a. natasha joukovsky
extracts blog
After Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, where he tracks allusions to whales and cetology, I keep a running list of references to recursion, innovation, mythology, and glamour.
Donna Tartt | THE SECRET HISTORY
"His students--if they were any mark of his tutelage--were imposing enough, and different as they all were they shared a certain coolness, a cruel, mannered charm which was not modern in the least..."
“His students—if they were any mark of his tutelage—were imposing enough, and different as they all were they shared a certain coolness, a cruel, mannered charm which was not modern in the least but had a strange cold breath of the ancient world:they were magnificent creatures, such eyes, such hands, such looks—sic oculos, sic ille manus, sic ora ferehat. I envied them, and found them attractive; moreover this strange quality, far from being natural, gave every indication of having been intensely cultivated. (It was the same, I would come to find, with Julian: though he gave quite the opposite impression, of freshness and candor, it was not spontaneity but superior art which made it seem unstudied.) Studied or not, I wanted to be like them. It was heady to think that these qualities were acquired ones and that, perhaps, this was the way I might learn them.”