V.

Under "Florence, April, 1899" is a sentence, young Stencil has memorized it: "There is more behind and inside V. than any of us had suspected. Not who, but what: what is she. God grant that I may never called upon to write the answer, either here or in any official report."

"Trafficking in human vanity," Schoenmaker continued, "propagating the fallacy that beauty is not in the soul, that it can be bought. Yes -" his arm shot out with a heavy silver lighter, a thin flame, his voice barked - "it can be bought, Miss Owlglass, I am selling it. I don't even look on myself as a necessary evil."
"You are unnecessary," she said, through a halo of smoke.

He wanted to say, God, the things we want.

She was saying, «Come home.» The only one he would allow to tell him this except for an internal voice he would rather disown as prodigal than listen to.

Some of us are afraid of dying; others of human loneliness. Profane was afraid of land or seascapes like this, where nothing else lived but himself. It seemed he was always walking into one: turn a corner in the street, open a door to a weather-deck and there he'd be, in alien country.

Rachel was Jewish, he recalled, like his mother. Maybe all she wanted to do was to feed him, be a Jewish mother.

For those who keep an eye on such things, bright little flags had begun to appear toward the end of Eisenhower's first term, fluttering bravely in history's gay turbulence, signaling that a new and unlikely profession was gaining moral ascendancy. Back around the turn of the century, psychoanalysis had usurped from the priesthood the role of father-confessor. Now, it seemed, the analyst in his turn was about to be deposed by, of all people, the dentist.

On the way downtown on the subway he decided that we suffer from great temporal homesickness for the decade we were born in.

Merely train's hardware for any casual onlooker, Waldetar in private life was exactly this mist of philosophy, imagination and continual worry over his several relationships - not only with God, but also with Nita, with their children, with his own history. There's no organized effort about it but here remains a grand joke on all visitors to Baedeker's world: the permanent residents are actually humans in disguise.

Anything that can get drunk, he reasoned, must have some soul. Perhaps this is all "soul" means. Events between soul and soul are not God's direct province: they are under the influence either of Fortune, or of virtue.

He and Rachel, both covered with lettuce leaves, looked at each other, wary. «How romantic,» she said. «For all know you may be the man of my dreams. Take that lettuce leaf off your face so I can see.» Like doffing a cap – remembering his place – he removed the leaf.
«No,» she said, «you're not him.»
«Maybe,» said Profane, «we can try it next time with a fig leaf.»

«What do you want to go and do that for?»
«Man, I want to die, is all,» cried Ploy.
«Don't you know,» said Dahoud, «that life is the most precious possession you have?»
«Ho, ho,» said Ploy through his tears. «Why?»
«Because,» said Dahoud, «without it, you'd be dead.»
«Oh,» said Ploy. He thought about this for a week. He calmed down, started to go on liberty again.

chapter one

In which Benny Profane, a schlemihl and human yo-yo, gets to an apocheir