just a reader.

Rereading: Gaudy Night

Masters, undergraduates, visitors; they sat huddled closely together on the backless oak benches, their elbows on the long tables, their eyes shaded with their fingers, or turned intelligently towards the platform where two famous violinists twisted together the fine, strong strands of the Concerto in D Minor. The Hall was very full; Harriet's gowned shoulder touched her companion's, and the crescent of his long sleeve lay over her knee. He was wrapt in the motionless austerity with which all genuine musicians listen to genuine music. Harriet was musician enough to respect this aloofness; she knew well enough that the ecstatic rapture on the face of the man opposite meant only that he was hoping to be thought musical, and that the elderly lady over the way, waving her fingers to the beat, was a musical moron. She knew enough, herself, to read the sounds a little with her brains, laboriously unwinding the twined chains of melody link by link. Peter, she felt sure, could hear the whole intricate pattern, every part separately and simultaneously, each independent and equal, separate but inseparable, moving over and under and through, ravishing heart and mind together.

Dorothy L. Sayers, Gaudy Night.

Rereading: Goodbye Without Leaving

It is painful to think about those days. It is like yearning for a lover you will never see again and to whom you never got to say goodbye.

. . . .

To be effortlessly yourself is a blessing, an ambrosia. It is like a few tiny little puffs of opium which lift you ever so slightly off the hard surface of the world.

. . . .

That powerful clear voice of Bessie Smith almost knocked me backward. As I listened I realized how very dirty those old dirty songs were, like "I'm Wild About That Thing" and "You've Got to Give Me Some." It turned out they were written under a pseudonym by a nephew of the Madagascar royal family—the world of music was full of such anomalies. Sunshine suddenly flooded me. I was an anomaly too. It was all okay.

. . . .

The greatest minds in history had grappled with this God issue, but it was not a big deal to Johnny. This was his greatness and his flaw.

. . . .

Oh, Little Franklin! The look of happiness on his face when he saw me waiting made my heart open and close like a sea anemone.

. . . .

I sighed. My life was a cloud of gnats.

. . . .

She gave me a little flowered square and I wiped my eyes. There is nothing so morally tepid, I thought, than weeping over something horrible that happened to someone else and will never happen to you.

. . . .

I was sort of a blank slate and Leo was a school. I needed the experience of him. He would kiss me and I would turn into Hannah Arendt. I would definitely be a better person for it.

. . . .

"Listen, Geralds. The Church has sacraments. You take the sacraments and you pays the price."
I sighed. How neat, I thought. How consoling. Even horrible emotional pain would have a reason, some terrible law one was compelled to obey.

. . . .

"'"Nenni!" said the Cat. "I am the Cat who walks by himself, and all places are alike to me."'"
My voice wavered and the words swam on the page, but it did not matter: my little boy had finally gone to sleep.

. . . .

I followed my boy, whose coppery hair flopped into his eyes. I thought of what he would be, what I had been, of the old man he would turn into whom I would never know. The journey seemed impossibly strange, amazingly long, and over in a flash.

Laurie Colwin, Goodbye Without Leaving.

Still rereading...The Moviegoer

As for my search, I have not the inclination to say much on the subject. For one thing, I have not the authority, as the great Danish philosopher declared, to speak of such matters in any way other than the edifying. For another thing, it is not open to me even to be edifying, since the time is later than his, much too late to edify or do much of anything except plant a foot in the right place as the opportunity presents itself—if indeed asskicking is properly distinguished from edification.

Walker Percy, The Moviegoer.

Still rereading...The Moviegoer

Sam is spieling in pretty good style, all the while ironing out the tablecloth into shallow gutters with the blade of his knife. A new prefatory note creeps into his voice. It is like a symphony when the "good" part is coming, and I know that Sam is working up to one of his stories. These stories of Sam used to arouse in me an appreciation so keen and pleasurable that it bordered on the irritable. On the dark porch in Feliciana he told us once of the time when he made a journey up the headwaters of the Orinoco and caught a fever and lay ill for weeks. One night he heard an incredibly beautiful voice sing the whole of Winterreise. He was sure it was delirium until the next morning when he met the singer, an Austrian engineer who sang lieder better than Lotte Lehmann, etc. When he finished I was practically beside myself with irritable pleasure and became angry with the others because they were not sufficiently moved by the experience.

Walker Percy, The Moviegoer.

Still rereading...The Moviegoer

"He's quite a guy," Joel told me. "Do you know what he told me after lying under a cliff for thirty six hours with two inches of his femur sticking out? He said: Queenie, I think I'm going to pass out and before I do, I'm going to give you a piece of advice—God, I thought he was going to die and knew and was telling me what to do with his book—and he said quite solemnly: Queenie, always stick to Bach and the early Italians—and passed out cold as a mackerel. And by God, it's not bad advice."

Walker Percy, The Moviegoer.

Rereading: The Moviegoer

Sometimes when she mentions God, it strikes me that my mother uses him as but one of the devices that come to hand in an outrageous man's world, to be put to work like all the rest in the one enterprise she has any use for: the canny management of the shocks of life. It is a bargain struck at the very beginning in which she settled for a general belittlement of everything, the good and the bad. She is as wary of good fortune as she is immured against the bad, and sometimes I seem to catch sight of it in her eyes, this radical mistrust: an old knowledgeable gleam, as old and sly as Eve herself.

Walker Percy, The Moviegoer.