Only Style Survives

“My spiritual fidelity is to the school of lapsed fashions”

“The evocative mystery of a name means everything to him, as it did to Proust—a name, like a two-note birdcall from the woods, is the smallest signature of style”

“An aficionado of exile, four times he mentions the troubadours in the first volume”

“Of all the items I have noted in my index, the one with the most entries is tomb. This shouldn’t surprise: everyone dies. Entire languages violently disappear. There’s not a place on earth, he says, that’s tombless”

“Chateaubriand says that the pleasures of youth revisited in memory are ruins seen by torchlight. I don’t know whether I’m the ruin or the torch.”

“The attribution of causation to human behavior is generally a work of fantasy. Birds will speak the last human words, Chateaubriand says. Each one of us is the last witness of something—some custom, habit, way of speaking, economy, some lapsed mode of life. He says only style survives”