Episodes of Sublime Transubstantiation by Means of Prose

It is possible to safely and faithfully say that over the last thirty years I have recited to myself, three hundred times, often aloud, a passage from the vastly under-appreciated novel of Edmund Wilson
I THOUGHT OF DAISY:
The thin strains of linkéd sweetness, with now and then a note frailly sour of the harp and the violin – some old musical-comedy tune I remembered from my college days - seemed to me even in this false and elfin echo to keep more that was human and charming than the pace of the newer dance music had ever allowed it to possess; and as I glanced at Daisy, gazing out like a charming good-natured child, at the sights of the passing shore, I was touched with sentimental revery.
Call it sleep, call it praying; a peace mantra.
From Robert Craft's AN IMPROBABLE LIFE:
What I learned in the hospital is that the time between heartbeats varies in healthy hearts, but not in diseased ones on the verge of failure. Thus a perfectly steady heartbeat is more likely to be found in elderly, rigid bodies than in flexible young ones. The corollary of this is that fractal patterns of considerable complexity are linked to healthy heart functioning, and that when the complexity disappears, sudden death may follow.

Patrick Leigh Fermor

Absinthe-equivalent 'sublime prose' is always so for the person partaking. If everyone spoke well, there would be eternal prosperity. But instead of ‘tell it slant’ and such beautiful expressions, we had ‘bombs away!’ and such nattering. Patrick Leigh Fermor was poised at the most elegant moment of travel writing. Disaffected at school, Fermor walked and pondered deeply from the Hook of Holland to Constantinople in 1933-1934. The Time of Gifts. Between the Woods and the Water.

Intramural romances spring up and prosper in places of learning, but some exotic psychological fluke directed my glance beyond the walls and, once more, out of bounds. It was a time when one falls in love hard and often, and my aesthetic notions, entirely formed by Andrew Lang’s Coloured Fairy Books, had settled years before on the long-necked, wide-eyed pre-Raphaelite girls in Henry Ford’s illustrations, interchangeable king’s daughters, ice-maidens, goose-girls and water spirits, and my latest wanderings had led me, at the end of a green and sweet-smelling cave set dimly with flowers and multicoloured fruit and vegetation – a greengrocer’s shop, that is, which she tended for her father – to the vision of just such a being. The effect was instantaneous. She was twenty-four, a ravishing and sonnet-begetting beauty and I can see her now and still hear that melting and deep Kent accent.