Appendix A
From my second novel:
He said, quietly now, "I just want to thank you, Edgar. The hours we spent together--every minute--is sacred to me. Every word you said--the things you told me--about your family, and your mother--it all means so much to me. You can't imagine. I won't forget any of it. You're such a beautiful person--such a perfect Romantic--an intimist. No one can appreciate you the way I do--I know it's arrogant to say that, but Edgar--you've shared so much of yourself with me, whether you meant to or not--I couldn't help loving you. There isn't anyone else like you. I won't say I'll never meet anyone else--I can't imagine it, but I probably might, someday. I may even love him--but not the way I love you--never. You are perfect--please believe it; you aren't ugly, in any way. Hilary knows--ask him. Hilary's a good friend to you. I'm jealous of him--I wish you loved me even half as much as you do him--just a quarter as much--don't you love me at all? Never mind. I'll try to forget about you, but I know I won't--ever. Even when I am old, I'll still love you, and I'll think about you--I hope happily. I wish you happiness, Edgar--I'm sure you'll be a success--you have so much talent. I wish I could be here to watch your career blossoming. In Turkey, I don't know. They probably don't have many English newspapers. I wish we didn't have to part now--it seems we've hardly known each other long enough. I just--I'll think about you, and I won't forget you. You'll always mean something very important to me."
Appendix B
From my current novel:
Valentine fell to sleep on the train and dreamt that he was asleep on a train and a pair of hands were touching him. The hands were small and white, like a woman's, or like Rupert's. They were very proficient. In the dream his body was perfectly still--more than still, it seemed not even to breathe; the eyes did not move behind their lids. His skin was smooth and pale as china, and the hands that moved over it seemed to touch it with the delicacy one employs when handling something extremely fragile.
The hands massaged his shoulders, and caressed his neck as if it were some exquisite column. The fingers smoothed over his forehead and his closed eyes, and felt the bridge of his nose as something brittle. They traced the line of his mouth--his lips were very pale blue--and then suddenly drew back, with a small inarticulate cry. The index finger was bleeding, cut on the sharp edge of his mouth, and bright blood fell from it onto him, ran from his lips in a thin trickle.
The hand appeared frightened; it tentatively returned, but then, without warning, aggressively grasped his right ear, which--as Valentine knew it would--snapped off. From the jagged edges of the empty hole appeared a matrix of fine lines that ran spontaneously over his face and down his neck, disappearing into his collar. In a moment, his entire body had crumbled into nothing more than a pile of dust on the seat.
Valentine awoke with a start. He was cold, and his shoulders were very stiff. He was nearly at Oxford.
Appendix C
From my second novel:
I felt worthless--an artist with an injured right hand: I certainly could not paint in the condition I was in, and if I could not paint, what good was I? All the world seemed wrong; Adin's harsh words came back to me, and I was furious with myself and acutely embarrassed for screaming in such an uncontrolled manner, and for such a vague reason. Adin had every right to be angry. What kind of a friend was I anyway--accusing him of hiding things, when really it was my own lack of talent that prevented me from seeing what I needed to reveal his soul. It is no wonder that I have got so few friends, I thought, and accused myself of disloyalty, fickleness, insanity, and all manner of wicked thoughts and deeds which I may or may not have committed sometime in my life. I told myself I ought to be truly grateful that any person even condescended to speak to me, rather than turning away in disgust.
Appendix D
From Olivia by Olivia (pseudonym of Dorothy Strachey):
She drew me toward her, pulled back my sari, and whispered close, close in my ear, her lips almost touching me, her breath hot on my cheek:
"I'll come tomorrow and bring you a sweet."
She was gone.
I remember that I felt as if my whole frame had been turned to water. My knees were giving away. I had to cling to a table and support myself till I recovered strength enough to get to a chair--she was coming--to-night--in a few hours-- A paean sang in my heart. Had I been weak before? Now, exhilaration flowed through my veins. Why? Why? I didn't stop to think why. I only know that there, in the immediate future, soon, soon, something was coming to me, some wild delight, some fierce anguish that my whole being called for (67).
From Death in Venice by Thomas Mann:
Aschenbach received that smile and turned away with it as though entrusted with a fatal gift. So shaken was he that he had to flee from the lighted terrace and front gardens of the park at the rear. Reproaches strangely mixed of tenderness and remonstrance burst from him: "How dare you smile like that! No one is allowed to smile like that!" He flung himself on a bench, his composure gone to the winds, and breathed in the nocturnal fragrance of the garden. He leaned back, with hanging arms, quivering from head to foot, and quite unmanned he whispered the hackneyed phrase of love and longing--impossible in these circumstances, absurd, abject, ridiculous enough, yet sacred too, and not unworthy of honour even here: "I love you!" (51).
From "The Ides of March" by E.W. Hornung:
My blood froze. My heart sickened. My brain whirled. How I had liked this villain! How I had admired him! How my liking and admiration must turn to loathing and disgust! I waited for the change. I longed to feel it in my heart. But--I longed and I waited in vain! (57)
From "The Knees of the Gods" by E.W. Hornung:
[I]t was rather fine to be wounded, just then, with the pain growing less; but the sensation was not to last me many minutes, and I can truthfully say that I have never felt it since.
"Ah, but you haven't had such a good time as I have!"
"Perhaps not."
Had his voice vibrated, or had I imagined it? Pain-waves and loss of blood were playing tricks with my sense; now they were quite dull, and my leg alive and throbbing; now I had no leg at all, but more than all my ordinary senses in every part of me. And the devil's orchestra was playing all the time, and all around me, on every class of fiendish instrument, which you have been made to hear for yourselves in every newspaper. Yet all that I heard was Raffles talking (315).
From The Fall of the House of Usher by Edgar Allan Poe:
I know not how it was--but, with the first glimpse of the building, a sense of insufferable gloom pervaded my spirit. I say insufferable; for the feeling was unrelieved by any of that half-pleasurable, because poetic, sentiment with which the mind usually receives even the sternest natural images of the desolate or terrible. I looked upon the scene before me . . . with an utter depression of soul which I can compare to no earthly sensation more properly than to the after-dream of the reveller upon opium--the bitter lapse into everyday life--the hideous dropping off of the veil. There was an iciness, a sinking, a sickening of the heart--an unredeemed dreariness of thought which no goading of the imagination could torture into aught of the sublime (532).