—

On Clouds

Akira Kurosawa’s Ran (1985) begins with a meeting in the undulating green mountains of Japan, rendered in lush Technicolor. I’ve been thinking a lot about the Brontës recently, the way that Charlotte and Emily use weather to convey emotional weather: “bracing” ventilation for harrowing intensity, trees split by lightning for sundered relationships. Kurosawa reveals himself as a poet of clouds; in the first shot, they mass up behind four men on horseback in white, fluffy piles, pure as a summer day. Several times throughout this opening, Kurosawa cuts to the clouds, alone against the cerulean sky, in heaped, smokelike mounds, rising, unfurling, unrolling in thick scrolls that seem to spell out something more ominous than their snowy softness belies. Later, as the tragedy of the story confirms this foreshadowing, the skies become grey and dark, clouds take on the bloodied tinctures of sunset, layer into one sightless, sooty smog, are replaced by the smoke from burning buildings.

I’ve always thought it would be lovely to live on a cloud. How disappointed I was as a child when I learned that a cloud was not a solid thing, that if you tried to use one as a bed (surely the coziest bed in the world!), you’d fall straight through! Sometimes when I look up into the sky, I still long to be in that inaccessible cloudland, cloud-leaping to a misty castle half-hidden among the plumes. In Kalidasa’s 5th-century Sanskrit poem Meghaduta, a yaksa, or nature spirit, exiled for allowing an elephant to trample his master’s garden, convinces a passing cloud to send a message to his wife, who is far away in the Himalayas. He persuades the cloud by describing all the beautiful sights it will see along the way: villages and cities and rivers and plains, “mango groves that glisten with ripe fruit.” The cloud is the ultimate wanderer, the lone pilgrim, the paragon of travelers. It measures the distance between here and there, near and far; high above us but still visible, able to rise and descend, it has a godlike perspective on our human happenings and yet is still humble enough to relate to us.

Less positive associations color Aristophanes’ The Clouds, a satire of Socrates’ philosophy. The debtor Strepsiades enrolls in Socrates’ school, “the Thinkery.” Socrates summons a Chorus of Clouds to show Strepsiades that gods like Zeus don’t exist, and Strepsiades, mistaking the Clouds for new gods, begins to worship them instead. These clouds stand in for intellectual and moral obscurity, philosophical fog, academic vapor, the bloat of sophistic billowing, a source of rhetorical thunder and flashy lightning strikes of wit. They are “the patron goddesses of the layabout.”

Personally, I take offense to the term “layabout”—I prefer “free spirit,” “reverist,” “daydreamer.” There are times when the sun dazzles and we need something to soften its bright blaze. Cloudy mornings are the mornings that make me feel like I have permission to stay under the sheets and sleep in. There is no need to hurry, no need to do, no need to strive. One can relax and float and dream in the cloudlike atmosphere of the bed, letting half-formed thoughts pass lazily across the mind’s blue skies, shapeshifting, metamorphosing, unforming, transforming, and reforming, drifting and melting into thin ether, rarefied gossamer, diaphanous subtleties.

Clouds have always caught the eye of those professional dreamers, the poets. They defy description and yet demand it. “The clouds—if I could describe them I would,” Virginia Woolf wrote in her diary in August 1928, then made the attempt anyway: “one yesterday had flowing hair on it, like the very fine white hair of an old man.” I always remember Keats’s clouds in “To Autumn”: “While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day / And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue.” His fellow Romantics were equally taken—who does not associate the image of one white perfect cloud-puff drifting in a springtime robin’s-egg sky with Wordsworth’s “I wandered lonely as a cloud”? And Shelley penned a whole poem in the voice of a cloud:

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I am the daughter of Earth and Water,
And the nursling of the Sky;
I pass through the pores of the ocean and shores;
I change, but I cannot die.

Emotions echo clouds and clouds take on emotions in Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus, when Titus says to the raped Lavinia, “Or with our sighs we’ll breathe the welkin dim, / And stain the sun with fog, as sometimes clouds / When they do hug him in their melting bosoms.” Even science becomes poetic when it comes to clouds, the names of their classification always having for me a kind of mystical resonance: cumulus, stratus, nimbus, combining and commingling and compiling, like clouds themselves, into stratocumulus, cumulonimbus, cirrostratus. It was Luke Howard, a young meteorologist, who at the beginning of the 19th century devised this classification, inspiring not just one poem from the much older Goethe but a whole sheaf, in which “The spirit mounts above, and lives forever.”

Angel’s wings, bridal veils, swans’ feathers, moon’s haloes, nature’s curtains, hazy lace. The mutability of clouds must have been one of our chief forms of entertainment in the days before books and phones. Clouds were our original cinema, dashing ever-changing pictures upon the heavens’ silver screen. Our tragedies and our comedies find their natural actors in the clouds, performing their great dramas across the stage of the sky. Is there any happiness so pure it does not find its correlative in a floating cumulus, any lightness of heart that is not matched by those airy striations of cirrus, any wretchedness that cannot be echoed by the grim grey march of darkening thunderclouds?

If our souls have any kind of material form, it must be the form of clouds. In my more irreligious moments—that is, in my moments when I revert to the kind of wild paganism I had as a child—I think we become clouds when we die. I like to think of my father as one such cloud, gazing benevolently down on me, a little nearer, perhaps, to God.

Further exploration:

• The color of the year, according to Pantone, just so happens to be “Cloud Dancer,” which Vogue explores through runway looks

• Gustav Holst was inspired by the Meghaduta to compose The Cloud Messenger, which had its first performance in 1910

• Speaking of the Meghaduta, I remember really loving how presents a verse from it in her newsletter (now behind a paywall, but I think you can claim a free post). Richard Hartz’s translation is here with a Sanskrit transliteration.

• On Substack, you can read more about Aristophanes’ The Clouds at Classical Wisdom

• This lovely little cloud comic by brought me a lot of joy

• I really love clouds in the paintings of John Constable, J. M. W. Turner, Thomas Cole, and Frederic Edwin Church, to name a few:

Mood Board of the Week

1. Comme des Garçons Spring 2025 Ready-to-Wear: Designer Rei Kawakubo titled Comme des Garçons’ Spring 2025 collection “Uncertain Future,” which might explain why all the eccentric silhouettes in this show wrap, swaddle, pad, cushion, and encloud the fragile human bodies beneath, erecting a barrier between wearer and viewer. The last three looks of the show turn their models into walking clouds and suggest that the uncertainty of the future is environmental in nature: look closely, and some of the puffs of fabric look like globs of plastic. In our uncertain future, will we be repurposing the little, very much not ephemeral clouds that are plastic bags into everyday garb?

