The Secret History

It is a terrible thing to learn as a child that one is a being separate from all the world, that no one and no thing hurts along with one's burned tongues and skinned knees, that one's aches and pains are all one's own. Even more terrible, as we grow older, to learn that no person, no matter how beloved, can ever truly understand us.

Trees are schizophrenic now and beginning to lose control, enraged with the shock of their fiery new colors. Someone – was it van Gogh? – said that orange is the color of insanity. Beauty is terror. We want to be devoured by it, to hide ourselves in that fire which refines us.'

Beauty is terror. Whatever we call beautiful, we quiver before it. And what could be more terrifying and beautiful, to souls like the Greeks or our own, than to lose control completely? To throw off the chains of being for an instant, to shatter the accident of our mortal selves? Euripides speaks of the Maenads: head thrown

suppose there is a certain crucial interval in everyone's life when character is fixed forever; for me, it was that first fall term I spent at Hampden. So many things remain with me from that time, even now: those preferences in clothes and books and even food – acquired then, and largely, I must admit, in adolescent emulation of the rest of the Greek class – have stayed with me through the years

Are you always up this early?' I asked him.

'Almost always,' he said without looking up. 'It's beautiful here, but morning light can make the most vulgar things tolerable.'

Calm down,' he said. 'I don't know where you get all these Dostoyevsky sorts of ideas.'

I was very charmed by them, and by the long black straight pens, which looked incredibly archaic and troublesome.

But how,' said Charles, who was close to tears, 'how can you possibly justify cold-blooded murder?'

Henry lit a cigarette. 'I prefer to think of it,' he had said, 'as redistribution of matter.'

The weekends at Francis's house were the happiest times. The trees turned early that fall but the days stayed warm well into October, and in the country we spent most of our time outside.

'If by romantic you mean solitary and introspective,' I said, 'I think romantics are frequently the best classicists.'