Tell me, when you are alone with him [ Max Beerbohm] Sphinx, does he take off his face and reveal his mask?
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In a letter to Ada Leverson [Sphinx] recorded in her book Letters To The Sphinx From Oscar Wilde and Reminiscences of the Author (1930).Oscar Wilde
He lies on top of her, sweating, taking great breaths, watching her face turned 3/4 away, not even a profile, but the terrible Face That is No Face, gone too abstract, unreachable: the notch of the eye socket, but never the labile eye, only the anonymous curve of cheek, convexity of mouth, a noseless mask of the Other Order of Being, of Katje's being — the lifeless non-face that is the only face of hers he really knows, or will ever remember.
Thomas Pynchon
Jack planned his new face. He made one cheek and one eye socket white, then rubbed red over the other half of his face and slashed a black bar of charcoal across from right ear to left jaw. He looked in the pool for his reflection, but his breathing troubled the mirror.
"Samneric. Get me a coconut. An empty one."
He knelt, holding the shell of water. A round patch of sunlight fell on his face and a brightness appeared in the depths of the water. He looked in astonishment, no longer at himself but at an awesome stranger. He spilt the water and leapt to his feet, laughing excitedly. Beside the pool his sinewy body held up a mask that drew their eyes and appalled them. He began to dance and his laughter became a bloodthirsty snarling. He capered towards Bill, and the mask was a thing on its own, behind which Jack hid, liberated from shame and self-consciousness.William Golding
It's a terrible thing to be alone — yes it is — it is — but don't lower your mask until you have another mask prepared beneath — as terrible as you like — but a mask.
Katherine Mansfield
The problem of Eternity, of which the face of the Sphinx speaks, takes us into the realm of the impossible. Even the problem of Time is simple in comparison with the problem of Eternity.
P. D. Ouspensky
He entered; but the mask he wore
Concealed his face from me.
Still, something I had seen before
He brought to memory.John B. Tabb
Wilde, Oscar
Wildeblood, Peter
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