Quilt Retreat Quotes

What do I think was modernism’s subject, then? What was it about? No doubt you can guess my starting point. It was about steam—in both the Malevich and the de Chirico a train still rushes across the landscape. It was about change and power and contingency, in other words, but also control, compression, and captivity—an absurd or oppressive orderliness is haunting the bright new fields and the sunlit squares with their eternally flapping flags. Modernism presents us with a world becoming a realm of appearances—fragments, patchwork quilts of color, dream-tableaux made out of disconnected phantasms. But all of this is still happening in modernism, and still resisted as it is described. The two paintings remain shot through, it seems to me, with the effort to answer back to the flattening and derealizing-the will to put the fragments back into some sort of order. Modernism is agonized, but its agony is not separable from weird levity or whimsy. Pleasure and horror go together in it. Malevich may be desperate, or euphoric. He may be pouring scorn on the idea of collective man, or spelling the idea out with utter childish optimism. We shall never know his real opinions. His picture entertains both. Modernism was certainly about the pathos of dream and desire in twentieth- century circumstances, but, again, the desires were unstoppable, ineradicable. The upright man will not let go of the future. The infinite still exists at the top of the tower. Even in the Picasso the monster flashing up outside the window is my monster, my phantasm, the figure of my unnegotiable desire. The monster is me—the terrible desiring and fearing subject inside me that eludes all form of conditioning, all the barrage of instructions about what it should want and who it should be. This is Picasso’s vestigial utopianism. You think that modernity is a realm of appetite and immediacy! I’ll show you appetite! I’ll show you immediacy! I shall, as a modernist, make the dreams of modernity come true. Modernism was testing, as I said before. It was a kind of internal exile, a retreat into the territory of form; but form was ultimately a crucible, an act of aggression, an abyss into which all the comfortable “givens” of the culture were sucked and then spat out.

I cannot lose you, little one. You are my best half. I love you more than I can ever express. Mikhail rubbed his face over hers and kissed her damp hair. She touched her tongue to a bead of sweat, smiling up at him tiredly. “I think I would always recognize you, Mikhail, no matter how damaged my mind.” He rolled over, taking her with him so that his weight would not crush her smaller body. “That is how it should be, Raven. You suffered much these past days, and it will stay fresh in my mind for all eternity. Tomorrow night we must leave this region. The vampire is dead, but he has left behind a trail that could destroy our people. We must move to a more isolated area, where perhaps our people can survive the coming persecution.” He brought up her arm to examine the long, deep scratches left by Andre. “You’re so certain it is coming?” A faint, bitter smile touched his mouth as he waved to snuff out the candles. “I have too often in my lifetime seen the signs. They will come--the assassins. Humans and Carpathians alike will suffer. We will retreat for a quarter of a century, perhaps a half century, to give ourselves time to regroup.” His tongue found the angry marks on her arm and bathed them gently with his healing touch. It was comforting and felt right to her. Her lashes drifted, down, their combined scents lingering in the bedchamber, a soothing fragrance. “I love you, Mikhail, all of you, even the beast in you. I don’t know why I became so confused. You aren’t evil. I can see so clearly inside of you.” Sleep, little one, in my arms where you belong. Mikhail drew up the quilt, wrapped protective arms around her, and sent them both to sleep.

My aunt's life was now practically confined to two adjoining rooms, in one of which she would rest in the afternoon while they, aired the other. They were rooms of that country order which (just as in certain climes whole tracts of air or ocean are illuminated or scented by myriads of protozoa which we cannot see) fascinate our sense of smell with the countless odours springing from their own special virtues, wisdom, habits, a whole secret system of life, invisible, superabundant and profoundly moral, which their atmosphere holds in solution; smells natural enough indeed, and coloured by circumstances as are those of the neighbouring countryside, but already humanised, domesticated, confined, an exquisite, skilful, limpid jelly, blending all the fruits of the season which have left the orchard for the store-room, smells changing with the year, but plenishing, domestic smells, which compensate for the sharpness of hoar frost with the sweet savour of warm bread, smells lazy and punctual as a village clock, roving smells, pious smells; rejoicing in a peace which brings only an increase of anxiety, and in a prosiness which serves as a deep source of poetry to the stranger who passes through their midst without having lived amongst them. The air of those rooms was saturated with the fine bouquet of a silence so nourishing, so succulent that I could not enter them without a sort of greedy enjoyment, particularly on those first mornings, chilly still, of the Easter holidays, when I could taste it more fully, because I had just arrived then at Combray: before I went in to wish my aunt good day I would be kept waiting a little time in the outer room, where the sun, a wintry sun still, had crept in to warm itself before the fire, lighted already between its two brick sides and plastering all the room and everything in it with a smell of soot, making the room like one of those great open hearths which one finds in the country, or one of the canopied mantelpieces in old castles under which one sits hoping that in the world outside it is raining or snowing, hoping almost for a catastrophic deluge to add the romance of shelter and security to the comfort of a snug retreat; I would turn to and fro between the prayer-desk and the stamped velvet armchairs, each one always draped in its crocheted antimacassar, while the fire, baking like a pie the appetising smells with which the air of the room, was thickly clotted, which the dewy and sunny freshness of the morning had already 'raised' and started to 'set,' puffed them and glazed them and fluted them and swelled them into an invisible though not impalpable country cake, an immense puff-pastry, in which, barely waiting to savour the crustier, more delicate, more respectable, but also drier smells of the cupboard, the chest-of-drawers, and the patterned wall-paper I always returned with an unconfessed gluttony to bury myself in the nondescript, resinous, dull, indigestible, and fruity smell of the flowered quilt.

This wasn’t the house of her childhood dreams. The naïve young man with his curly-brimmed hat, his flowered waistcoat, and his pink-cheeked wife with her baby and her quilted petticoat, had no place here. This wasn’t a stylish project fit for a design magazine or a perfect retreat from a stressful world. Instead it was a place of compromises. The elegant kitchen that she loved was a secondhand windfall. The dresser by the hearth still belonged more to Maggie, or even to Fury, than to herself. In fact, none of the furniture or possessions that surrounded her were symbols of hard-won independence. They were the story of her reintegration into a community that, for years, she had failed to value and that now might be her salvation.

Tomorrow night we must leave this region. The vampire is dead, but he has left behind a trail that could destroy our people. We must move to a more isolated area, where perhaps our people can survive the coming persecution.” He brought up her arm to examine the long, deep scratches left by Andre. “You’re so certain it is coming?” A faint, bitter smile touched his mouth as he waved to snuff out the candles. “I have too often in my lifetime seen the signs. They will come--the assassins. Humans and Carpathians alike will suffer. We will retreat for a quarter of a century, perhaps a half century, to give ourselves time to regroup.” His tongue found the angry marks on her arm and bathed them gently with his healing touch. It was comforting and felt right to her. Her lashes drifted, down, their combined scents lingering in the bedchamber, a soothing fragrance. “I love you, Mikhail, all of you, even the beast in you. I don’t know why I became so confused. You aren’t evil. I can see so clearly inside of you.” Sleep, little one, in my arms where you belong. Mikhail drew up the quilt, wrapped protective arms around her, and sent them both to sleep.