Sublime

I phoned Ernest and he urged me to conclude my royal interrogatory and come to the Gritti. He said, “I have a new Lancia with a good professional driver to take us over the Alps and along the Corniche to Pamplona for the Feria of San Fermín. Would like your company on the trip. I’m beat up from those kites falling all over Africa.” In the past he h

have just reread The Age of Innocence. Poor Countess Olenska, so much more alive than everyone in New York. She was better than Newland Archer, to whom she couldn’t give herself because she was married. It didn’t matter to society that she had been wronged by her husband. They felt her life was over.

When they arrived at Marignane airport that afternoon, such dark thoughts were immediately dispelled by the dramatic, almost blinding clarity of the light, the thick Gauloise blue of the sky, and the amiable nature of the taxi driver who was taking them to their hotel. It soon became clear that he had missed his vocation; he should have been workin

Mais si incisif que soit son humour, si mordantes que soient ses récriminations, cela ne nous empêche pas d’avoir le sentiment, la certitude, que c’est là un homme qui aime, un homme qui aime l’amour, et qui est condamné à ne jamais rencontrer une âme accordée à la sienne. Hamsun est vraiment ce qu’on pourrait appeler un aristocrate de l’esprit. »

blarzy,

‘Love him,’ said Jacques, with vehemence, ‘love him and let him love you. Do you think anything else under heaven really matters? And how long, at the best, can it last, since you are both men and still have everywhere to go? Only five minutes, I assure you, only five minutes, and most of that, helas! in the dark. And if you think of them as dirty,

how they love, and how they die. In our little town (is this, one wonders, an effect of the climate?) all three are done on much the same lines, with the same feverish yet casual air.