A Whistling Woman (urspr publ 2002; utgåvan 2004)

". . . he must have felt that he had lost the old warm world, paid a highprice for living too long with a single dream. He must have looked up at anunfamiliar sky through frightening leaves and shivered as he found what a grotesque thing a rose is and how raw the sunlight was upon the scarcely created grass. A new world, material without being real, where poor ghosts,breathing dreams like air, drifted fortuitously about . . . like that ashen, fantastic figure gliding toward him through the amorphous trees."
Frederica admired this passage [from The Great Gatsby], and had made tidy notes on it, as the culmination of her lecture. Note, she had said, the implications for American literature, of the phrase about the 'new world', 'material without being real'. Note, she had written, that Gatsby has created his whole world out of his Platonic idea of himself; his romantic dream, and it is disintegrating.
But as she read it out, she caught the full force of the achieved simplicity of every word in that perfectly created paragraph about destruction, that perfectly, easily coherent paragraph about disintegration. She felt something she had always supposed was mythical, the fine hairs on the back of her neck rising and pricking in a primitive response to a civilised perfection, body recognising mind.
She stopped in mid-sentence, and began again, urgently. Look, she told them, I've just really seen how good this paragraph is. Think about the adjectives, how simple they look, how right every single one is, out of all the adjectives that could have been chosen. Look at 'unfamiliar' and think about a man who had made up his own heaven and earth, who was his own family. Look at 'frightening leaves' which are flatly bald and menacing, but lightly so. 'What a grotesque thing a rose is.' The idea of intricate natural perfection undone in one atmospheric and one psychological adjective which is also an ancient aesthetic adjective.
And then, 'raw' describing sunlight where did he find that? Raw is cold, not heated, raw is bare and open, raw is unripe and with 'scarcely created' it suggests a virgin world either at the shivering beginning or the end of time, when it doesn't hold together. And from these sensuous adjectives grotesque, raw we move to mental ones new, material, not real and the solid creation disintegrates into phantasmagoria, fimtasms, ghosts, dreams like air, not even really air, and then finally, the wonderful rendering of shapelessness, the 'amorphous' trees.
And if you use the negative Greek word, amorphous, you carry with it all the positive Greek words for shape, and form, metamorphosis, morphology, Morpheus the God of Sleep. What Fitzgerald has done, quickly, briefly, and clearly, is to undo what art and literature have done over and over again, the image of the human mind at home in the beauty of the created garden, with the forms of trees and the colour of the sky and the grass, and the intricate natural beauty of the rose.
Frederica stared almost wildly at the class, which stared back at her, and then smiled, a common smile of pleasure and understanding. For the rest of her life, she came back and back to this moment, the change in the air, the pricking of the hairs, of *really reading* every word of something she had believed she 'knew'. And at that moment, she knew what she should do was teach, for what she understood - the thing she was both by accident and by inheritance constructed to understand - was the setting of words in order, to make worlds, to make ideas.

The play [The Winter's Tale] swept on, and broke into the irritating little runnels of scenes in which the greatest of playwrights evaded the recognitions, reparations, climax, everyone had a right to expect, and fobbed off his audience with oratio obliqua, reported speech, when the father met the lovely living daughter who replaced both his dead son, and her exposed infant self, for whom he had mourned for sixteen unstaged years. What a mess, Frederica thought. "I can see why he did it, and we find ways to excuse it, because it is what HE did, but WHAT A MESS --"

When his pencil broke, Hodgkiss gave him his own pen, and watched him adjust his grip, test the slant of the nib and the flow of the ink. It was a stubby, mottled pen, black and midnight-blue. It produced, in Marcus's grip, a string of spider-webs, of ghosts of branches, of shapes like the graduated spines on the fish skeletons.

It was a good poem. It was an uncompromising description of elemental solids - snow, water, ice, iron, stone, with the adjective at work, bleak. And, Frederica thought, the wind moaned, which is a human sound, and there was the woman with the boy child. The earth moaning. And then, infinity.
.... Lovely, lovely, economical words, Frederica thought, fast, fast. Sustain is perfect. The earth can't either hold him up, or keep Him alive. ... Frederica, exalted by Rossetti's hard absolute words ...

In his garden he found a whole clump of Honesty. Perennial honesty, Lunaria rediviva, was fragrant; this was the biennial, L. biennis, a garden fugitive. The membrane inside the seed-case, polished and exposed, was like transparent oculi of parchment, or abalone shell. He spent some time rubbing off the seeds, and creating wands of fragile, translucent windows. The French called them monnaie des papes.