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The day was fading into a soft sun-shot haze, pricked here and there by a yellow electric light, and passers were rare in the little square into which they had turned. Dallas stopped again, and looked up.
“It’s more real to me here than if I went up,” he suddenly heard himself say; and the fear lest that last shadow of reality should lose its edge kept him rooted to his seat as the minutes succeeded each other.
He sat for a long time on the bench in the thickening dusk, his eyes never turning from the balcony. At length a light shone through the windows, and a moment later a man-servant came out on the balcony, drew up the awnings, and closed the shutters.
At that, as if it had been the signal he waited for, Newland Archer got up slowly and walked back alone to his hotel.
aaaahh
“You wish you had married Margaret and gotten stuck up here in Maine?”
And he said quietly, “No. But you know what I mean. I watch Becka go through this hell, and that’s what I did with you.”
I thought about this. I said, “She’s doing a lot better than I was at that point.” It seemed to be true. Then I added, “But I think she really maybe hasn’t liked him for a long time.” And I thought about that, and William evidently thought about it as well, because he said, “So you still liked me when you found out?”
“Oh God, yes. I loved you.”
William sighed hugely. “Oh Button,” he said.
sad :(
Some mornings I woke even before William did, and I would take my walk because I was so anxious. And I was anxious because of the girls. One day I called Chrissy and asked her how Becka was doing—I knew she would tell Becka I had done this, but I wanted to know—and Chrissy said, “Mom, don’t worry about her. She’s got her shrink, Lauren, and she’s got Michael and me, and she’s doing okay.”
“She doesn’t call me anymore,” I said.
Chrissy hesitated before she said, “I think she doesn’t need you like she used to. Even those years married to Trey she still needed you, but, Mom, you did your job. She’s on her way.”
“Okay,” I said. “I hear you.”
And I did.
But it sort of killed me, I will tell you that.
“I went out for dinner with a woman I had met years earlier. She was one of the saddest women I have ever known. She had never had a boyfriend or a girlfriend, and God knows she would have told me if she had. She was sad, Chrissy, she was damaged in some fundamental way; she had never had a day of therapy, she just lived her life as a tax attorney, and we went out for dinner that night, and then I realized that she probably was an alcoholic. She had at least a bottle of wine that night, and a martini to start off with, and then— Are you listening?”
But I could tell she was. She was watching me with real interest on her face. She nodded.
“And then, for dessert, she ordered these special-made doughnuts that came with chocolate sauce you could dip them in, and as I watched her dipping these little doughnuts in this chocolate sauce I felt such a sense—I guess a sense of fear—because I was in the presence of such deep loneliness. And I thought, Yes, I am going to have that affair.
“But you’re obviously not getting along. Because you want to be with someone else. Or you think you do. So listen to me more, Chrissy. This is important. Do not put this on Michael. You make the decision of what you’re going to do, but you do not need to tell him that you’re attracted to someone else. I suspect he knows this and he feels humiliated and has no idea what to do because everything he does right now you find abhorrent. If you want to leave the marriage, then leave the marriage. But if you don’t, then try to be more openhearted to your husband.”
As soon as I said this I realized she could not do that. So I said, “But I suspect you can’t do that, be openhearted to him now, because you don’t want him.”
Chrissy, who had been looking at me intently, looked away. I watched the side of her face, and she seemed no longer angry; there was a vulnerability to her face, is what I am saying.
I put my hand on her arm. After a few moments, she put her hand on mine briefly, and when she looked at me there were tears in her eyes and they began to slip down her face. She rubbed them away with the back of her hand. “Oh honey,” I said. “Honey, honey, honey.”
I thought about William’s affairs, and I will tell you this about finding out about them:
It humbled me. It humbled me unbelievably. It brought me to my knees. And I was humbled because I had not known such a thing could happen in my own life. I had thought that this sort of thing happened to other women. I remember going to a party during this period, and I overheard two women talking about a woman whose husband had had an affair. And what I remember—it scorched me—was how both women said, Oh, come on, how could she not have known?
And then it happened to me.
[...] Yet the special thing about literature, the major art form of a Western civilisation now ending before our very eyes, is not hard to define. Like literature, music can overwhelm you with sudden emotion, can move you to absolute sorrow or ecstasy; like literature, painting has the power to astonish, and to make you see the world through fresh eyes. But only literature can put you in touch with another human spirit, as a whole, with all its weaknesses and grandeurs, its limitations, its pettinesses, its obsessions, its beliefs; with whatever it finds moving, interesting, exciting or repugnant. Only literature can give you access to a spirit from beyond the grave – a more direct, more complete, deeper access than you’d have in conversation with a friend. Even in our deepest, most lasting friendships, we never speak as openly as when we face a blank page and address a reader we do not know. The beauty of an author’s style, the music of his sentences have their importance in literature, of course; the depth of an author’s reflections, the originality of his thought certainly can’t be overlooked; but an author is above all a human being, present in his books, and whether he writes very well or very badly hardly matters – as long as he gets the books written and is, indeed, present in them. (It’s strange that something so simple, so seemingly universal, should actually be so rare, and that this rarity, so easy to observe, should receive so little attention from philosophers in any discipline: for in principle human beings possess, if not the same quality, at least the same quantity of being; in principle they are all more or less equally present; and yet this is not the impression they give, at a distance of several centuries, and all too often, as we turn pages that seem to have been dictated more by the spirit of the age than by an individual, we watch these wavering, ever more ghostly, anonymous beings dissolve before our eyes.) In the same way, to love a book is, above all, to love its author: we want to meet him again, we want to spend our days with him. During the seven years it took me to write my dissertation, I lived with Huysmans, in his more or less permanent presence.[...]
[...] And yet the morning after I defended my dissertation (or maybe that same night), my first reaction was that I had lost something priceless, something I’d never get back: my freedom. For several years, the last vestiges of a dying welfare state (scholarships, student discounts, health care, mediocre but cheap meals in the student cafeteria) had allowed me to spend my waking hours the way I chose: in the easy intellectual company of a friend. As André Breton pointed out, Huysmans’ sense of humour is uniquely generous. He lets the reader stay one step ahead of him, inviting us to laugh at him, and his overly plaintive, awful or ludicrous descriptions, even before he laughs at himself. No one appreciated that generosity more than I did, as I received my rations of celeriac remoulade and salt cod, each in its little compartment of the metal hospital tray issued by the Bullier student cafeteria (whose unfortunate patrons clearly had nowhere else to go, and had obviously been kicked out of all the acceptable student cafeterias, but who still had their student IDs – you couldn’t take away their student IDs), and I thought of Huysmans’ epithets – the woebegone cheese, the grievous sole – and imagined what he might make of those metal cells, which he’d never known, and I felt a little less unhappy, a little less alone, in the Bullier student cafeteria.
But that was all over now. My entire youth was over. Soon (very soon), I would have to see about entering the workforce. The prospect left me cold.
[...] The moment I walked into the Basque restaurant where Aurélie was meeting me for dinner, I knew I was in for a grim evening. Despite the two bottles of white Irouléguy that I drank almost entirely by myself, I found it harder and harder, and after a while, almost impossible, to keep up a reasonable level of friendly conversation. For reasons I didn’t entirely understand, it suddenly seemed tactless, almost unthinkable, to talk about the old days. [...]
this isn't that deep i just found the image of this guy drinking two bottles of white wine funny