Clara saw what others couldn't. Like that little boy in The Sixth Sense, only instead of seeing ghosts, Clara saw good. Which was itself pretty scary. So much more comforting to see bad in others; gives us all sorts of excuses for our own bad behavior. But good? No, only really remarkable people see the good in others.
Imagine a cheerful crowd of Leib Guard officers invading the imperial kitchens, holding the staff almost at gunpoint. Led, as ever, by Svetogorov, we descended into the basement, unlocked a door to a room, and flipped the lid of a chest to reveal layers of straw that covered perfectly preserved, huge slabs of ice. We whipped out our swords and attempted to hack at it, but the highest-grade imperial ice resisted splendidly. Then Svetogorov found an ice pic, and the next moment, shards of ice flew in all directions as if they were alive and trying to escape. My fellows frolicked after them, but I — I froze. One shard had lodged itself at my feet and lay there waiting. It glittered in the candlelight and it seemed to radiate confidence — a groomed, smooth, mature ice. It could have been old. As old as I. It could been the vary same ice from which Empress Anna's Ice Palace had been built. The ice my parents had lain on. Do they not say that ice has memory? Suddenly, it seemed as if my mind — no, my whole body impaled itself on a peculiar realization: if I picked it up, it would become one with me.
This bizarre historical novel involves a Russian empress who builds a palace out of ice blocks and forces a disgraced nobleman and a deformed female jester to "marry" there, giving birth to two princes — one of whom discovers later that he's immune to cold. The story of Prince Alexander spans two centuries and three continents, and includes a ton of famous historical figures.
St. Petersburg in the 1760s was much different than it is now. It was a city cut out generously, for growth, and it had not yet filled its own interstitial spaces. It lay like a fanciful appliqué on the burlap of my country's reality.
...What is my life for and what am I going to do with it? I don't know and I'm afraid. I can never read all the books I want; I can never be all the people I want and live all the lives I want. I can never train myself in all the skills I want. And why do I want? I want to live and feel all the shades, tones, and variations of mental and physical experience possible in my life. And I am horribly limited. Yet I am not a cretin: Lame, blind and stupid. I am not a veteran, passing my legless, armless days in a wheelchair. I am not that mongoloidish old man shuffling out of the gates of the mental hospital. I have much to live for, yet unaccountablyI am sick and sad.Perhaps you could trace my feeling back to my distant at having to choose between alternative. Perhaps that's why I want to be everyone – so no one can blame me for being I. So I won't have to take the responsibility for my own character development and philosophy. People are happy - - - if that means being content with your lot: feeling comfortable as the complacent round peg struggling in a round hole, with not awkward or painful edges – no spaces to wonder or question in. I am not content, because my lot is limiting, as are all others. People specialize; people become devoted to an idea; people "find themselves." But the very content that comes from finding yourself is overshadowed by the knowledge that by doing so you are admitting you are not only a grotesques, but a special kind of grotesque.
We can't say for sure that personality caused people's preferences for some kinds of recreational reading over others. In fact, the causal arrow may sometimes go the other way. Reading might not just reflect who you are, but also influence who you become.
at least partly related to or evocative of either the summer or heat or love or laughter or death or sex or the sort of false fecundity that this season offers.
A wall of books opened, and I walked like a lamb into that bustling pleasure palace known as Flossie's. Red flocked wallpaper and a Victorian decor set the tone. Pale, nervous girls with black-rimmed glasses and blunt-cut hair lolled around on sofas, riffling Penguin Classics provocatively. A blonde with a big smile winked at me, nodded toward a room upstairs, and said, "Wallace Stevens, eh?" But it wasn't just intellectual experiences. They were peddling emotional ones, too. For fifty bucks, I learned, you could "relate without getting close." For a hundred, a girl would lend you her Bartok records, have dinner, and then let you watch while she had an anxiety attack. For one-fifty, you could listen to FM radio with twins. For three bills, you got the works: A thin Jewish brunette would pretend to pick you up at the Museum of Modern Art, let you read her master's, get you involved in a screaming quarrel at Elaine's over Freud's conception of women, and then fake a suicide of your choosing — the perfect evening, for some guys. Nice racket. Great town, New York.
Settled in with my grilled cheese sandwich and beer, I'd watch Lex gamble away the morning, study the faces of the other players, and flirt innocently with the older man who ran the room. He liked me and gave me menthol cigarettes when I ran out of my regular ones, and then took me aside to a table next to the big one in order to share his stash of hard candy. He pulled my chair out and asked me to tell him all about myself, but then didn't pause for me to speak and began telling me all about myself instead: I was a nice girl, he said, and I shouldn't be hanging around all night with a bum like Lex in a place like this.
"She likes it," Lex yelled over, without looking up from his cards.
I smiled and shrugged and chose a pink candy from the dish.
After a while I'd return to Lex's side where I'd dream about the wonderful novel that might contain us, the sordid romance of Lex and me in the underworld. Wasn't I bored just to sit there? the others asked, not understanding how busy I was in my mind, polishing the night until it gleamed like a rare fiction. Bored? How could I be? I was the heroine of a great book.
