If I sat in an arm chair with a doily more often sipping tea, or gin and vermouth, more appropriately, I might have it in me to finish Brideshead Revisited. As it is, I find it rather a bore. Sebastian, of course, is frightfully charming and that teddy bear of his, so aptly christened Aloysius, amusingly underlines his terrible charm further, but it's all too charming for me. Even though it has such pulchritudinous passages as:
"On a sheep-cropped knoll under a clump of elms we ate the strawberries and drank the wine — as Sebastian promised, they were delicious together — and we lit fat, Turkish cigarettes and lay on our backs, Sebastian’s eyes on the leaves above him, mine on his profile, while the blue-grey smoke rose, untroubled by any wind, to the blue-green shadows of foliage, and the sweet scent of the tobacco merged with the sweet summer scents around us and the fumes of the sweet, golden wine seemed to lift us a finger’s breadth above the turf and hold us suspended."
That passage is perfection. But. my.brain.justcan't.focus.on so much beauty --- today---or ever.
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