An Apprenticeship or The Book of Pleasures

Lóri put on perfume and this was one of her imitations of the world, she who was trying so hard to learn life

And her love that now was impossible — that was dry the way the fever of someone who doesn’t sweat was love without opium or morphine.

In the naked and absolutely blue sky there’s not a cloud of love crying.

the knowledge that everything that exists, exists with absolute exactness and ultimately whatever she ended up doing or not doing would not escape that exactness; something the size of a pinhead would not extend by a fraction of a millimeter beyond the size of a pinhead: everything that existed was of a great perfection. Except most of what existed

a fraction of a second the person saw herself as an object to be looked at, which could be called narcissism but, already influenced by Ulisses, she’d call: pleasure in being. To find in the external figure the echoes of the internal figure: ah, so it’s true I wasn’t just imagining it: I exist.