J. M. Coetzee – Disgrace

Coetzee, J. M. Disgrace. New York: Penguin Group, 1999.

4/8/20 – 4/10/20

Transcribed: Unknown; 4/24/20.

Another book that is stunningly simple. Amazing “show don’t tell.” Has the markings of allegory but also brutally real. (Is this an observation I make too often in some form or another?)

Very clean clear prose. The tone is of a humanities professor that can wax poetic if wanted but tires of all of it.

What are the morals of this book? Its lessons? Why does the art come back to him? Does it?

This book really moves. At the beginning I thought, I am tired of these professor books, even the good ones. Dellilo, Looker. So cerebral and so bitter. Underachieving. Then — obviously — it moves. At the beginning, even with Cape Town, I thought there a chance it was set in the Netherlands.

Often compares himself, a little sneeringly, as a foil, with Emma Bovary. Right, in some way his existence a response to the Romantics he studies (and somewhat lets him down).

The insufficiency of language, maybe specifically the English language.

The specific use of dogs.

(1) “luxe et volupté” – luxury and pleasure
(2) “The skull, followed by the temperament: the two hardest parts of the body.”
(2) Last chorus of Oedipus: “Call no man happy until he is dead.”
(2-3) “Intercourse between Soraya and himself must be, he imagines, rather like the copulation of snakes: lengthy, absorbed, but rather abstract, rather dry, even at its hottest.”
(3) la donna è mobile – the woman is mobile.
(3) “Of her life outside Windsor Mansions Soraya reveals nothing. Soraya is not her real name, that he is sure of. There are signs she has borne a child, or children.”
- - What is so good about this? There are no marks on it and yet it is good.
(4) “His own opinion, which he does not air, is that the origins of speech lie in song, and the origins of song are the need to fill out with sound the overlarge and rather empty human soul.”
“The truth is, he is tired of criticism, tired of prose measured by the yard.”
(5) On Soraya, not wearing makeup after the first meeting (having gone back, already we see the premonition of his tending toward the adolescent): “A ready learner, complaint, pliant.”
- - The easy slippage between the metaphoric and the physical. In that direction, for him.
(5) “No emotion, or none but the deepest, the most unguessed-at: a ground bass of contentedness, like the hum of traffic that lulls the city-dweller to sleep, or like the silence of the night to countryfolk.”
(6) “He has always been a man of the city, at home amid a flux of bodies where eros stalks and glances flash like arrows.”
“He is all for double lives, triple lives, lives lived in compartments.”
“In Soraya’s arms he becomes, fleetingly, their father: foster-father, step-father, shadow-father.”
- Is this in some way why he chases Melanie? The lost daughter, Lucy?
Character done in a paragraph or two:
- (7) “He himself has no son. His childhood was spent in a family of women. As mother, aunts, sisters fell way, they were replaced in due course by mistresses, wives, a daughter. The company of women made of him a lover of women, and to an extent, a womanizer. With his height, his good bones, his olive skin, his flowing hair, he could always count on a degree of magnetism. If he looked at a woman in a certain way, with a certain intent, she would return his look, he could rely on that… Then one day it all ended. Without warning this powered fled. Glances the would once have responded to his slid over, past, through him. Overnight he became a ghost. If he wanted a woman he had to learn to pursue her, often, in one way or another, to buy her.”
  - - He’s wrong about that; he still gets women easily. It’s in his head.
    - I marked, “Marcus” re: women in fam
“Afternoons only” is what gets him.
- - She has smile lines. Possibly it’s not youth but the attraction of people who belong to someone else. And the cliché of a secretary cheating is not enough to hold him.
(8) “He has a shrewd idea of how prostitutes speak among themselves about the men who frequent them, the older men in particular. They tell stories, they laugh, but they shudder, too, as one shudders at a cockroach in a washbasin in the middle of the night. Soon, daintily, maliciously, he will be shuddered over. It is a fate he cannot escape.”
(9) “Her name is Dawn. The second time he takes her out they stop at his house and have sex. It is a failure. Bucking and clawing, she works herself into a froth of excitement that in the end only repels him. He lends her a comb, drives her back to campus.”
- - Okay — two perfect things. One: the second date. Then, the comb.
(11) “He spends more time in the university library, reading all he can find on the wider Byron circle, adding to notes that already fill two fat files. He enjoys the late-afternoon quiet of the reading room, enjoys the walk home afterwards: the brisk winter air, the damp gleaming streets.”
