Explore "The Magic Skin" by Honoré De Balzac on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
After a moment's silence, Raphael said with a careless gesture:
"Perhaps it is an effect of the fumes of punch -- I really cannot tell -- this clearness of mind that enables me to comprise my whole life in a single picture, where figures and hues, lights, shades, and half-tones are faithfully rendered. I should not have been so surprised at this poetical play of imagination if it were not accompanied with a sort of scorn for my past joys and sorrows. Seen from afar, my life appears to contract by some mental process. That long, slow agony of ten years' duration can be brought to memory to-day in some few phrases, in which pain is resolved into a mere idea, and pleasure becomes a philosophical reflection. Instead of feeling things, I weigh and consider them -- -- "