flame, a thing of dark imaginings

When he returns she is standing at the bookshelves, head on one side, reading titles. He puts on music: the Mozart clarinet quintet.

Wine, music: a ritual that men and women play out with each other. Nothing wrong with rituals, they were invented to ease the awkward passages. But the girl he has brought home is not just thirty years his junior: she is a student, his student, under his tutelage. No matter what passes between them now, they will have to meet again as teacher and pupil. Is he prepared for that?

-- J. M. Coetzee, Disgrace

He stood a stranger in this breathing world,

An erring spirit from another hurled;

A thing of dark imaginings, that shaped

By choice the perils he by chance escaped.

-- Byron