Following advice from La Larissa, as one must and does, I have begun Brideshead Revisited, and I feel like I have discovered a new color or a new kind of light. What an astonishingly perfect novel it is. I want to quote at length from it. Charles has just left Brideshead in disgrace, and is determined that in leaving it behind he will also leave behind illusion. "Henceforth I live in a world of three dimensions--with the aid of my five sense." But in Paris he gives a dinner for Rex, and the tragedy of the schism between mind and body, and the impossibility of leaving behind illusion, is drawn.

He plainly wished to talk of his own affairs; they could wait, I thought, for the hour of tolerance and repletion, for the cognac; they could wait until the attention was blunted and one could listen with half the mind only; now in the keen moment when the maître d'hôtel was turning the blinis over in the pan, and, in the background, two humbler men were preparing the press, we would talk of myself.

And the meal itself goes back and forth between news of the family Charles loves, told by the efficient--the very efficient--Rex, and the food before him:

"I'll tell you a thing, Charles, that Ma Marchmain hasn't let on to anyone. She's a very sick woman. Might peg out any minute. George Anstruther saw her in the autumn and put it at two years."

"How on earth do you know?"

"It's the kind of thing I hear. With the way her family are going on at the moment, I wouldn't give her a year. I know just the man for her in Vienna. He put Sonia Bamfshire on her feet when everyone including Anstruther has despaired of her. But Ma Marchmain won't do anything about it. I suppose it's something to do with her crack-brain religion, not to take care of the body."

The sole was so simple and unobtrusive that Rex failed to notice it. We ate to the music of the press -- the crunch of bones, the drip of blood and marrow, the tap of the spoon basting the thin slices of breast. There was a pause here of a quarter of an hour, while I drank the first glass of the Clos de Bère and Rex smoked his first cigarette. He leaned back, blew a cloud of smoke across the table, and remarked, "You know, the food here isn't half bad; someone ought to take this place up and make something of it."

I loved that, after remarking that not taking care of the body had something to do with Lady Marchmain's Catholicism, Rex "failed to notice" the simple and unobtrusive sole. Rex has a talent for reverse alchemy: he can turn anything into dross. Charles, who has saved the best wine (here, cognac) for last, sees this miracle despised. And after the feast, we learn that the wedding of Rex and Julia, an event which this same miracle became the first sign and which was thereby hallowed even further, was no celebration, although we do not learn the details.

I have not finished; if anyone tells me anything about the rest of the book I will find them and cause them unimaginable distress. Brideshead Revisited is one of those books, like The Wind in the Willows, or The Reivers, that one wishes one could read again for the first time. Thus: Unimaginable. Distress.