Children of her type contrive the purest philosophies. Ada had worked out her own little system. Hardly a week had elapsed since Van's arrival when he was found worthy of being initiated in her web of wisdom. An individual's life consisted of certain classified things: "real things" which were unfrequent and priceless, simply "things" which formed the routine stuff of life; and "ghost things," also called "fogs," such as fever, toothache, dreadful disappointments, and death. Three of more things occurring at the same time formed a "tower" or, if they came in immediate succession, they made a "bridge." "Real towers" and "real bridges" were the joys of life, and when the towers came in a series, one experienced supreme rapture; it almost never happened, though. In some circumstances, in a certain light, a neutral "thing" might look or even actually become "real" or else, conversely, it might coagulate into a fetid "fog." When the joy and the joyless happened to be intermixed, simultaneously or along the ramp of duration, one was confronted with "ruined towers" and "broken bridges."
The pictorial and architectural details of her metaphysics made her nights easier than Van's, and that morning - as on most mornings - he had the sensation of returning from a much more remote and grim country than she and her sunlight had come from.
Her plump, stickily glistening lips smiled.
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1 comment:
There is nothing in the English language that comes close to the wicked grandeur that is Ada....
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