“It’s delicate, it’s original, and yet it is commendable according to everybody’s rules, that’s the genius of it, to change, but not so much, to be inimitable, yet not beyond the common grasp, and that’s what he’s done, Father, I tell you.”
I was unstoppable.
“This is what I think about that man,” I said. “The carnality in him, the passion for women, the near beastly refusal to keep his vows is at war always with the priest, for look, he wears his robes, he is Fra Filippo. And out of that war, there comes into the faces he paints a look of utter surrender.”
My father listened.
“That’s it,” I said. “Those characters reflect his own continued compromise with the forces he cannot reconcile, and they are sad, and wise, and never innocent, and always soft, reflective of mute torment.”
/Anne Rice