- - Wrote: “This isn’t enough? That’s jarring — not like Delillo.” But that sounds so pleasant… will it not be enough for me?
(12) “Cape Town: a city prodigal of beauty, of beauties.”
- - Wasteful — as if he is recycling something
(12) “Does she know he has an eye on her? Probably. Women are sensitive to it, to the weight of the desiring gaze.”
“When he returns she is standing at the bookshelf, head on one side, reading titles. He puts on music…”
- - “lmao yep.”
“Wine, music: a ritual that men and women play out with each other. Nothing wrong with rituals, they were invented to ease the awkward passages.”
(13) “Do the young still fall in love, or is the mechanism obsolete by now, unnecessary, quaint, like steam locomotion? He is out of touch, out of date. Falling in love could have fallen out of fashion and come back again half a dozen times, for all he knows.”
(13) Wait. It just occurs to me, is Melanie black? He says dark beauty later, I thought just name. “‘We did Adrienne Rich and Toni Morrison in my second year. And Alice Walker. I got pretty involved.” I’m a fucking idiot.
(13) “So: not a creature of passion. In the most roundabout of ways, is she warning him off?”
(14) “[Gender] reversals: the stuff of bourgeois comedy.”
(15) “He wills the girl to be captivated too. But he senses she is not.”
(16) Ew: “Why? Because a woman’s beauty does not belong to her alone. It is part of the bounty she brings into the world. She has a duty to share it.” Prodigal huh.
(16) “Smooth words, as old as seduction itself. Yet at this moment he believes in them. She does not own herself. Beauty does not own itself.”
- - Seducing himself.
(19) “Too far. What is far, what is too far, in a matter like this? Is her too far the same as his too far?”
(25) “Not rape, not quite that, but undesired nevertheless, undesired to the core. As though she had decided to go slack, die within herself for the duration, like a rabbit when the jaws of the fox close on its neck. So that everything done to her might be done, as it were, far away…. At this moment, he has no doubt, she, Melanie, is trying to cleanse herself of it, of him. He sees her running a bath, stepping into the water, eyes closed like a sleepwalker’s.
- - The detail that she puts her plates in the sink but does not wash it (so young)
  - This was excerpted to me a couple days or weeks before reading this in NYT
(28) “She is behaving badly, getting away with too much; she is learning to exploit him and will probably exploit him further. But if she has got away with much, he has got away with more; if she is behaving badly, he has behaved worse. To the extent that they are together, if they are together, he is the one who leads, she the one who follows. Let him not forget that.”
(29) “Have you slept with Amanda?” Ugh. So good. “Amanda is another student in the class, a wispy blonde. He has no interest in Amanda.” That’s so perfect. It really do be like that.
(44) “That is what whores are for, after all: to put up with the ecstasies of the unlovely.”
(56) “They circle around him like hunters who have cornered a strange beast and do not know how to finish it off.”
(61) “Curious that he and her mother, cityfolk, intellectuals, should have produced this throwback, this sturdy young settler. But perhaps it was not they who produced her: perhaps history had the larger share.”
(63) “Being a father…. I can’t help feeling that, by comparison with being a mother, being a father is rather abstract business.”
(65) “What if we don’t call it a visit? What if we call it a refuge? Would you accept refuge on an indefinite basis?”
(71) “Two weeks ago he was in a classroom explaining to the bored youth of the country the distinction between drink and drink up, burned and burnt. The perfective, signifying an action carried through to its conclusion. How far away it all seems! I live, I have lived, I lived.
(74) “But it is true. They are no going to lead me to a higher life and the reason is, there is no higher life. This is the only life there is. Which we share with animals. That’s the example that people like Bev try to set. That’s the example I try to follow. To share some of our human privilege with the beasts. I don’t want to come back in another existence as a dog or a pic and have to live as dogs or pigs live under us.
(76) “‘What are you reading?’ he repeats; and then, ‘It’s not working out, is it? Shall I leave?”
(76) “He has never been afraid to follow a thought down its winding track, and he is not afraid now. Has he fathered a woman of passion?”
(89) “‘My case rests on the rights of desire,’ he says. ‘On the god who makes even the small birds quiver.’”
(89) “I was a servant of Eros: that is what he wants to say, but does he have the effrontery? It was a god who acted through me.”
