Ada, or Ardor: A Family Chronicle (Vintage International)

Observation is not always the mother of deduction.

for ineptitude is always synonymous with multitude, and nothing is fuller than an empty mind.

“Ruth

Revelation can be more perilous than Revolution. Sick minds identified the notion of a Terra planet with that of another world and this “Other World” got confused not only with the “Next World” but with the Real World in us and beyond us.

“Ada, our ardors and arbors”—a dactylic trimeter that was to remain Van Veen’s only contribution to Anglo-American poetry—sang through his brain.

He recognized the familiar, individual, beautiful intake of her flat young abdomen, its wonderful “play,” the frank and eager expression of the oblique muscles and the “smile” of her navel—to borrow from the vocabulary of the belly dancer’s art.

Remembrance, like Rembrandt, is dark but festive. Remembered ones dress up for the occasion and sit still.

peonies, “deficient in botanical reality,” as she grandly expressed it, not yet knowing that reality and natural science are synonymous in the terms of this, and only this, dream.

Memory met imagination halfway in the hammock of his boyhood’s dawns.