Balthazar
After the slow and at times confusing start with Justine, this second book in the Alexandria Quartet is a very compelling read. It now feels as though the story has found its feet. Humorous, tragic, romantic and profound. Recommended, however do read Justine first!
Three sides of space and one of time constitute the soup-mix recipe of a continuum. The four novels follow this pattern.
The central topic of the book is an investigation of modern love.
First the young, like vines, climb up the dull supports of their elders who feel their fingers on them, soft and tender; then the old climb down the lovely supporting bodies of the young into their proper deaths.
The aetiology of love and madness are identical except in degree
all love-making to one less instructed than oneself has the added delicious thrill which comes from the consciousness of perverting, of pulling them down into the mud from which passions rise
Nothing except the act of physical love tells us the truth about one another.
One felt the power of his personality shooting out into the tense crowd like sparks from an anvil.
I am an expert in love – every man believes himself to be one: but particularly the Englishman.
Those warm kisses remain there, amputated from before and after, existing in their own right like the frail transparencies of ferns or roses pressed between the covers of old books
It is wonderful whenever one can overcome one's treacherous heart.
Science is the poetry of the intellect and poetry the science of the heart's affections.
In a book of poems: ‘One to be taken from time to time as needed and allowed to dissolve in the mind.’