<原文开始>Of course he wept at the funeral and knew how colossal this thing was that, without warning, had been taken away. When the minister read, along with the biblical stuff, a selection from Julius Caesar out of his father's cherished volume of Shakespeare's plays -- the oversized book with the floppy leather binding that, when Coleman was a small boy, always reminded him of a cocker spaniel -- the son felt his father's majesty as never before: the grandeur of both his rise and his fall, the grandeur that, as a college freshman away for barely a month from the tiny enclosure of his East Orange home, Coleman had begun faintly to discern for what it was.
Cowards die many times before their deaths; The valiant never taste of death but once. Of all the wonders that I yet have heard, It seems... (查看原文)
Singularity. The passionate struggle for singularity. The singular animal. The sliding relationship with everything. Not static but sliding. Self-knowledge but concealed. What is as powerful as that? "Beware the ides of March." Bullshit -- beware nothing. Free.
With both bulwarks gone -- the big brother overseas and the father dead -- he is repowered and free to be whatever he wants, free to pursue the hugest aim, the confidence right in his bones to be his particular I. Free on a scale unimaginable to his father. As free as his father had been unfree. Free now not only of his father but of all that his father had ever had to endure. The impositions. The humiliations. The obstructions. The wound and the pain and the posturing and the shame -- all the inward agonies of failure and defeat. ... (查看原文)
The delectation of this elemental eros. Take the hammer of Faunia to everything outlived, all the exalted justifications, and smash your way to freedom. Freedom from? From the stupid glory of being right. From the ridiculous quest for significance. From the never-ending campaign for legitimacy. The onslaught of freedom at seventy-one, the freedom to leave a lifetime behind -- known also as Aschenbachian madness. "And before nightfall" -- the final words of Death in Venice -- "a shocked and respectful world received the news of his decease." (查看原文)
She remained amazed and excited by the New York subway. When she was in the Metro in Paris she never thought about it, but the melancholic anguish of the people in the New York subway never failed to restore her belief in the rightness of her having come to America. The New York subway was the symbol of why she'd come -- her refusal to shrink from reality. (查看原文)
In imperfect revolt against her Frenchness (as well as being obsessed with her Frenchness), lifted voluntarily out of her country (if not out of herself), so ensnared by the disapproval of Les Trois Grasses as to be endlessly calculating what response might gain her their esteem without further obfuscating her sense of herself and misrepresenting totally the inclinations of the woman she once naturally was, at times destabilized to the point of shame by the discrepancy between how she must deal with literature in order to succeed professionally and why she first came to literature, Delphine, to her astonishment, is all but isolated in America. Decountried, isolated, estranged, confused about everything essential to a life, in a desperate state of bewildered longing and surrounded on all si... (查看原文)