(90) “What was ignoble about the Kenilworth spectacle was that the poor dog had begun to hate its own nature. It no longer needed to be beaten. It was ready to punish itself. At that point it would have been better to shoot it.’”
(104) “Menstruation, childbirth, violation and its aftermath: blood-matters; a woman’s burden, women’s preserve.”
(105) “It was never safe, and it’s not an idea, good or bad. I’m not going back for the sake of an idea. I’m just going back. ”
(107) Everything happens fast af in this book.
(108) “They are of her generation, but edgy of her nevertheless, as if she were a creature polluted and her pollution could leap across to them, soil them.”
(109) “Words are beginning to take shape that have been hovering since last night at the edges of memory. Two old ladies locked in the lavatory; They were there from Monday to Saturday/ Nobody knew they were there.”
(109) “In Lucy’s room the double bed is stripped bare. The scene of the crime, he thinks to himself; and, as if reading the thought, the policemen avert their eyes, pass on.”
(109) “A quiet house on a winter morning, no more, no less.”
(110) “It will dawn on them that over the body of the woman silence is being drawn like a blanket.”
(110) “Like shooting fish in a barrel, he thinks. Contemptible, yet exhilarating, probably, in a country where dogs are bred to snarl at the mere smell of a black man. A satisfying afternoon’s work, heady, like all revenge.”
(112) “Vengeance is like a fire. The more it devours, the hungrier it gets.”
(117) “More and more he is convinced that English is an unfit medium for the truth of South Africa. Stretches of English code whole sentences long have thickened, lost their articulations, their articulateness, their articulatedness. Like a dinosaur expiring and settling in the mud, the language his stiffened. Press into the mould of English, Petrus’s story would come out arthritic, bygone.”
(123-4) “The sheep drink at length, then leisurely begin to graze. They are black-faced Persians, alike in size, in markings, even in their movements. Twins, in all likelihood, destined since birth for the butcher’s knife. Well, nothing remarkable in that. When did a sheep last die of old age? Sheep do not own themselves, do not own their lives. They exist to be used, every last ounce of them, their flesh to be eaten, their bones to be crushed and fed to poultry. Nothing escapes, except perhaps the gall bladder, which no one will eat. Descartes should have thought of that. The soul, suspended in the dark, bitter gall, hiding.”
(125) “She is sitting on the sofa in pajamas and dressing-gown, playing with the cat. It is past noon. The cat is young, alert, skittish. Lucy dangles the belt of the gown before it. The cat slaps at the belt, quick, light paw-blows, one-two-three-four.”
(125) “Country ways — that is what Lucy calls this kind of thing. He has other words: indifference, hardheartedness. I the country can pass judgment on the city, then the city can pass judgment on the country too.”
(126) “He takes a step forward. The sheep backs away uneasily to the limit of its chain.”
(126) “The sun beats on his face in all its springtime radiance.”
(127) “Should he mourn? Is it proper to mourn the death of beings who do not practice mourning among themselves? Looking into his heart, he can find only a vague sadness.”
- - Is this a way to think? I guess a kind of application of the golden rule. I should be mourned because i can mourn. I did mourn.
(128) “Shaded lamps and pictures on the walls (Van Gogh’s sunflowers, a Tretchikoff lady in blue, Jane Fonda in her Barbarella outfit, Doctor Khumalo scoring a goal) soften these bleakness.”
(129) “He does not play the eager host, does not offer them a drink, but does say, ‘No more dogs. I am not any more the dog-man,’ which Lucy chooses to accept as a joke; so all, it appears, is well. “
(129) “Lucy is our benefactor,’ says Petrus; and then, to Lucy: ‘You are our benefactor.’
A distasteful word, it seems to him, double-edged, souring the moment. Yet can Petrus be blamed? The language he draws on with such aplomb is, if he only knew it, tired, friable, eaten from the inside as if by termites. Only the monosyllables can still be relied on, and not even all of them.”
(141) “Presumably Lucy is healing too, or if not healing then forgetting, growing scar tissue around the memory of that day, sheathing it, sealing it off. So that one day she may be able to say, ‘The day we were robbed,’ and think of it as merely the day when they were robbed.”
(141) “Sometimes he fears that the characters in the story, who for more than a year have been his ghostly companions, are beginning to fade away.”
(142) “What is being asked for is, in fact, Lösung (German always to hand with an appropriately balance abstraction): sublimation, as alcohol is sublimed from water, leaving no residue, no aftertaste.”
(142) “Nevertheless, he is the one who holds the dog still as the needle finds the vein and the drug hits the heart and the legs buckle and the eyes dim.”
