with its lugubrious pose

a panegyric elegy

Numinous in this case really being some inarticulate feeling that rose up in her with that quality of light, which of course is the old image of the relationship to the divine

for readers of poetry or gazers at paintings or films, listeners to music, for all of us who have found there comfort and consolation and instruction, unnervings, adumbrations of meaning, echoes of intuitions we hadn’t even understood that we had

And we leave the deeper thing in the work of art, which is also famously the most ineffable, its tone or mood, which is like a sensation of echo, which we often take away quite mutely and quietly

It is a sort of kore myth transposed upward, a Gnostic retelling in which the love of life, the moment of its blossoming and ceremony, traps us

"Elbows off the table!” A cheerful and peremptory call to manners that has vast stretches of childhood in it.

dark with the consciousness of human fate, and besotted with the high adjectival style of that consciousness as it lifts a coming-of-age narrative to the level of brilliant chiaroscuro meditation

blending between the medieval romance and the early picaresque novel

the reader, reduced to something like mendicant vulnerability by its more nerve-wrenching moments