2. Gaganendranath Tagore, Resurrection (1920): A nephew of Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore, Gaganendranath Tagore, along with his brother Abanindranath, founded the Indian Society of Oriental Art. He incorporated techniques from Japanese painting and influences from Cubism into his work, both of which can be seen here—the former in the lightness and delicacy of the brushwork, the latter in the geometric shaping of the cloud-forms. Out of these clouds, accompanied by a burst of rays, a sort of door or window emerges: a portal to another world.

3. Benjamin Løzninger, C/Loud Project (ca. 2015): Why not bring the heavens down to earth? That’s exactly what Benjamin Løzninger does in this street art project, plastering buildings and walls with large-scale prints of clouds and cerulean sky. Forget all those boring people who tell you to be practical and realistic. Sometimes it’s good to have your head in the clouds.

4. Berndnaut Smilde, Nimbus Green Room (2013): Dutch artist Berndnaut Smilde’s Nimbus series brings the atmosphere indoors, crafting clouds in art galleries, industrial warehouses, and other unlikely locations. These puffballs of smoke and water linger for a few seconds—long enough to be photographed—then dissipate, dissolve, etherealize into nothing. Depending on its environment, such a cloud, Smilde says, could be “an element escaped from a landscape painting, a thought, a heavenly place, a concealing element, or simply an in-between state.”

5. Caitlin r.c. Brown & Wayne Garrett, CLOUD (2012): I love it when art engages in a kind of trompe le doigt, if you will—hard materials made to look soft, like Bernini turning cold, hard marble into warm, malleable flesh. CLOUD may look soft and lamblike at a distance, but it’s actually glass and filament, an accumulation of 6,000 incandescent light bulbs. The “rain” that streams from the cloud is deceptive, too: it’s actually a curtain of chains viewers can stand beneath and pull, turning lightbulbs on and off. As incandescent lightbulbs are phased out in exchange for LED bulbs, the Protean nature of the cloud takes on the resonance of shifting technologies.

6. Miu Miu Cloud sunglasses: Sunglasses trends seem, cloudlike, to change often, and strangely, shapeshifting as the weathervane of fashion spins now this way, now that. Heart-shaped, round, large, narrow and skinny, square, barely there. Miu Miu, in 2019, came out with cloud-shaped sunglasses, in blue and pink tints, suggestive of “the female gaze” and “daydreaming.” The short promo film, “Head in the Clouds,” tells a tale of two lookalike girls. One loses her sunglasses; the other puts them on and sees the world through new eyes.

7. René Magritte, The False Mirror (1929): In true Surrealist style, Magritte’s enormous painting of an eye replaces the iris with a cloudscape: soft white fluff scudding across pure blue, interrupted only by the void of a flat black pupil. The realistic anatomy of this lashless eye serves to unsettle us further, while the flatness of the cloudscape suggests that we are not looking at a reflection in the eye—what the eye is seeing—but rather looking through the eye, its mirror transformed into window. Looking out at the viewer, this eye with its heavenly expanse suggests the All-Seeing Eye of God; indeed, fellow Surrealist Man Ray, who owned the painting from 1933 to 1936, felt the eye “sees as much as it itself is seen.” When we look into the eyes of another, we should be wary of making it a “false mirror” of our own selves. Instead, we need to look through, seeking to see the other’s inner landscape. For the eye is the window to the soul, and who knows but that the soul is a mass of ever-shifting cloud?

8. Jean-Honoré Fragonard, The Storm (ca. 1759): Fragonard’s The Storm embraces the dark side of the cloud, depicting an overcast sky that hangs ominously above a wagon stuck in the mud. Men try to push the wagon, sheep huddle, and a fabric covering whips in the wind, echoing the shape of the dark clouds around it.

9. Alfred Stieglitz, Equivalent (1930): In the 1920s and early 1930s, photographer Alfred Stieglitz focused his camera—and 40 years of photography knowledge—on clouds, producing a sequence of experiments he first called Music, then Equivalents. “Through clouds,” said Stieglitz, “[I wanted] to put down my philosophy of life—to show that my photographs were not due to subject matter—not to special trees, or faces, or interiors, to special privileges, clouds were there for everyone—no tax as yet on them—free.” Over the years, the photographs freed themselves of the grounding of mountains or trees or other earthbound objects, as though Stieglitz was attempting to pioneer a sort of abstract photography, images that, like music, served as equivalents to pure emotional states, echoing Romantic tradition. Stieglitz’s wife, painter Georgia O’Keeffe, shared his interest in clouds, producing a series of cloudscapes, Sky Above Clouds, from 1960-77.

3 Things I’m In Love With This Week

1. Bride and Prejudice (2004): For more faithful adaptations of Jane Austen’s perennial favorite, Pride and Prejudice, I doubt anything will come close to the precisely realized joys of the 1995 BBC miniseries (how wonderfully grumpy Colin Firth is! how sharp and lively and smiling-lipped Jennifer Ehle is!) or the cinematic splendor of Joe Wright’s 2004 film (the proposal in the rain! the hand flex!), but my withering review of Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights last week prompted me to think about literary adaptations that take creative liberties with or attempt to modernize their source material and succeed: Clueless, Baz Luhrman’s Romeo + Juliet, even a vlog version of Jane Eyre I enjoyed as a teenager. But a special place in my heart is reserved for Gurinder Chadha’s Bride and Prejudice, an East-meets-West Bollywood take on Austen’s novel. The Bennet family is reimagined in 21st century India as the Bakshi family, who encounter wealthy American Will Darcy at a wedding he attends with his British-Indian friend Balraj (Bingley) and Balraj’s sister Kiran (Caroline). Darcy eventually sheds his snobby, racially-tinged condescension to fall in love with Lalita, played by a radiant Aishwarya Rai.

   Like Fennell’s film, Chadha’s changes the race of several characters. Like Fennell’s film, it’s campy and over-the-top. Like Fennell’s film, it’s not afraid of color. But unlike Fennell’s film, it understands and loves its source material, as well as the on-screen world it’s trying to create. Wedding dances and garbas effectively, cheerfully substitute for Regency balls, and issues of diaspora and post-colonial culture clash meld with the original’s themes of class and wealth. The result is the rare movie that makes me unmixedly, exuberantly, wholly happy.

