Constitutional
Well, I give up. How tall is the Carlyle Hotel? How many floors? You'd think that the usually informative Web site NYC-Architecture would answer my questions, but it doesn't. No matter. I'm not planning to write about the Carlyle. I was just looking at my luncheon companion's site and noting that we took several of the same photographs. I then remembered cropping my shot of the gleaming Carlyle tower - it gleamed a good deal more fiercely in person - and, completely out of ideas for something to say today, thought that I might conjure something out of thin air and the inspiration of this picture. Which I tried to adjust for perfect perpendicularity. I gave up on that, too.
I'm reminded of my favorite metaphor in The Leopard. I'll give it first in Italian and then in Archibald Colquhoun's English.
La pioggia era venuta, la pioggia era andata via; ed il sole era risalito sul trono come un re assoluto che, allontanato per una settimana dalle barricate dei sudditi, ritorna a regnare iracondo ma raffrenato da carte costituzionali.
The rains had come, the rains had gone, and the sun was back on its throne like an absolute monarch kept off it for a week by his subjects' barricades, and now reigning once again, choleric but under constitutional restraint.
I daresay that a translator today would substitute "irascible" or "testy" for "choleric."
