A golden age = a matter of disregard

Thus, just as his mother begged him [in her letter, which he kept, unread, in his pocket]... Joe had turned his thoughts from Prague, his family, the war.  Every golden age is as much a matter of disregard as of felicity.  It was only when he was settling into the back of a taxicab, or reaching for his wallet, or brushing against a chair, that there came the crinkling of paper; the flutter of a wing; the ghostly foolscap whisper from home; and for a moment he would hang his head in shame.

p. 525, Kavalier and Clay, Michael Chabon, Dec./Jan. 2010-2011

A transient effect of weather

The windows of the old red row house pooled with light, then spilled over.  Lit thus from behind by a brimming window, Josef Kavalier seemed to shine, to incandesce... As he watched Joe stand, blazing, on the fire escape, Sammy felt an ache in his chest that turned out to be, as so often occurs when memory and desire conjoin with a transient effect of weather, the pang of creation.  The desire he felt, watching Joe, was unquestionably physical, but in the sense that Sammy wanted to inhabit the body of his cousin, not possess it.  It was, in part, a longing...to be someone else, to be more than the result of two hundred regimens and scenarios and self-improvement campaigns that always ran afoul of his perennial inability to locate an actual self to be improved.  Joe Kavalier had an air of competence, of faith in his own abilities, that Sammy, by means of constant effort over the whole of his life, had finally learned only how to fake.

p.112-113, Kavalier and Clay, Michael Chabon, Dec./Jan. 2010-2011