2. Dubliners by James Joyce: Reading Richard Ellmann’s biography of Joyce, I got the urge to reread Dubliners, which I hadn’t read all the way through since high school, though I’ve often revisited specific stories, especially “The Dead.” Any writer who is interested in writing short stories should read Dubliners, which, amazingly, Joyce wrote mainly in his early 20s. The common thread of the stories, aside from Dublin, is a sense of paralysis: characters are often stuck, mired, indecisive and ineffective. Speaking of clouds, one of the stories is “A Little Cloud,” where the protagonist’s unfulfilled ambitions as a poet and feelings of dissatisfaction are thrown into relief by a visit from an old friend who has since become a successful writer. Joyce’s ability to get inside of his characters, to both expose their flaws and follies and yet make us empathize with them, is masterly. It seems that I’m not the only one who’s been reading Dubliners recently: very accurately describes Joyce’s language as “unobtrusively beautiful,” calls his economy “astonishing,” and I just saw that is starting a Bay Area book club for it.

3. A Time of Gifts by Patrick Leigh Fermor: mentioned this book in response to a Note I’d posted, and as I love walking and any book that appeals to the wanderer, the flâneur, the inveterate stroller within me, I began reading and was not disappointed. In 1933, British travel writer and soldier Patrick Leigh Fermor set off at the age of 18 for Holland, planning to walk across Europe all the way to Constantinople. Many years later, he wove together his diaries and recollections into A Time of Gifts. Travel writing is underrated nowadays. The Best American Travel Writing was slaughtered on the altar of The Best American Food Writing, with editors assuming travel blogs and vlogs could replace real, solid, well-crafted travel writing. They only need to read Fermor’s book to see how wrong they were. The quality of sheer likability that allowed Fermor to get food and shelter on his journey is equally lavished on the reader.

Words of Wisdom

“Rest is not idleness, and to lie sometimes on the grass under the trees on a summer’s day, listening to the murmur of water, or watching the clouds float across the blue sky, is by no means waste of time.”

— John Lubbock, “Recreation” (from The Use of Life, 1894)

Poetry Corner

“Clouds”

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White sheep, white sheep,
On a blue hill,
When the wind stops,
You all stand still.
When the wind blows,
You walk away slow.
White sheep, white sheep,
Where do you go?

—Christina Rossetti

Beauty Tip

Cloudgaze! Use a swath of grassy turf for your pillow, the air for your blanket, and turn the sky into your cinema screen. Better yet if you invite a friend to swap visions and interpretations.

Lingering Question

What stresses in your life right now are just passing clouds?

Dear Readers, I haven’t done a post in this format in such a long time—I hope you enjoyed this one! If you did, please give this post a like and share with a friend, and as always, I’d love to hear your thoughts—on clouds, Dubliners, adaptations of classic books, or anything else—in the comments!

Emily Brontë’s work often expresses a belief in the continuance of souls after death, which is unfortunate because that means her own soul would have had to witness the absurdity that is Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights, released in theaters on Valentine’s Eve. Book purists need not bother enumerating the differences between Brontë’s classic novel and this film, which stylizes its title in quotation marks—that time would be better spent actually reading, or rereading, said novel.

It is not that films should not take creative liberties with their source material or attempt reimagining well-known, much-loved tales. Many films have done it well, and meaningfully. But half the time I was watching “Wuthering Heights,” I felt like laughing, and half the time, I felt disgusted. There was nothing sexy about the squelching egg yolks, the dirty, grassy mouths, poor Isabella barking like a dog.1 “To be a whacher is not a choice. / There is nowhere to get away from it,” I remembered from Anne Carson’s “The Glass Essay” as I tried to look anywhere but the screen. I felt clowned, baited, like an “abject reptile”—and that, too, on my wedding anniversary.2

Anachronism can work, and heavy stylization can work. Muddles, however, are simply muddles. In Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet, Shakespeare’s 14th-century Verona is transposed to 1990s “Verona Beach,” where the Montagues and Capulets are imagined as two rival gangs. But it respects its source material, doesn’t shit all over it. The result is a weird, brilliant, operatic cohesion between its Shakespearean dialogue and its campy setting.

Here, however, grimy, realistic 19th-century visuals clash with red vinyl, Euphoria face gems, 1940s victory rolls, and enough aspic to put me off Jell-O for a lifetime. Margot Robbie is Oktoberfest Barbie, while Jacob Elordi is Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog. Are we in a comedy or a tragedy? Shakespeare himself knew how to blend the best of both, but here the tonal incoherence strikes a clanging discord, exemplified by the opening scene where a hanged man gets an erection while a crowd jeers and engages in sundry bawdry—icky but cartoonish, adding nothing to the story.

Speaking of Elordi, despite being yet another white Heathcliff, he does justice to the role, sincerely delivering the few lines of Brontë’s novel that are kept in when he mourns the dead Cathy. Margot Robbie, however, is entirely too modern, visibly acts, and remains bathetic even when she tries to go for pathos. They seem to be in two different movies, or perhaps Elordi is simply the straight man to Robbie’s funny woman—Heathcliff and Cathy reimagined as a comedic duo for the 21st century.

Some things, yes, I genuinely liked about the film: the cinematography, parts of the soundtrack, the fact that I never felt bored during its 136 minutes. The dollhouse in Thrushcross Grange was genius for bringing to screen a writer whose work frequently features jails, prisons, captives, chains. Yet our sad little pornbrained era can only see these as a code for BDSM, and not even a particularly scintillating BDSM but a BDSM that grotesquely conflates abuse and entrapment with kink and bondage, a BDSM we can only giggle at like virgins or wear as an edgy costume, afraid to own our desires. I’d been hoping for something along the lines of In the Realm of the Senses, but all I got were eggs smashed under bedclothes instead of up vaginas.

Really, there is no doubt about the creativity and craftsmanship and hours of labor and attention to detail that went into the elaborate costumes and sets.3 But I couldn’t help but feel that Cathy and Heathcliff were ruining my appreciation of them by how irritating they were in their 30-year-olds-do-teenagers rendering of what was sold to us as “the greatest love story ever told.” I don’t care for your pretend hysterics! Get out of the way, I just want to soak up the skin walls! I was tempted to shout, much as the philosopher Diogenes told Alexander the Great he was blocking his view of the sun.

