"The Secret History"

[fiefoe]

I wonder what my takeaway would have been had I read this at a more impressionable age, but here I'm most impressed by how unpleasant chronic hypothermia is.

• I suppose at one time in my life I might have had any number of stories, but now there is no other. This is the only story I will ever be able to tell.
• And I think that mine is this: a morbid longing for the picturesque at all costs.
• My years there created for me an expendable past, disposable as a plastic cup.
• (In California:) Nowhere, ever, have the hideous mechanics of birth and copulation and death—those monstrous upheavals of life that the Greeks call miasma, defilement—been so brutal or been painted up to look so pretty;
• If there’s one thing I’m good at, it’s lying on my feet. It’s sort of a gift I have.
• “But even Plato knew that class and conditioning and so forth have an inalterable effect on the individual. It seems to me that psychology is only another word for what the ancients called fate.”
• For if the modern mind is whimsical and discursive, the classical mind is narrow, unhesitating.
• I am nothing in my soul if not obsessive.
• "Death is the mother of beauty,” said Henry. “And what is beauty?” “Terror.”
• It is dangerous to ignore the existence of the irrational. The more cultivated a person is, the more intelligent, the more repressed, then the more he needs some method of channeling the primitive impulses he’s worked so hard to subdue.
• what could be more terrifying and beautiful.. than to lose control completely? To throw off the chains of being for an instant, to shatter the accident of our mortal selves?
• let God consume us, devour us, unstring our bones. Then spit us out reborn.”
• “Only this. To receive the god, in this or any other mystery, one has to be in a state of euphemia, cultic purity. That is at the very center of bacchic mystery.
• And it may be a superhuman effort to lose oneself so completely, but that’s nothing compared to the effort of getting oneself back again.”
• what I love about Greek, that language innocent of all quirks and cranks; a language obsessed with action, and with the joy of seeing action multiply from action, action marching relentlessly ahead
• Justice, in a society, is when each level of a hierarchy works within its place and is content with it.
• in Greek grammar, one of the very first axioms I learned is that men have friends, women have relatives, and animals have their own kind.
• I sometimes got the feeling that (Julian) was less pleased by kindness itself than by the elegance of the gesture.
• I was grateful to see that, as usual, he was projecting his own tasteful interpretations upon the confusion.
• The Jacobeans had a sure grasp of catastrophe. They understood not only evil, it seemed, but the extravagance of tricks with which evil presents itself as good.

It takes a lot of descriptive passages to make a long book:

• The shock of first seeing a birch tree at night, rising up in the dark as cool and slim as a ghost. And the nights, bigger than imagining: black and gusty and enormous, disordered and wild with stars.
• There was the harsh Ar at the beginning, which called up gold, idols, lost cities in the jungle, which in turn led to the hushed and sinister chamber of Gen,
• I saw, in the small, cold light of dawn, that the flagstones outside were covered with earthworms: delicate, nasty, hundreds of them, twisting blind and helpless
• The tears mingled easily with the cold water, in the luminous, dripping crimson of my cupped fingers,
• Commons lawn stretched out wide and desolate like some Napoleonic battlefield: churned, sordid, roiled with footprints.
• the umbrella blew inside out. For a moment it had a horrible life of its own, squawking and flapping its spines like a pterodactyl;
• an amnesia-land, a kind of skewed Heaven where the old landmarks were recognizable but spaced too far apart, and disarranged, and made terrible by the emptiness around them.
• Gray wood-plank fllors, so worn they were almost fuzzy