". . .but what fascinated me would be the asparagus, tinged with ultramarine and rosy pink which ran from their heads, finely stippled in mauve and azure, through a series of imperceptible changes to their white feet, still stained a little by the soil of their garden-bed: a rainbow-loveliness that was not of this world. I felt that these exquisite creatures who had been pleased to assume vegetable form, who, through the disquise which covered their firm and edible flesh, allowed me to discern in this radiance of earliest dawn, these hinted rainbows, these blue evening shades, that precious quality which I should recognise again when, all night long after a dinner at which I had partaken of them, they played (lyrical and coarse in their jesting as the fairies in Shakespeare's Dream) at transforming my humble chamber into a bower of aromatic perfume."
And this little passage is not even two complete sentences! Faulkner would have been proud. Given the sensual description of this phallic vegetable, we can only imagine what he might have written about a cucumber or a zucchini-"firm and edible flesh," indeed! I was halfway into the next sentence/paragraph before the full import of the "aromatic perfume" hit. Others have been brought to the brink of ecstasy by Marcel's description of a madeleine dissolving in his teaspoon; I think this passage shows a much more exquisite sensibility. He could only have been French! |
