The God in Flight

Book excerpt: In 1878, young Satterwhite arrives at Yale University to discover what life holds for fellows with sharp aesthetic senses. He has never imagined anyone like Professor Doriskos Klionarios, who teaches art and poetry. The two are so dissimilar: a provincial youth and a cultured man of thirty, a foreigner who will never be a fine Englishman. But the tumultuous love affair scorned by their society is a gilded construct between one who believes that he is ready to know real love and a willing partner who understands that what the heart sees, it cannot forget; better to acquiesce to desire. Desire leads to danger, and danger to flight¿from the rabid moralists of the college, the law, a peer¿s obsessive jealousy. Their flight takes them to England in the rising glory of its Decadence, the artistic arena where Wilde was trying his luck.