The main thing that confounds me is that in the 131 years since the Lumière brothers first invented the cinematograph, no one has made a really good adaptation of Wuthering Heights, and yet it is a novel that should not be that difficult to adapt. It is not some modernist puzzle like Ulysses. Aside from a little trickiness in the framing device of the two narrators and one leap backwards in time at the beginning, it proceeds pretty linearly. The events are straightforward, the characters vividly painted, the dialogue memorable. It was actually very strange that the director of Promising Young Woman, a movie about rape, trauma, and revenge, would get so much wrong about a story with such similar themes.

At least the film reinforced my love for my husband by reminding me of the time he mistakenly referred to Wuthering Heights as “Suffering Hill.” Emerald Fennell’s “Wuthering Heights,” clearly a ragebait parody of the Brontë novel (for what other explanation is possible?) should have been titled Suffering Hill. Hollywood no longer really cares about making films that simply give us a good story well told. Buoyed up on great flares of marketing, films float for a few seconds, then crumple and deflate. The point is to get our backsides into movie theater seats, not make our sitting there worthwhile. If we are baited into raging about these bad movies online, thereby getting more backsides into theater seats, all the better.

When Emily Brontë was bitten by a dog as a teenager, she walked into the kitchen, took a red-hot poker from the fire, and calmly cauterized the wound. When her brother Branwell accidentally lit his room on fire while drunk, Emily matter-of-factly dragged him from his bed and doused the flames with a pan of water. Who will cauterize the wound in our culture, drag us bodily from the burning bed? Films are delivering us visual feasts with little to no nutritional value. Eventually we will refuse such fodder and, like Cathy and Heathcliff themselves, prefer starvation. “What meat is it, Emily, we need?”

—

This review is kind of an epilogue to an earlier essay about the book and why its second half—pretty much universally excluded from film adaptations—is so important. You can read that here:

Dear readers, I am all wuthered out, so in terms of posts this is probably the last you will be hearing from me about Wuthering Heights for a while. If you’ve seen the movie and agree or disagree with me, if you love Emily Brontë, or if you just want to say hi, please leave a comment—I always love hearing from you!

Catherine Linton (née Earnshaw) dies on page 121 of my edition of Wuthering Heights, but the book goes on for another 127 pages. What, in those 127 pages, do you suppose happens? If you’re Hollywood, your answer would be “nothing.” Nothing happens in those 127 pages. Maybe Heathcliff mopes around a lot moaning and wailing after “the ghost of his heart’s darling.” And maybe said ghost glides around the moors, hither and thither, intoning Kate Bush’s 1978 hit while she waits for Heathcliff to finally kick the bucket and join her. Whatever it is that happens in the second half of Emily Brontë’s novel, it is not important. Brontë, silly girl, wasted her time.

From the 1939 adaptation of Wuthering Heights onward, Hollywood has been loath to touch the second generation of the novel’s characters. Critics, too, for a long time, were willing to dispense with it. “Great as the novel is,” wrote E. M. Forster in 1927, “one cannot afterwards remember anything in it but Heathcliffe [sic] and the elder Catherine.” This is a pity, because to dismiss the second generation is to diminish the fullness of Brontë’s vision. Take the novel’s second half away, and Wuthering Heights narrows to an obsessive love story, a passionate, savage romance, a yarn of yearning and longing, illicit embraces on the Yorkshire moors, unrequited desire amongst the cliffs and heather. It is a serious misreading.

Misreading is something Brontë warns us about right from the start. Lockwood, our narrator, arrives in this wild landscape from the city and, humorously, misreads much. He mistakes Heathcliff for a fellow “misanthropist” and “[a] capital fellow!” He mistakes “an obscure cushion” to be full of cats, only to see “[u]nluckily, it was a heap of dead rabbits.” He mistakes Cathy II to be first Heathcliff’s wife, then Hareton’s, only to find out she is the widow of Heathcliff’s recently deceased son Linton.

So readers, coming to Wuthering Heights for the first time, might imagine themselves in a sort of torrid, northern English, 19th-century pulp romance, only to discover Wuthering Heights is a multigenerational saga, set mostly during the last three decades of the 18th century, that lays out the workings of cruelty, obsession, abuse, selfishness, revenge, and uncontrolled passion, and shows their eventual remolding into kindness, maturity, and healthy love. And the couple we should be rooting for is not Heathcliff and the elder Catherine but Hareton and the younger Catherine.

Lockwood comes to the Heights because he has rented a nearby property, Thrushcross Grange, for a year, and Heathcliff, who lives at the Heights, is his landlord. A snowstorm causes him to stay the night, and he is taken to a bedroom that was once the elder Catherine’s, on whose window ledge he finds scratched, over and over again, the names “Catherine Earnshaw,” “Catherine Heathcliff,” and “Catherine Linton.” Read them forwards, and they trace the journey of the first Catherine; backwards, and they trace the journey of the second Catherine. But to hear it all, Lockwood will have to go back to Thrushcross Grange and seek the story from the housekeeper, Nelly Dean.

Nelly Dean sits down with a bit of sewing and starts to stitch together this convoluted tale of Earnshaws, Heathcliffs, and Lintons. It begins some thirty years in the past, when the occupants of the Heights were Mr. and Mrs. Earnshaw, their 14-year-old son Hindley, their almost 6-year-old daughter Catherine, and the servants, including Nelly, who is Hindley’s age, and an irascible old brimstone-and-hellfire Bible-thumper named Joseph. One day, in fairytale fashion, Mr. Earnshaw goes to Liverpool on business, promising to bring back a violin for Hindley, a horsewhip for Cathy, and some fruit for Nelly. Three days later, he returns, opens the bundle of his coat, and reveals “a dirty, ragged, black-haired child” who can only stare and speak unintelligible gobbledygook. Mr. Earnshaw explains that he had seen the child “starving, and houseless” in the streets, failed to discover the child’s origins or parentage, and took him home.

