“Most of us are familiar enough with the sensation that we might not be the prettiest creatures in the room.”

“That is: for most of us, the inexplicable variations in human taste are a salvation.”

“Do you know how sometimes you see a man, and you’re not sure if you want to get in his pants or if you want to cry? Not because you can’t have him; maybe you can. But you see right away something in him beyond having. You can’t screw your way into it, any more than you can get at the golden egg by slitting the goose. So you want to cry, not like a child, but like an exile who is reminded of his homeland.”

“Just a few weeks in town and they had all made up their minds about him: he was too hot, and knew it, thought he was some kind of god, not worth wasting time or pride on. One or two made a point of glowering at him, as if he had come just to torment them. It is hard to summon up much compassion for the travails of the beautiful. Who could care if he felt cut off by people’s expectations about him, as surely as if he lived in a plastic bubble? He would burst the bubble later; when he felt like it he would walk over and just pick out anybody he wanted, if there was anybody he wanted. For the moment, though, he was truly at a loss, could not find a way of standing, or of composing his face, that was neither off-putting nor excessively encouraging. He could only glower back at them, when he really wanted to make friends.”

“He saw an outside that was congruent with his inside. A face that was intelligent, spiritual, decent - a face that you might wish to see across the circle in your reading group, not in bed, not hovering above yours in your playroom as you lie strapped to your chair. He saw the body of a little boy, clumsy and defenceless.”

“The grave eyes and the faint, dissolute smile; the archer’s body like a pale, silver frame for the cock that rose up, spontaneously, like a wicked idea in the mind of a schoolboy. You would have seen that creature who seemed to have been placed here specially to act out your most cherished and secret intentions.
You would have seen that creature, but he could not. He tried, he looked in the mirror as faithfully as you look into yours. He could, if he concentrated, see himself part by part. Each part fine; he had no complaint with any of his parts. Only the aggregate eluded him. What you or I would have seen seemed to him a delusion, and our hasty assumption that it had something to do with his insides an affront.”

“This night he caught himself by surprise and saw the stranger everyone else saw. The body that was a part of the landscape of other people’s lives and about which they made up the most preposterous stories.”

“He had allowed men to love him; he had never induced it. Really, never at all? Not the way he had dressed, or the attitudes he had struck when he had sensed that an attitude was desired? All right, he was practiced in making himself lovable. Men didn’t just happen upon him in a state of nature and fall head over heels. Still, it was one thing to put forth your little generic flower of masculinity and wait for some bee to come suck it, and quite another to set your sights on one particular bee.”

“Among his contemporaries, though, he could not think of a single man whose strength was not sabotaged by vanity, superstition, hopeless longing. Only he himself bore the terrible burden of moving through life without self-deception.”

“Maybe they really were lovers, maybe this was at last what the word meant: your lover was the one you had to shelter from the worst things you knew about yourself. Yes, this had to be it, the hot shame and, somewhere beneath it, a strange, hopeless sort of jubilation… As, when you are first in love, you will take any willing bystander in your arms.”


Mark Merlis – An Arrow’s Flight