"The Moor's Last Sigh" [.]

[fiefoe]

• With her walking-stick she drew a line in the dust. On one side, the synagogue, Flory and history; on the other, Abraham, his rich girl, the universe, the future - all things unclean.
• Even now, in memory, she dazzles, must be circled about and about. We may perceive her indirectly, in her effects on others - her bending of other people's light, her gravitational pull which denied us all hope of escape, the decaying orbits of those too weak to withstand her, who fell towards her sun and its consuming fires. Ah, the dead, the unended, endlessly ending dead: how long, how rich is their story. We, the living, must find what space we can alongside them; the giant dead whom we cannot tie down, though we grasp at their hair, though we rope them while they sleep.
• so I came to think of the needle (in his body) as a metaphor - as, perhaps, the prick of his ambitions. 'Would Achilles have been a great warrior without his heel?' and remembering that I can almost envy him his sharp, wandering, enabling angel of death.
  

The whimsical grew very scarce towards the end:

• On the nursery walls he first painted a series of trompe-l'oeil windows, Mughal-palatial, Andalusian Moorish, Manueline Portuguese, roseate Gothic, windows great and small;
• I was never merely thirsty in that period, but 'the thirstfulness was terrific'. My sister Mynah the mimic cured me of what she called 'being in a hurree' by becoming my ridiculing echo
• Indian-born painter V. Miranda, presently a resident of the Andalusian village of Benengeli, had injured himself while attempting the enigmatic feat of painting a full-grown elephant from underneath.
  

I'd be happier if that were the end of the book:

    Finally, Abraham's garden rained down like a benediction. Imported soil, English lawn-grass and foreign flowers - crocuses, daffodils, roses, hollyhocks, forget-me-nots - fell towards the Backbay Reclamation; also alien fruits. Whole trees rose gracefully into the heavens before floating down to earth, like giant spores. The feathers of un-Indian birds went on drifting through the air for days. <> Peppercorns, whole cumin, cinnamon sticks, cardamoms mingled with the imported flora and birdlife, dancing rat-a-tat on the roads and sidewalks like perfumed hail.

etiolate: To become blanched or whitened, as when grown without sunlight.
dernier soupir: last sigh
épatante: spiffy
purblind: nearly or partly blind; Slow in understanding or discernment;
esperance: hope

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