Sublime

He has been told nothing, but he feels the terrible and tingling atmosphere of something which is too good to be told.

rarefaction

Perhaps there’ll be a disaster, Carleton had said; and Thomas felt again the blow of the hooded creature fleeing Bethesda with paint on its hands. But that had been no disaster, only something strange and soon forgotten in the order and quiet of his home – so Thomas, who had a gift for self-persuasion, placidly ate a radish.

“Ada, our ardors and arbors”—a dactylic trimeter that was to remain Van Veen’s only contribution to Anglo-American poetry—sang through his brain.

Canetti, and Borges, too, I think—two very different men—said that just as the sea was the symbol or mirror of the English, the forest was the metaphor the Germans inhabited.

lamia

Of such a letter, Death himself might well have been the post-boy.

The burning of the Italian cornfields, the ruin of the Italian vines, were some thing more than actual; they were allegorical. They were the destruction of domestic and fruitful things, the withering of what was human before that inhumanity that is far beyond the human thing called cruelty.