Mrs. Earnshaw does not take so kindly to the boy. She is more inclined to side with her husband’s latter statement that the child is “dark as if it came from the devil” than obey his former injunction to “take it as a gift of God.” She is even “ready to fling it out of doors,” upbraiding her husband for “bring[ing] that gipsy brat into the house, when they had their own bairns to feed, and fend for.” For their part, the bairns are not seriously affected by their father’s strange rescue-kidnapping, choosing to let the adults sort it out, until they go to look for their presents. The violin is “crushed to morsels,” and the whip is lost. It is then that Hindley “blubber[s] aloud” and Cathy “grin[s] and spit[s]” at the child. Neither of them want “it” (at this point the child is referred to by everyone, even Mr. Earnshaw, as “it”) in their beds; Nelly leaves the boy “on the landing of the stairs, hoping it might be gone on the morrow,” is banished by Mr. Earnshaw, and comes back to learn that the child has been named “Heathcliff,” after a son who’d died in childhood.

In her absence, there has been a rearrangement of attachments and affections. Cathy and Heathcliff are now “very thick” friends, but Hindley—and Nelly herself—“hated him.” What about the Earnshaw parents? Mrs. Earnshaw is firmly in the camp of Heathcliff haters, failing to intervene when Hindley and Nelly give Heathcliff “blows” and “pinches.” Mr. Earnshaw, on the other hand, is “furious” upon “discover[ing] his son persecuting the poor, fatherless child.” When I first read Wuthering Heights, I saw Mr. Earnshaw as a kind-hearted man who dies too soon and Hindley as nothing more complicated than a mean teen who grows into an even meaner adult. But Mr. Earnshaw, for all his empathy and well-intentioned desire to protect his foundling, really, I think, pulls the lever that sets all the cogs and gears of the tragedy rolling.

Brontë does not linger on the relationship the children have with Mr. Earnshaw, so we might gloss over it, but the details she does give are telling. Mr. Earnshaw “took to Heathcliff strangely” and favors him above his own biological children.1 We don’t know why; at any rate, a parent who plays favorites is bound to sow evil in the home. If Mr. Earnshaw had come home with fiddle in tact, rather than smashed in the act of bringing “a cuckoo” (as Nelly calls Heathcliff) into the nest, perhaps things might have been okay. But the broken fiddle becomes a cipher for lost paternal love, and unlike Cathy, Hindley, because of the age difference, cannot bond with Heathcliff as playmate. Worse, he loses his only allies when Mrs. Earnshaw dies and Nelly defects to the camp of Heathcliff sympathizers. The result is that Hindley “had learned to regard his father as an oppressor rather than a friend, and Heathcliff as a usurper of his parent’s affections and his privileges, and he grew bitter with brooding over these injuries.” Jealousy begets violence, violence becomes Heathcliff’s leverage for soliciting even more fatherly fondness, and this fondness provokes further resentment towards the usurper.

Mr. Earnshaw worsens in health and as a parent. He becomes “grievously irritable,” and “suspected slights of his authority nearly threw him into fits,” especially where it concerns his partiality to Heathcliff. He threatens Hindley with physical punishment, and Hindley does not escape to college without first eliciting the warm paternal remark that “Hindley was naught, and would never thrive as where he wandered.” Joseph, that miserable, sermonizing sycophant, encourages Mr. Earnshaw to treat his children all the more severely, a disaster waiting to happen when combined with Cathy’s mischievous nature. As with Hindley, Mr. Earnshaw wounds her with his words: “I cannot love thee; thou’rt worse than thy brother…. I doubt thy mother and I must rue that we ever reared thee!” The effect of such statements is to first draw tears from, then harden Cathy. One night Mr. Earnshaw asks her, “Why canst thou not always be a good lass, Cathy?” She replies, “Why cannot you always be a good man, father?” The implication is that the daughter’s badness stems from the father’s badness—the sins of the father are visited upon the child. Parents may scold and reprimand and moralize and chide, but unless they look at their own bad behavior, they will be unlikely likely to find the cause—at least the partial cause—of what they condemn in their offspring.

One cannot wonder at the way these children turn out after so many years of abuse, grief, emotional neglect, and, for Heathcliff, racism. We see that physical abuse is a normal thing for the children at the Heights, for the first “sound blow” is delivered by Mr. Earnshaw when he sees Cathy “grinning and spitting” at the stranger. Later, he froths with rage that he cannot strike Hindley with his stick when Hindley ill treats Heathcliff. We may think that Cathy and Hindley deserve it, but there are other ways to “teach [a child] cleaner manners.” What these children are taught instead is that it is perfectly acceptable to hit, slap, pinch, and beat. Even in play, Cathy enjoys “slapping and ordering” others. Like their father, the Earnshaw children have passionate, easily provoked natures, and the nurture of these loveless years makes them selfish, hard, unable to mature.

As for Heathcliff, we know little about his early years, but his reaction to physical violence is significant. What responses can one can have to being bullied? One can break down and start crying, turning against oneself. One can turn against the aggressor, fighting back, returning blow for blow. Or one can simply not react, denying the bully satisfaction in eliciting tears or blows. Heathcliff’s responses are always the third, and Nelly theorizes that he must have been “hardened, perhaps, to ill-treatment” before he came to the Heights. His other emotional reactions, too, are muted: when he gets sick, he is “uncomplaining as a lamb”; when Hindley throws an iron weight at him, then knocks him under a horse’s feet, Heathcliff “cooly” sits down for a few minutes to recover; in response to Mr. Earnshaw’s partiality, he expresses neither gratitude nor insolence but merely indifference.

It is only with Cathy that he feels safe allowing himself fuller emotional expression, as is evident when Mr. Earnshaw dies. Both of them “set up a heart-breaking cry,” then later calm and soothe one another. After Hindley returns as the head of the house and resumes his abuse—to both Cathy and Heathcliff, especially Heathcliff, exiling him from the house to the servants’ quarters, stripping him of education, and condemning him to hard labor—Cathy and Heathcliff, “the unfriended creatures,” cling close to one another. Their chief delight is their rambles together on the moors. Outside, in nature, with only each other, they are free.

There is nothing to disturb this closeness until Cathy and Heathcliff end up at Thrushcross Grange, where a dog bites Cathy on the ankle as she and Heathcliff are spying on the Linton children, Edgar and Isabella, and Cathy is taken inside the Grange for five weeks to recover. This is where we first see a division between Wuthering Heights and Thrushcross Grange, and Brontë clearly means to contrast them. Poor Heathcliff! With what envy and admiration does he look upon the crimson luxuriance (“ah! it was beautiful”), so different from the savage gargoyles and cold flagstones of the Heights! The Grange is the best house in the neighborhood, the Heights only second best. The Grange lies low in a valley, “buried in trees,” while the Heights are subject to the “[p]ure, bracing ventilation” of the “north wind, blowing over the edge.” The Heights are nature, wildness, isolation, while the Grange is civilization, refinement, society. The Heights are strength, but a strength hardened into tyranny, while the Grange is weakness, softened into cowardice and overindulgence.

