But the approach was different—a leather-lunged engine pushed the passengers round and round in a corkscrew, mounting, rising; they chugged through low-level clouds and for a moment Dick lost Nicole’s face in the spray of the slanting donkey-engine    
(Tender is the Night, Book II, chapter xii)

Dorothy Perkins roses dragged patiently through each compartment slowly waggling with the motion of the funicular, letting go at the last to swing back to their rosy cluster. Again and again these branches went through the car. 
 (Tender is the Night, Book II, chapter viii)

by Nichola Deane

by Nichola Deane

Rilke, an admirer of Vilhelm Hammershǿi, made a visit to Copenhagen to meet the Danish artist in the autumn of 1904. Rilke wished to write an essay on Hammershǿi, a task rendered difficult by the artist’s inability to hold a conversation. Although Rilke records the visit, briefly, in letters, the essay was never completed.

I see him now before me, in the polished wooden chair, his hands on the armrest, the wood reflecting light. Every single surface in the Strandgade apartment sings back this whiteness. Light descends on him and then it stays. His wife, Ida, pours coffee for us and I look at their faces, both wearing a near-identical softness of expression. The emptiness of this Spartan room wells and brims inside their broken-focus gaze.

 Two hundred years ago there were Romantic poets whose lives might have been saved if they had met Nichola Deane. Unfortunately for them, she was not scheduled to be born until 1973, so they died without the consolation of having met their ideal reader. Fatally misunderstood, they wasted away in ratty Roman rented rooms, croaked from fever in the wrong war of liberation, drowned in boating accidents and were cremated on the beach. With two MA degrees to prove that Romantic literature was a subject specifically fitted for her scope of comprehension, the prodigy was well qualified to spend a lifetime at university.