(143) “He does not understand what is happening to him. Until now he has been more or less indifferent to animals. Although in an abstract way he disapproves of cruelty, he cannot tell whether by nature he is cruel or kind. He is simply nothing. He assumes that people from whom cruelty is demanded int he line of duty, people who work in slaughterhouses, for instance, grow carapaces over their souls. Habit hardens: it must be so in most cases, but it does not seem to be so in his. He does not seem to have the gift of hardness.”
(143-4) “He avoids saying to her, ‘I don’t know how you do it,’ in order not to have to hear her say in return, ‘Someone has to do it.’”
(144) “It would be simpler to cart the bags to the incinerator immediately after the session and leave them there for the incinerator crew to dispose of. But that would mean leaving them on the dump with the rest of the weekend’s scourings: with waste from the hospital wards, carrion scooped up at the roadside, malodorous refuse from the tannery — a mixture both casual and terrible.”
(145-6) “WHy has he taken on this job? To lighten the burden on Bev Shaw? For that it would be enough to drop off the bags at the dump and drive away. For the sake of the dogs? But the dogs are dead; and what do dogs know of honor and dishonor anyway?
For himself, then. For his idea of the world, a world in which men do not use shovels to beat corpses into a more convenient shape for processing….. But there are other people to do these things — the animal welfare thing, the social rehabilitation thing, even the Byron thing. He saves the honor of corpses because there is no one else stupid enough to do it. That is what he is becoming: stupid, daft, wrongheaded.”
- I wrote “Like Bev” — that’s stupid
(148) “Out of the way of temptation: a callous thing to say to a woman, even a plain one. Yet not plain in everyone eyes. There must have been a time when Bill Shaw saw something in young Bev. Other men too, perhaps.”
(149) When he and Bev sleep together for the first time.
(150) Preoccupation with Emma Bovary. The anti-Emma.
(150) “And let him stop calling her poor Bev Shaw. If she is poor, he is bankrupt.”
(151) Insistence of the word “ethnic” (multiply) in description of Lucy’s activities with her hippy friends
(153) “Talking with Petrus is like punching a bag filled with sand.”
(155) “She shakes her head. ‘I can’t talk anymore, David, I just can’t,’ she says, speaking softly, rapidly, as though afraid the words will dry up. I know I am not being clear. I wish I could explain. But I can’t. Because of who you are and who I am, I can’t. I’m sorry. And I’m sorry about your car. I’m sorry about the disappointment.”
(156) “Again the feeling washes over him: listlessness, indifference, but also weightlessness, as if he has been eaten away from inside and only the eroded shell of his heart remains. How, he thinks to himself, can a man in this state find words, find music that will bring back the dead?”
(156) The return of the theme of dogs being able to smell thoughts.
(156) “He waits for more, but there is no more, for the moment. ‘It was history speaking through them,’ he offers at last. ‘A history of wrong. Think of it that way, if it helps. It may have seemed personal, but it wasn’t. It came down from the ancestors.’”
(157) “‘To begin with, you don’t understand what happened to me that day. You are concerned for my sake, which I appreciate, you think you understand, but finally you don’t. Because you can’t.’”
(158) “She broods a long time before she answers. ‘But isn’t there another way of looking at it, David? What if… what if that is the price one has to pay for staying on? Perhaps that is how they look at it; perhaps that is how I should look at it too. They see me as owing something. They see themselves as debt collectors, tax collectors. Why should I be allowed to live here without paying? Perhaps that is what they tell themselves.’”
(158) “‘Hatred…. When it comes to men and sex, David, nothing surprises me anymore. Maybe, for men, hating the woman makes sex more exciting. You are a man, you ought to know. When you have sex with someone strange — when you trap her, hold her down, get her under you, put all your weight on her — isn’t that a bit like killing? Pushing the knife in; exiting afterwards, leaving the body behind covered in blood — doesn’t it feel like murder, like getting away with murder?”
- - I wrote: “[check mark]. Jesus.”
(159) “You are a man, you ought to know: does one speak to one’s father like that? Are she and he on the same side?”
(159) “‘They spur each other on. That’s probably why they do it together. Like dogs in a pack.’
‘And the third one, the boy?’
‘He was there to learn.’”