Notably, the Grange encounter coincides with puberty for both Cathy and Heathcliff, who are twelve and thirteen respectively. What would have been, at this age, the normal process of separation between child and parent and the child’s individualization is instead the painful sundering of Cathy and Heathcliff. They become aware of a social world that exists beyond the isolation of the Heights, where race, class, and gender make distinctions between who gets to come inside and who is shut outside: Cathy, white, the legitimate daughter of Mr. Earnshaw, is welcomed, pampered, given food and drink and slippers, ringletted, re-outfitted, Miss Manners-ed, and civilized, while Heathcliff, “the villain” whom it would be “a kindness to the country to hang… at once,” “the son of a fortune-teller,” “a gipsy,” “a little Lascar, or an American or Spanish castaway,” “unfit for a decent house,” is thrown out and must spy at events from the window. Cathy learns to care for money, status, and how she appears to the world, while Heathcliff learns that he has no place in the world and must remain the perpetual outsider. The division grows, with Cathy becoming closer to Edgar Linton, until, of course, the ultimate betrayal: Heathcliff overhears Cathy telling Nelly that “it would degrade [her] to marry Heathcliff, now” and runs out before she completes her sentence, “…so he shall never know how I love him.” For some people, to abandon is less painful than to be abandoned, and Heathcliff’s abandonment of the Heights lasts three years. When he returns, mysteriously wealthy and educated, Cathy is married to Edgar and is now mistress of the Grange. Childhood is over. It is time for the revenge to begin.

Brontë tells her story through parallels, doublings, repetitions, and echoes. Minor adjustments in circumstance and personality, however, lead to major differences of outcome. Heathcliff and Cathy, older foster brother and younger foster sister, are paralleled at Thrushcross Grange by Edgar and Isabella Linton, older brother and younger sister. In a neat criss-crossing of relations, the sister of one house marries the brother of the other: first Cathy and Edgar marry, then Heathcliff seduces and marries Isabella. Cathy and Heathcliff are passionately attached to one another, but they go after the Lintons for more worldly reasons (Cathy for money and status, Heathcliff for revenge and to have an heir). They are contemptuous of the Lintons yet long to be part of their world: Cathy wants to be “the greatest woman of the neighborhood,” while Heathcliff wishes he had Edgar’s “great blue eyes and even forehead.” Cathy and Heathcliff’s childhoods are marked by neglect and abuse, while the Lintons seem to enjoy relatively happy, pampered childhoods with their parents.

But Cathy and Heathcliff disrupt family life at the Grange. Cathy inadvertently kills Mr. and Mrs. Linton by passing on a fever, forcing the Linton siblings into adulthood with her, Heathcliff basically ruins Isabella’s life by proving to be very much the opposite of the dark romantic hero she’d imagined, and both Cathy and Heathcliff bring storm to household calm through the obsessive, destructive attachment they refuse to give up. Edgar and Isabella both come under the thumbs of their stronger spouses: Isabella endures great physical and emotional abuse at Heathcliff’s hands, and Cathy is confident that Edgar’s love for her is so strong she “might kill him, and he wouldn’t wish to retaliate.”

Inter- and intragenerational parallels also present in the first generation when they become parents. Just as Mr. Earnshaw loses his wife and becomes a single father, Hindley loses his wife Frances and becomes a single father, Edgar loses Cathy and becomes a single father, Heathcliff loses Isabella and becomes a single father. As fathers, all of them falter on some level. The Heights fathers are tyrannical, abusive, exploitative, playing favorites (Mr. Earnshaw), succumbing to grief and alcohol (Hindley), or using offspring as a means to an end, little caring whether they live or die afterwards (Heathcliff). The Grange fathers are more responsible: Mr. Linton reads Hindley “a lecture on the road he guided his family,” and Edgar is a protective, affectionate parent, whose primary fault might be that he shelters his daughter, leaving her vulnerable when she is drawn into Heathcliff’s machinations.

Mothers are mostly absent: Isabella, after running away from Heathcliff and finding no refuge in her brother, must have tried her best, but leaves behind at her death a child who is sickly, whiny, and selfish. The primary “mother” is actually Nelly, who throughout the novel makes food, tends to illness, provides emotional support, attempts to give moral guidance, serves as a link between past and present, and remains standing while almost everyone around her crumbles like autumn leaves. Her plain common sense grounds the novel, which would otherwise fly up into a whirlwind, what with all its drama and drinking and death and vengeance and passion and unrequited ardor. Since it’s she who’s narrating this story to Lockwood, we might reserve doubts about her reliability, but she does seem to have the ability to self-reflect on her actions, which is more than we can say for many of the more exciting characters, and she has the rare ability to provide sympathy without excusing bad behavior.

Nelly’s survival between generations allows us crucially to note the repetitions and changes. The three couples of the first generation (Hindley and Frances; Edgar and Catherine; Heathcliff and Isabella) collapse into three cousins (Hareton Earnshaw, Catherine Linton, and Linton Heathcliff), and the love triangle of Hareton-Catherine II-Linton echoes the love triangle of Heathcliff-Catherine I-Edgar. Importantly, the birth of the second Cathy is the death of the first Cathy. Cathy begins where her mother’s journey ends: at Thrushcross Grange, with the name Catherine Linton. Nelly tells us Catherine has the sauciness of her mother and “a perverse will that indulged children invariably acquire,” but Earnshaw fire is tempered by Linton water: “Her spirit was high, though not rough… That capacity for intense attachments reminded me of her mother; still she did not resemble her; for she could be soft and mild as a dove… her anger was never furious; her love never fierce; it was deep and tender.” The second Cathy is loved, albeit overindulgently, by her father and by Nelly, and her environment, though isolated and confined, is safe and peaceful. Nevertheless, at thirteen, she is led by her curiosity across the moors to Wuthering Heights, just as her mother at a similar age had encountered Thrushcross Grange. Where the discovery of Thrushcross Grange was for the mother a discovery of convention, society, and civilization, the discovery of Wuthering Heights is for the daughter is the discovery of evil. Nelly tries to protect her, but Cathy’s willfulness and curiosity are too strong.

