"Out of Africa"
Oct. 20th, 2009 08:34 pmKamante:
- All this was in the grand manner, and recalled the declaration of faith of Prometheus: "Pain is my element as hate is thine. Ye rend me now: I care not." And, "Ay, do thy worst. Thou art omnipotent."
- He had in him something bright and live; in a painting he would have made a spot of unusually intense colouring;
- He was aware of this separateness of his, himself, with the arrogant greatness of soul of the real dwarf, who, when he finds himself at a difference with the whole world, holds the world to be crooked.
- He stood in a peculiar relation to existence on the whole; he mastered it, but he had no high opinion of it.
- .. a shrill delight in things going wrong, .. Kamante brought this characteristic to a rare perfection, even to a special self-irony, that made him take pleasure in his own disappointments and disasters, nearly exactly as in those of other people.
- .. the same kind of mentality in the old Native women who have been roasted over many fires, who have mixed blood with Fate, and recognize her irony, wherever they meet it, with sympathy, as if it were that of a sister.
- As a Chef he was a different thing, and precluded classification. Nature had here taken a leap and cut away from the order of precedence of faculties and talents, the thing now became mystic and inexplicable.
- He.. beat whites of egg with a weeding knife that I had had to weed the lawn with, and his whites of eggs towered up like light clouds.
- He spoke of the sauce of the lightning that struck the tree, and of the sauce of the grey horse that died.
- "We think you turn. Because why? We think that you shall never can forget us. Because why? We think that you remembered still all our face and our mother names."
* Esa's present was a picture, framed and under glass, of a tree, very carefully penned down in ink, every one of its hundred leaves painted a clear green. Upon each leaf, in diminutive Arabic letters, a word was written in red ink.
* The document now became Jogona's great treasure... The past, that had been so difficult to bring to memory, and that had probably seemed to be changing every time it was thought of, had here been caught, conquered and pinned down before his eyes. It had become History; with it there was now no variableness neither shadow of turning.
<<