I recently began my first “re-read” of the Vampire Chronicles in a significant amount of time via audiobook. I hope to write about it more in the future, as it was an integral part of my adolescence, but for now I’m just enjoying reveling in the magnificence of passages like this:
Remarkable, if for nothing else, because of this, that all of those men and women who stayed for any reason left behind them some monument, some structure of marble and brick and stone that still stands; so that even when the gas lamps went out and the planes came in and the office buildings crowded the blocks of Canal Street, something irreducible of beauty and romance remained; not in every street perhaps, but in so many that the landscape is for me the landscape of those times always, and walking now in the starlit streets of the Quarter or the Garden District I am in those times again. I suppose that is the nature of the monument. Be it a small house or a mansion of Corinthian columns and wrought-iron lace. The monument does not say that this or that man walked here. No, that what he felt in one time in one spot continues. The moon that rose over New Orleans then still rises. As long as the monuments stand, it still rises. The feeling, at least here … and there … it remains the same.
Interview With the Vampire, Page 52
I’ve missed reading things like this (as I made a habit of re-reading Anne’s books regularly in the past), but it’s interesting to rediscover them now, with 20+ years of extra life behind me. She always had a way of making the mundane sound magical, and I’ll miss her voice.
Keep It To Your Shelf 