Commonplace Book

'...A surprise, a misunderstanding, confused impressions, had smashed open the secret hiding places where everything furtive, forbidden, overheated, uncertain and lonely in Torless's soul had accumulated, and channelled those dark impulses towards Basini. Because there, all of a sudden, they encountered something which was warm, which breathed, which was fragrant, which was flesh, something that gave those indistinct and wandering dreams a form and part of its own beauty, in place of the corrosive ugliness with which Bozena had tortured them in his loneliness. All at once a door to life was opened up for them, and everything mingled in the resulting half-light, desires and reality, orgiastic fantasies and impressions that still bore the warm traces of life, sensations that broke in from without and flames that flickered towards them from within, shrouding them beyond recognition.'

from The Confusions of Young Torless by Robert Musil