Both Catherines move from attractions of similarity (Heathcliff; Linton) to attractions of difference (Edgar; Hareton). But where Cathy I’s identities are multiple and overlapping, like the three names scrawled randomly, swarming the page where they are written (at the height of her breakdown, the elder Cathy looks into a mirror and cannot recognize herself; she loses track of her place in space and time), Cathy II seems to have a solid core of identity—stemming, I think, from the stable love of her father—that enables her to not fully lose herself even as her environment and circumstances shift. Hardened to harshness, not given the moist soil needed to mature beyond self-absorbed immaturity, Cathy I, like Heathcliff, does not know truly how to love. She expects others to adapt to her needs without ever really adapting to theirs, does not consider the long-term consequences of her actions, makes choices that are primarily emotional, impulsive, or manipulative, and is not opposed to using physical abuse to control others. Even her death is the outcome of her own bad actions: caught between Heathcliff and Edgar, unable to understand why she cannot have both, she starves herself for days in an attempt to make them give way to her whims and wishes.

Like her mother’s relationship with her father, Cathy’s relationship with Linton is a shallow one, but unlike her mother, she tries to reach outside of herself in moments of genuine compassion. The elder Cathy can only tolerate relationships of absolute identification or none at all. She and Heathcliff comfort themselves after Mr. Earnshaw’s death by imagining heaven together—the same heaven—but Cathy II and Linton argue over incompatible versions of heaven before coming to the compromise of trying out each other’s. Cathy has a great deal of maternal patience for Linton’s whiny self-pity, largely bearing his illness, and the pressures of Heathcliff’s control over him, until it becomes the mechanism for Heathcliff’s abuse of her.

Mother and daughter both become imprisoned in the strange new environments they discover, Cathy I hindered from the Heights by her own breakdown and Edgar’s discouragement, Cathy II from the Grange because Heathcliff literally imprisons her at the Heights to force a marriage with Linton so that Heathcliff can gain control over her property when both her father and Linton die (so swoon-worthy!). For Cathy I, freedom means to go back to girlhood (“I wish I were a girl again, half savage and hardy, and free”), whereas for Cathy II, freedom is maturation into womanhood. Death and abuse only temporarily set back her character instead of instituting permanent changes. After her father and Linton die and she is stripped of her inheritance and trapped at the Heights with Hareton and Heathcliff, she grows sullen and sulky, “a changed and hardened girl.” Her withdrawal from others into her own pride mirrors the early Heathcliff’s, while her cruelty towards Hareton echoes the worst of her mother.

Yet it is in the second Catherine—and her second, better relationship with her other cousin, Hareton—that Brontë shows us the abused don’t have to become abusers themselves. People can reflect, feel remorse, and choose to change. Circumstances may act on people, but people also have the power to change circumstances. Abuse and an unyielding desire for vengeance turn Heathcliff into a second Hindley and Hindley’s son, Hareton (who becomes Heathcliff’s foster son of sorts) into a second Heathcliff. Hindley degraded Heathcliff into a servant and deprived him of education, so Heathcliff does the same to Hareton. When all three of the second generation are united in Wuthering Heights, the situation actually mirrors that of the three Heights children at the beginning of the novel. Heathcliff, like Mr. Earnshaw, fosters a son he has more natural affinity with than his own biological son. In return, the foster son attaches to the father who is not his own: Hareton is the only character who really mourns Heathcliff’s death, remaining fiercely loyal to him as the one parental figure he can cling to.

In the second generation, Grange and Heights traits—incompatible in the first generation, to much grief and trouble—are merged and fused. Perhaps because he is the product of the only marriage where love is totally absent, Linton combines the worst of the Grange with the worst of the Heights. His Grange traits devolve into cowardice and sickliness, his Heights traits into selfishness and manipulativeness. Poor Linton! As with the characters of the first generation, his arc can only bend hastily towards death.

On the other hand, Catherine’s Grange refinement and compassion soften her Heights wildness and passion. She can love tenderly without being trampled and stand up to tyranny without lacking compassion: compounding bravery and empathy, she tells Heathcliff, “I don’t hate you. I’m not angry that you struck me. Have you never loved anybody, in all your life, uncle? never?” Heathcliff finds her bewildering and uncanny, a source of obvious discomfort. It is in the second Catherine that Heathcliff meets the final girl who will vanquish him.

Catherine accomplishes this primarily through the ungnarling of Hareton. When Heathcliff “takes possession” of Hareton after Hindley’s death, he wonders “if one tree won’t grow as crooked as another, with the same wind to twist it!” But Heathcliff, who instinctively rescues baby Hareton from falling to his death, almost as Mr. Earnshaw had rescued him from peril, is not exactly the same wind, and Hareton does not end up as crooked after all. True, Cathy does twist a few boughs. Her initial attitude towards Hareton is one of snobbery at his illiteracy and disgust at his rough manners. Though he is attracted to her and offers up various kindnesses (asking her to sit near the fire, getting books for her that are too high up), she rebuffs him out of a kind of vengeance for her treatment at the Heights, silencing his protestations that he has tried to help her. When, for her sake, he attempts to learn how to read, she cruelly mocks his first wobbly steps and, wounded, he consigns the books to the flames.

However, Nelly’s admonishments of bad behavior, which never had any effect on the elder Cathy or Heathcliff, actually manage to prick the younger Cathy. “Were you not naughty?” Catherine admits she might have been, offers Hareton a book, is rejected, and returns the next morning, evidently having reflected in the interval: “her conscience reproved her for frightening him off improving himself.” Cathy puts her mischievous ways to better use by trying various methods of baiting Hareton’s attention. Finally she tries direct communication of her feelings: “I didn’t know you took my part… and I was miserable and bitter at every body; but, now I thank you, and beg you to forgive me.” She braves further rebuffs, cajoling him for friendship and forgiveness, until, in Jane Eyre’s words, she has finally “won a place by [his] heart’s very hearthstone.”

The high water mark of Catherine’s newfound compassion for Hareton is that she bites her tongue around him about Heathcliff, recognizing and respecting the depth of his attachment. After all, ties formed early in life are “stronger than reason could break.” For his part, he effectively elicits her empathy and communicates his feelings by asking her “how she would like him to speak ill of her father?”

