"Look at her up there, offering herself like—"
"Who? Sobriety doesn't suit you. Good God." Marlon handed over his own drink. "It's delicious," he said.
Viktor looked down at it. "I don't drink."
"You don't?" Marlon thought through the past weeks, and took back his glass. "You mixed the vat last night. And you're always dropping things. You're the drunkest man I know."
"I've never touched the stuff. I couldn't dance."
"But when you were younger."
"I started training when I was eight." Viktor poked the fire with a long branch and said, "Tell me something. Tell me why I could walk down a street in the city and see two faces in the crowd. And one of them—a stranger—it might be a beautiful woman—for one of them I feel nothing, I remain intact. And the other, no more beautiful, no more spectacular: When I see her, I fall through the universe. And only because of our past, only because of some promise my idiot heart made itself years before."
"Why don't you try a drink."
"The truth is, there's no such thing as love. There's only history."
—
Rebecca Makkai, The Hundred-Year House
(2014)
.
. . And he began to discover her. He had an inkling of the vastness of the
unknown sensual store of delights she was. With a passion of voluptuousness
that made him dwell on each tiny beauty, in a kind of frenzy of enjoyment, he
lit upon her: her beauty, the beauties, the separate, several beauties of her
body.
He
was quite ousted from himself, and sensually transported by that which he
discovered in her. He was another man reveling over her. There was no
tenderness, no love between them any more, only the maddening, sensuous lust
for discovery and the insatiable, exorbitant gratification in the sensual
beauties of her body. And she was a store, a store of absolute beauties that it
drove him to contemplate. There was such a feast to enjoy, and he with only one
man’s capacity.
He
lived in a passion of sensual discovery with her for some time—it was a duel:
no love, no words, no kisses even, only the maddening perception of beauty
consummate, absolute through touch. He wanted to touch her, to discover her,
maddeningly he wanted to know her. Yet he must not hurry, or he missed
everything. He must enjoy one beauty at a time. And the multitudinous beauties
of her body, the many little rapturous places, sent him mad with delight, and
with desire to be able to know more, to have strength to know more. For all was
there.
—
D.H. Lawrence, The Rainbow
(1915)
"The friendship was all in my mind, but Bill was not. I saw him once or twice a week. He worked in the Museum of Art. I often visited a particular drawing there, and Bill was the guard who generally stood near it, wearing blue pants and a white shirt with a breast tag bearing his name: W. Connors. I introduced myself once, and he told me his first name. A black man, somewhere in his late forties.
That I should be so affected by this drawing as to come around all the time, hungering at it, I thought might be understandable to a person who'd spent enough time in its presence to have been penetrated, similarly penetrated, maybe without the complicity of the artgoer, but penetrated anyway by its message. I felt a kinship with Bill--an illusory kinship, like the strange shocking wedding you experience with a figure who turns his face toward you as you flicker past in a train--to inhabit a frame for them, as they inhabit a frame for you--looking from either side of the same frame, I think you get it, in a moment that blinks on and blinks off, but never changes, a picture, in other words. Anyhow I liked thinking we shared something, each of us involved so much with what was going on in the same frame, Bill Connors and I."
--
Denis Johnson, The Name of the World
(2000)
