It has made me better loving you

"It has made me better loving you...it has made me wiser, and easier, and brighter. I used to want a great many things before, and to be angry that I did not have them. Theoretically, I was satisfied. I flattered myself that I had limited my wants. But I was subject to irritation; I used to have morbid sterile hateful fits of hunger, of desire. 

Now I really am satisfied, because I can’t think of anything better. It’s just as when one has been trying to spell out a book in the twilight, and suddenly the lamp comes in. I had been putting out my eyes over the book of life, and finding nothing to reward me for my pains; but now that I can read it properly I see that it’s a delightful story"

Henry James - Portrait of a Lady 

James was not an actor of life, not an actor within life, I mean, he did not truly live. His life was socially exhausting, true, even if it only developed in the surfaces. The "intangibility of his life", as one critic once defined it.  But he was a splendid spectator of life, the most subtle of its commentators. Usually, James encapsulates his deepest knowledge of existence (a knowledge he acquired through observation, that is) with a very personal somewhat languid language, highly intellectual. Most times this makes his brilliance: his powers of penetration expressed in a beautiful literary way. A few times it could be irritating (what does this mean exactly, really it cannot be expressed in a simpler way?). 

And quite a few times more, he is simply crystal-clear, his intelligence being most transparent. His psychological skill exploding before the reader without exigence. As if the world unexpectedly, all of a sudden freely revealed its well-kept mysteries.