Michael’s Reviews > All That Is > Status Update

‘I’m having a lot of trouble,’ she said. ‘I can’t seem to do things, I don’t know why. When you die,’ she said, ‘what do you think happens to you?’
‘You’re not going to die.’
‘I know, but what do you think happens?’
‘Something glorious.’
‘Oh, Philip. Only you would say something like that. Do you know what I think?’
‘What?’
‘I think that whatever you believe will happen’

“You lived, said Lorca, by dying and being remembered. Meija’s death, in 1934, was like an apprenticeship for his own, prefigured but not yet known. The fierce storm that would tear the country apart was already gathering. The boy with the white sheet was coming, the bucket of quicklime was ready, and the smoothed-over dirt of the bull ring was already in shadows.”

“He loved her for not only what she was but what she might be, the idea that she might be otherwise did not occur to him or did not matter. Why would it occur? When you love you see a future according to your dreams.”

“Malcolm believes in Malraux and Max Weber: art is the real history of nations. In the details of his person there is evidence of a process not fully complete. It is the making of a man into a true instrument. He is preparing for the arrival of the great artist he one day expects to be, an artist in the truly modern sense which is to say without accomplishments but with the conviction of genius.”