(159) “They do rape. He thinks of the three visitors driving away in the not-too-old Toyota, the back seat piled with household goods, their penises, their weapons, tucked warm and satisfied between their legs — purring is the words that comes to him. They must have had every reason to be pleased with their afternoon’s work; they must have felt happy in their vocation.”
(160) “While the men, for their part, drank up her fear, revealed in it, did all they could to hurt her, to menace her, to heighten her terror.”
(160) “Lucy’s intuition is right after all: he does understand; he can, if he concentrates, if he loses himself, be there, be the men, inhabit them, fill them with the ghost of himself. The question is, does he have it in him to be the woman?”
(160) “‘Dearest Lucy, With all the love in them orld, I must say the following. You re on the brink of a dangerous error. You wish to humble yourself before history. But the road you are following is the wrong one. It will strip you of all honour; you will not be able to live with yourself. I plead with you, listen to me.’”
(160) “‘Dear David. You have not been listening to me. I am not the person you know. I am a dead person and I do not know yet what will bring me back to life. All I know is that I cannot go away.
‘You do not see this, and I do not know what more I can do to make you see. It is as if you have chosen deliberately to sit in the corner where the rays of the sun do not shine…. Yes, the road I am following may be the wrong one. But if I leave the farm now I will be defeated, and will taste that defeat for the rest of my life.
‘I cannot be a child for ever. You cannot be a father fo ever. I know you mean well, but you are not the guide I need, not at this time.
‘Yours, Lucy.’”
(161) “She chose a certain surround, a certain horizon.”
(162) “[I was a teacher] Of the most incidental kind. Teaching was never a vocation for me. Certainly I never aspired to teach people how to live. I was what used to be called a scholar. I wrote books about dead people. That was where my heart was. I taught only to make a living.”’
(163) “Desiree: now he remembers. Melanie the firstborn, the dark one, then Desiree, the desired one. Surely they tempted the gods by giving her a name like that.”
(163) Fucking ew: “He does not say, I know your sister, know her well. But he thinks: fruit of the same tree, down probably to the most intimate detail. yet with differences: different pulsing of the blood, different urgencies of passion. The two of them in the same bed: an experience fit for a king.”
(166) Obsession with this verb configuration: “Burned – burnt – burnt up.”
(167) “Fallen? Yes, there has been a fall, no doubt about that. But mighty? Does mighty describe him? He thinks of himself as obscure and growing obscurer. A figure from the margins of history.”
(176) Dead bird; how does everybody know that this happens? Herzog.
(180) Opera: “Their early ecstasies will, he suspects, never be repeated.His life is becalmed; obscurely he has begun to long for a uquiet retirement; failing that, for apotheosis, for death. Teresa’s soaring arias ignite no spark in him; his own vocal line, dark, convoluted, goes past, through, over her.”
(180) “Sung in an English that tugs continually toward an imagined Italian”
(181) “The villa too, with Byron’s pet monkeys hanging languidly from the chandeliers and peacocks fussing back and forth among the ornate Neapolitan furniture, has the right mix of timelessness and decay.”
“Yet first on Lucy’s farm and now again here, the project has failed to engage the core of him. There is something misconceived about it, something that does not come from the heart. A woman complaining to the stars that the spying of the servants forces her and her lover to relieve their desires in a broom-closet who cares? He can find words for Byron, but the Teresa that history has bequeathed him — young, greedy, wilful, petulant— does not reach ups to he music he has dreamed of, music whose harmonies, lushly autumnal yet edged with irony, he hears shadowed in his inner ear.”
(181) “He tries another track. Abandoning the page of notes he has written, abandoning the pert, precocious newlywed with her captive English Milord, he tries to pick Teresa up in middle age. The new Teresa is a dumpy little widow installed in the Villa Gamba with her aged father, running the household, holding the purse-strings tight, keeping an eye out that the servants do not steal the sugar. Byron, in the new version, is long dead; Teresa’s sole remaining claim to immortality, and the solace of her lonely nights, is the chestful of letters and memorabilia she keeps under her bed, wha she called her reliquie, which her grand-nieces are meant to open after her death and peruse with awe.”
(181) “The complexion that Byron once so admired has turned hectic;”
(182) “the man in the ransacked house”
(183)”But by steps, as he begins to live his days more fully with Teresa and the dead Byron, it becomes clear that purloined songs will not be good enough, that the two will demand a music of their own. And, astonishingly, in dribs and drabs, the music comes. Sometimes the contour of a phrase occurs to him before he has a hint of what the words themselves will be; sometimes the words call forth the cadence; sometimes the shade of a melody, having hovered for days on the edge of hearing, unfolds and blessedly reveals itself. As the action begins to unwind, furthermore, it calls up of is own accord modulations and transitions that he feels in his blood even when he has not the musical resources to realize them.”
- - I wrote: “he’s been holding back on us…”
the plink-plunk of the toy banjo
(184) “But he was wrong. It is not the erotic that is calling to him after all, nor the elegiac, but the comic. He is in the opera neither as Teresa nor as Byron nor even as some blending of the two: he is held in the music itself in the flat, tinny slap of the banjo strings, the voice that strains to sour away from the ludicrous instrument but is continually reined back, like a fish on the line.”
(185) “So this is art, he thinks, and this is how it does its work! How strange! How fascinating.”
(186) “He is inventing the music (or the music is inventing him) but he is not inventing the history.”
mal’aria
This is a really amazing section. Go back. End of chap. 20.
(189) “There is silence while they contemplate, from their respective anglses, the story of his life.”
(189) “‘Your imorata. Melanie Isaacs — silt that her name? She is in a play at the Dock Theatre. Didn’t you know? I can see why you fell for her. Big, dark eyes. Cunning little weasel body. Just your type.”
(190) “The marriage of Cronus and Harmony: unnatural. That was what the trial was set up to punish, once all the fine words were stripped away. On trial for his way of life. For unnatural acts: for broadcasting old seed, tired seed, seed that does not quicken, contra naturam. If toehold men hog the young women, what will be the future of the species? That, at bottom, was the case for the prosecution. Half of literature is about it: young women struggling to escape from under the weight of old men, for the sake of the species.”
(194) “Omnis gens quaecumque se in se perficere vult.” [Loosely: ‘Every nation, whatever it is, wishes to perfect itself in itself.]
(194) “The shocks of existence: he must learn to take them more lightly.”
(198) “‘Because I couldn’t face one of your eruptions. David, I can’t run my life according to whether or not you like what I do. Not any more. You behave as if everything I do is part of the story of your life. You are the main character, I am a minor character who doesn’t make an appearance until halfway through. Well, contrary to what you thin, people are not divided into major and minor. I am not minor. I have a life of my own, just as important to me as yours is to you, and in my life I am the one who makes the decisions.”
(199) “What kind of child can seed like that give life to , seed driven into the woman not in love but in hatred, mixed chaotically, meant to soil her, to mark her, like a dog’s urine?”
“Standing against the wall outside the kitchen, hiding his face in his hands, he heaves and heaves and finally cries.”
- - This double heave is very good.
(200) “Lucy, your situation is becoming ridiculous, worse than ridiculous, sinister.”
(214) “He has not the musical resources, the resources of energy, to raise Byron in Italy off the monotonous track on which it has been running since the start. It has become the kind of work a sleepwalker might write.”
“His hopes must be more temperate: that somewhere from amidst the welter of sound there will dart up, like a bird, a single authentic note of immortal longing. As for recognizing it, he will leave that for the scholars of the future, if there are still scholars by then. For he wil not hear the note himself, when it comes, if it comes — he knows too much about art and the ways of art to expect that.”
(215) “Aribitrarily, unconditionally, he has been adopted; the dog would die for him, he knows.”
“Would he dare to do that: bring a dog into the piece, allow it to loose its own lament to th heavens between the stripes of lovelonrn Teresa’s Why not? Surely, in a work that will never be performed, all things are permitted?”
(216) “A good person. Not a bad resolution to make, in dark times.”
(217) “the backs of her knees: the least beautiful part of a woman’s body, the least expressive, and therefore perhaps the most endearing.”
(218) “City boys like him; but even city boys can recognize beauty when they see it, can have their breath taken away.”
“Not much of an eye for anything, except pretty girls, and where has that got him? Is it too late to educate his eye?”
(219) “What the dog will not be able to work out… what his nose will not tell him, is how one can enter what seems to be an ordinary room and never come out again.”
(220) Gives him up.