Arrogance and romance Cynosura is a feverish love story between a non-ordinary Tennessee farm girl of supernal physical beauty and an estranged youth possessed of exceptional intellectual ambition. The girl, a gifted and hard-working cellist, is a natural-born elitist, contemptuous, or anyway indifferent to ordinary people. Her self-selected life's mission is to identify the man to whom she will want to consecrate her life. She is sexual, intelligent, melancholy, efficient, and intuits that her life will be short. The boy, preternaturally brilliant, is not in love with life. He chooses solitude so as not to have to compromise with friends (he hasn't any) or colleagues. Value, he believes, derives solely from the mind and imagination, though he is too young, of course, to have developed a full philosophy. He abhors capitalist practice and strives for self-sufficiency at the price of poverty. Their brief and explosive affair approaches transcendence.