world-space

Updated: May 10, 2025

New York was vast, New York was startling, with strange histories, with wild cosmopolite backward generations that accounted for anything; and to have got nearer the luxuriant tribe of which the rare creature was the final flower, the immense, extravagant, unregulated cluster, with free-living ancestors, handsome dead cousins, lurid uncles, beautiful vanished aunts, persons all busts and curls, preserved, though so exposed, in the marble of famous French chisels all this, to say nothing of the effect of closer growths of the stem, was to have had one's small world-space both crowded and enlarged.

Henry James - The Wings of the Dove, Volume 1 of 2