Life perspectives and evasions

"Mr. da Silva had been born in Brazil. This was hard to notice. He wasn´t exactly the Carnival type. The Latin details of his childhood had been erased by a North American education and a love of the European novel.

(...)

He was a great teacher, Mr. da Silva. He treated us with complete seriousness, as if we eighth graders, during fifth period, might settle something scholars had been arguing about for centuries. He listened to our chirping, his hairline pressing down on his eyes. When he spoke himself, it was in complete paragraphs. If you listened closely it was possible to hear the dashes and commas in his speech, even the colons and semicolons. Mr. da Silva had a relevant quotation for everything that happened to him and in this way evaded real life. Instead of eating his lunch, he told you what Oblonsky and Levin had for lunch in Anna Karenina. or, describing a sunset from Daniel Deronda, he failed to notice the one that was presently falling over Michigan."

From Jeffrey Eugenides's Middlesex