By age and by education he belonged to the stout Positivist tradition, and his habit of thought had been formed in the days of the epic struggle between physics and metaphysics. But he had been, then and always, essentially a spectator, a humorous detached observer of the immense muddled variety show of life ...
This from an Edith Wharton story, "The Eyes," to which I was listening happily over a podcast of "Selected Shorts". (Luckily you can read the entire story online here.) Wharton's prose, I was reminded, has a real love of words nestled in it. Sometimes it's a bit dense, and you find yourself lulled into not listening to the words until a word or phrase suddenly leaps out at you.
In this instance I was reminded of an ancient New Yorker cartoon. ... caption, "He says he's just an observer of the passing scene."
Those months were delightful. Noyes was constantly with me, and the more I saw of him the better I liked him. His stupidity was a natural grace -- it was as beautiful, really, as his eye-lashes. And he was so gay, so affectionate, and so happy with me, that telling him the truth would have been about as pleasant as slitting the throat of some artless animal.
and a little farther on:
He shot his head out of the mist with a queer tortoise-like motion he sometimes had, and blinked approvingly at Frenham.
To this genius for capturing a turn of phrase is added a few queer word nuggets, just enough out-of-place to catch your attention but not so opaque as to cause your attention to stumble, at least not for more than a phrase or two, never for an entire sentence. (I am likely to stop the iPod or to scramble for my cell phone that I can leave myelf a note.) The trait is a variation of what reading Shakespeare becomes, where the endless variations in words (using one part of speech for another, as an adjective for a noun, or a by now obsolete form of a word) can make the reading both rewarding and frustrating at once.
Here are just two words that caught my ear in "The Eyes": dupery and hyacinthine. I'll leave it to you to find these words buried in the story.
And on and on it goes. This post was still in draft when I caught yet another Selected Shorts" podcast, reading this time from Wharton's "The Debt". Early on Wharton engages in another one of her sidelong characterizations. The victim this time, ultimately to find retribution, is one Galen Dregde:
He was as inexpressive as he is to-day, and yet oddly obtrusive: one of those uncomfortable presences whose silence is an interruption.
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