Sublime

The relentless beating heat was beginning to confuse me and I had a bad moment there before I realized that so far his suspicions hadn’t alighted on Tom. He had discovered that Myrtle had some sort of life apart from him in another world, and the shock had made him physically sick. I stared at him and then at Tom, who had made a parallel discovery

Quand j’eus fini ma lecture, je savais une chose : quoi que Scott fît et de quelque façon qu’il le fît, il me faudrait le traiter comme un malade et l’aider dans la mesure du possible et essayer d’être son ami. Il avait déjà beaucoup de bons, de très bons amis, plus que personne à ma connaissance, mais je me tins désormais pour l’un d’eux, moi auss

The cause is given curtly, mid-sentence: ‘(picnic, lightning)’ and, after a paragraph of tender analogies about his dim recollections of her, she is never mentioned again. This bracketed tragedy is an instant shorthand for Humbert’s sensibility: his ruthless irony and black humour, a flippancy whose source is an inscrutable mix of callousness and p

Harpers.

We’ll both be happier if I can find you as fascinating as you ought to be.” Paul was almost relieved to feel the sting. It meant Julian saw every weakness in him and still thought he was worth the effort of hurting.

“Anyhow, he gives large parties,” said Jordan, changing the subject with an urban distaste for the concrete. “And I like large parties. They’re so intimate. At small parties there isn’t any privacy.”

But she was acidly disappointed by the price her double—“The Dark Lady of American Letters,” “The Sibyl of Manhattan”—exacted. She confessed that she’d hoped “being famous would be more fun,”9

“Hemingway loves to write for those of us who will never come face to face with danger.”