"A certain aesthetic amazement"

It is a joyless, rather vacuous evening, and so I will quote Hollinghurst from memory.

I felt the poetry of the thing tonight, perched above the breakers and the dim phosphorescence of the returning foam. I knew nothing about this country; to me it was a dream-Belgium, it was Allemonde, a kingdom of ruins and vanished pleasures, miracles and martyrdoms, corners where the sun light never shone. Not many would recognise it but some would. I seemed to have lost Luc in it. It was his wildness that had brought me to him and now it had taken him from me away. I studied my situation with a certain aesthetic amazement.

This is late in the novel, when our protagonist, Edward, realizes he has lost Luc, the love of his life. Of course the scene is symbolic, but its symbolism is not subterranean, and does not wait to be unearthed by the prospecting hermeneut. Unlike Jhumpa Lahiri and her ilk, who leave a symbol to semaphore its meaning wildly but "naturally" in each of their stories (for example: Amit's marriage to Megan is Failing; Amit and Megan have to go to a party; Megan's dress is Torn; Megan asks Amit to stand close to her so the Rent Doesn't Show; towards the End of the Party, Amit and Megan begin to talk to Other People, and the Rent is Visible For All to See; therefore, The Rent in the Dress Symbolizes the Rent in their Marriage; but don't draw attention to it, please, keep it low, because it's natural, it could have actually happened, it functions on two levels, the realist and the "literary"), this one is appropriated by the narrator. Its function is not to reinforce a "theme" but to signal that the narrator understands his situation, and is thus more natural than the fake naturalness imposed by Lahiri's Creative Writing gyaan. (Deresiewicz on Lahiri: "The pieces in Interpreter of Maladies are crafted—no, machine-tooled—to within a millimeter of their tiny, calculating lives; their writing-handbook devices—the inciting event, the governing symbol, the wry turn, the final epiphany—arrive one after another, exactly on time, with the subtlety of a pit bull and the spontaneity of a digital clock." )