Read you then this lyrical
prose, and, if the Titanic master-builder of rhythm who composed
_Bhagavat_ and the _Levrier de Magnus_ speaks not falsely, then, by
Apollo, you may taste, even you, my master, the ambrosial joys of
Olympus." It was in an ostensible vein of sarcasm that he had asked me to
call him, and that he himself called me, "my master." But, as a matter of
fact, we each derived a certain amount of satisfaction from the mannerism,
being still at the age in which one believes that one gives a thing real
existence by giving it a name.
Unfortunately I was not able to set at rest, by further talks with Bloch,
in which I might have insisted upon an explanation, the doubts he had
engendered in me when he told me that fine lines of poetry (from which I,
if you please, expected nothing less than the revelation of truth itself)
were all the finer if they meant absolutely nothing. For, as it happened,
Bloch was not invited to the house again. At first, he had been well
received there. It is true that my grandfather made out that, whenever I
formed a strong attachment to any one of my friends and brought him home
with me, that friend was invariably a Jew; to which he would not have
objected on principle--indeed his own friend Swann was of Jewish
extraction--had he not found that the Jews whom I chose as friends were
not usually of the best type.
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