Changing partners

Reading Powell's Dance (yes, I am getting dangerously close to blogging it) I found a wonderful sentence. Nick is visiting Peter Templer and another guest named Lady McReith sweeps him up to demonstrate some dance moves (the first mention of actual dancing in the book). Here is how he describes it:

Up to that moment I had found her almost embarrassingly difficult to deal with as a fellow guest: now the extraordinary smoothness with which she glided across the polished boards, the sensation that we were holding each other close, and yet, in spite of such proximity, she remained aloof and separate, the pervading scent with which she drenched herself, and, above all, the feeling that this offered something further, some additional and violent assertion of the will, was—almost literally—intoxicating.

I think there are three, maybe four, interesting points here.

1. I love the expression "almost literally". Technically, "literally" has a toggle meaning. It either is or is not literal. The expression "almost literally" shouldn't have any meaning but it does. I know what it means even though I couldn't define it.
2. This passage goes to the very centre of Powell's purpose in writing the novel. It is as clear and concrete an example as he might give of someone who was not a partner of Nick's in any meaningful way up until now can become a partner with a shift of context. 
3. Note the Nietzschean language here: "some additional and violent assertion of the will". It's important to see, as we read Powell, just how incredibly important Nietzsche is to him.
4. A half point: notice the lovely, long, periodic sentences that Powell writes. This is an art that has almost been lost. People sometimes praise a writer like Cormac McCarthy for his long sentences but those sentences are "in fact, clumsy run-on sentences or massive lists.  Powell writes beautiful, graceful sentences that feel easy and natural (this stuff reads aloud beautifully) but are actually the result of very impressive art on his part.