I was reading Brideshead Revisited during the slow parts of tutoring yesterday, and I came to a lovely passage about the narrator and Sebastian discovering wine-tasting. It's not a subject I know anything about, except through the movie Sideways. At any rate, the passage described how Sebastian and the narrator would start with three bottles and three glasses each and would compare the three wines; only, as they kept tasting them, they'd get the wines mixed up and eventually would end up with the six glasses all passed between them and being poured into from any which bottle. Meanwhile, their analyses of the wines would grow more and more... well, influenced by the intoxicating effect of the wine. Here, the passage broke into dialogue, the two characters tossing back and forth sillier and sillier metaphors for describing the wine.

Ending with: "Like the last unicorn." I have to wonder, did Peter S. Beagle read Brideshead Revisited and discover that phrase for the first timethem having been inspired by Peter S. Beagle's work. They're just such striking words. It does make me wonder.