It is the alliance of Cathy and Hareton that defeats Heathcliff, not through force or obeisance but through love. Strength is necessary for standing up against tyranny, defending the vulnerable, following through on one’s principles, and remaining resilient in the face of obstacles, while softness promotes understanding, forgiveness, empathy, and emotional vulnerability. Both halves are necessary to make up love, as manifested in the playful economy of slaps and kisses that arises between the younger Catherine and Hareton near the novel’s end. In each other’s presence, they have “the eager interest of children,” all the spirit and curiosity and innocence and zest for life, but they are not stuck in childhood like Heathcliff and the first Catherine. Their love ends his revenge quest, for the sight of them happy together awakens the past: not the ghost of old injuries and injustices but “the ghost of my immortal love, of my wild endeavors to hold my right, my degradation, my pride, my happiness, and my anguish,” as Heathcliff says. Heathcliff is an open wound, bleeding over everybody, and only the forgiving, understanding love of the next generation, whom he’d tried so hard to incarnadine, manage to cauterize him.

The cycle is broken; abuse will no longer beget abuse, nor vengeance, vengeance. Heathcliff dies, leaving the joint Thrushcross Grange and Wuthering Heights property to their rightful inheritors. Rightful not by blood or law but by spirit: for is it not Cathy of the cultivated Grange who has taught rough Hareton Earnshaw to read his own name over the entrance of the Heights, and the year, “1500,” of his ancient family’s founding? Fittingly, Cathy’s birthday is the spring equinox, and her wedding with Hareton will take place on New Year’s Day, 1803. It looks as though the burgeoning century is shaping up into something, for this couple, quite new and quite beautiful.

Is it not strange, though, this excision of Heathcliff, one of the most memorable characters in all literature? At the end of the novel, he and his posterity are dead, and whatever property was temporarily his reverts back to what is left of the families it’d originally belonged to. Heathcliff’s story is so bleak when you look at it this way, his life so wasted. It really is “a cuckoo’s [tale], sir,” as Nelly first tells Lockwood. The cuckoo flies in from nowhere, deposits an egg, and flies away again. When one tries to grapple with Heathcliff, one finds oneself referring to forces and beings supernatural, larger than human: Heathcliff is a vampire, a ghoul, a devil. He is pain personified, or trauma, or violence; he is the repressed id, the world “cleft into gigantic disorder.”2 Yet, if his actions are monstrous, his feelings are always human. Wronged, abused, injured, abandoned, do we not also bleed and suffer?

Speaking of human feelings, it is reading, especially at the end of the novel, that has a humanizing effect. In childhood, we little know how to read the world and the events around us. We exist in a realm of bewildering ciphers, strange, dark shapes that signify nothing. “Mr. Heathcliff never reads; so he took it into his head to destroy my books,” the younger Cathy tells Lockwood. Growing up is a process of learning how to read what happens to us and what has already happened to us. A certain few are lucky enough to be taught by patient, well-meaning parents. Some are blocked entirely, kept in a state of illiteracy. Still others sound out the letters haltingly, jerkily, must revert often to the dictionary, but manage to squeeze out a little sense.

In Wuthering Heights, to read is finally to falter, to stumble, to perhaps be led to a wrong conclusion, then to reflect, reevaluate, reshape. The characters in stone (“1500” and “Hareton Earnshaw”) mean something totally different at the beginning and end of the book; the story teaches us to read that inscription. Some of have names like Heathcliff’s, without origin, without history, floating, singular. Some of us have names like Cathy’s, mutating through the changes of life, bouncing off first one situation, now another. Some of us have names like Hareton’s, heavy legacies carved ineffaceably into stone. Far more important than money or property or status, we inherit from our parents traumas, patterns of behavior, dispensations, a sense of what is normal and not normal, an attitude towards the world. But we can choose to reinterpret, redefine, re-envision, choose to pour the scalding liquid metal of the past into a new mold. “Eternity” may be one word for the place “where life is boundless in its duration, and love in its sympathy, and joy in its fulness.” Imagination, as Emily Brontë knew, is another.

More for Valentine’s Day

Dear Readers, Happy Valentine’s Day!! I will probably be posting a (much much shorter) review of the 2026 Wuthering Heights in the next few days, so do keep an eye out. And if you have any Wuthering Thoughts, please leave them in the comments—I always look forward to hearing from you!

Anyway, for the third year in a row, here are some snippets from my 2025 diaries, remixed and alphabetized. All credit for this experiment is due to Sheila Heti.

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A beautiful floating world of waterlilies. A full moon, light coming very brightly through the window. A good test of a material is to see whether it glows with something rich & strange & subtle in sunlight or candlelight. A ring is a thing of nothing. Alcaics—Alcaeus and Horace—Mary Sidney, Sidney Psalter—Tennyson—Auden. Almost jasmine. Already February! And I am happy that we are moving forward with our lives together. And now I can write poetry, which is what I really want to make more time for this year. And talking about his raising $15 million, as if that’s what makes me love him. Another thing I miss is hearing Telugu spoken. Anyway, I am glad that winter will be arriving soon, arranging itself in the withered pockets with hands as contented as a lady’s in a fur muff. Anyway, I took refuge in the Ulta Beauty like last time. Art made simple as Nature and Nature made glorious as Art. As wise old Socrates or Solomon said, “Drink a pot of tea / And you will have to pee.”

Because they were so devastatingly itchy afterwards. Berry picking—boysenberries for the first time and marionberries. Blooming all over with orange and pink-orange flowers and rhododendrons. Blue-silver windblown waves of the lake, blurred moon, then the lake dark liquid obsidian. But I put the heavy glass lid on the jar and I suffocated it and watched the flame go lower and dimmer and die out, little by little, until a thin smoke hung in the glass and the glass grew hot, and then I took the lid off. But now the panic has been put aside. But the jackdaw said, “I don’t know what happened to the squirrels.”

Canada Lily, Wood Lily, Chocolate Lily, Mahogany Fawn Lily. Canada Toadflax. “Chocolate-enrobed” sandwich cookies. Clasping Venus’s Looking-glass. Coin-operated laundries should not be a thing in this day and age—even parking meters take credit cards now. Colorful little townhouses, the winding uphill streets, the tiny playgrounds. Compared to last year they had so many mango cakes, so many gleaming fruit tarts, so many cookies, honey lollipops with bee pollen, spanakopita and other hand-pies, orange-flavored cakes dusted with powdered sugar that they said were traditional. “Cutie pie, I’m captivated by your idea of a car that runs on bubbles.”

Dark stream running like thought, lots of new green shoots by its banks. