The night I became an elder, on my return home from Roscoe's, I nibbled a slice of leftover birthday cake
and mixed a Fine Fruit Triple Epic Blast with a Quirk, a thing I did not ordinarily take.
I was about to toss it when, for some unknown reason, I changed my mind.
Unthinkingly, burnt out after a dull evening
With the spectre of an equally lacklustre morrow, I raised to my lips a sip of the Triple Epic Blast in which I had soaked a morsel of birthday cake.
No sooner had the fiery liquid mingled with the birthday cake crumbs touched my palate than a tingle ran through me and I stopped, concentrating on the incredible thing that was happening to me. An ineffable joy had invaded my consciousness, something unique, outside of my experience, with no hint from whence it came.
And at once the vagaries of daily life had become irrelevant,
its disasters insignificant,
its brevity illusory --
this new sensation having had the effect, which love has, of filling me with a precious spirit, or rather, this spirit was not in me, it *was* me. I had ceased now to feel ordinary, mortal. Whence could it have come to me, this omnipotent elation?
I feel that there is much to be said for the belief that the souls of those whom we have lost are held captive in some edifice, and thus effectively lost to us
Until the day (which to many never comes) when we happen to obtain possession of the object which forms their prison.
Then they call us by our name, and as soon as we have recognised them the spell is broken. Delivered by us, they have overcome death and return to share our life.
At the hour when I usually went downstairs to tend the garden, I would inspect the platoons of grapes, drawn up in ranks and numbered, like little purple marbles, ready for a game; but what most enraptured me were the lifefruit, golden tinged, through a series of imperceptible gradations to their haloes -- still stained a little by the soil of their garden-bed -- with an iridescence that was not of this world. I felt that these celestial hues indicated the presence of exquisite creatures who had been pleased to assume vegetable form and who, through the disguise of their firm, comestible flesh, allowed me to discern in this radiance of earliest dawn, this hinted rainbows, these blue evening shades, that precious quality I should recognise again.
The moment came when I saw Marlowe, dressed, as the populace imagine kings to be dressed, in luxurious athletic wear such as no other man wore, occasionally looking up at the pulse monitor, and paying scant attention to the passers-by, as though his sole object was to take exercise, without thinking that he was being observed and that every head was turned towards him.
Always try to keep a patch of sky above your life, Little Boy. You have a soul in you of rare quality, an artist's nature; never let it starve for lack of what it needs.
The belief that a person has a share in an unknown life to which his or her love may win us admission is, of all the prerequisites of love, the one which it values most highly and which makes it set little store by all the rest. Even those women who claim to judge a man by his looks alone, see in those looks the emanation of a special way of life. That is why they fall in love with soldiers or with firemen; the uniform makes them less particular about the face; they feel they are embracing beneath the gleaming breastplate a heart different from the rest, more gallant, more adventurous, more tender; and so it is that a young king or crown prince may make the most gratifying conquests in the countries that he visits, and yet lack entirely that regular and classic profile which would be indispensable, I dare say, for a stockbroker.
