George Santayana's The Last Puritan has the sort of piquant observations that I just never see in today's novelists (not that I'm an expert on today's novelists). Here are a few selections from just the first few pages:
It was a mystery to the town how Mr. Nathaniel Alden spent his time when it was not Sunday morning. Novels he had been heard to condemn as lacerating to the feelings, and he could never bring himself to go to a theatre, even to one disguised under the decent name of the Boston Museum: that is, he declared, would be to expose the most sacred part of one's being to artificial emotion.____
The music was classical and soothing, the service High Church Unitarian, with nothing in it either to discourage a believer or to annoy an unbeliever.____
To think the death of a sufferer a blessing might be comforting after the event, but was shocking before.____
Talk, Mr. Alden had discovered, was chiefly gossip, and gossip encouraged a morbid interest in matters that didn't concern one. Funerals he found the most satisfactory of social occasions, because there you expressed your human attachments without unnecessary chatter...Fortunately on Sundays the sanctity of the place seemed to extend throughout the sunken area within the railings, and under the squat granite columns; if acquaintances met there they would decently ignore each other, or at most pass with a mute bow. The blessed silence of the Sabbath saved one, at least there, from the plague of social jabbering.____
Unless all his fortune was to be dissipated, tenants must occasionally be evicted and mortgages foreclosed. How horrible that in fulfilling as he must the evident duties of his station, he should never be at ease in his conscience! A scar of horror, if not of guilt, lay consciously on his breast, like the scarlet letter.____
He felt a canine interest to run down the side alleys, and explore the unsavoury recesses hidden there behind corners. This was hardly a moment when he could indulge so irrational a craving. Yet dogs loved those smells probably very much as respectable people loved hob-nobbing and criticising.____
He didn't go out for exercise. The need of exercise, he said, was a modern superstition, invented by people who ate too much, and had nothing to think about.
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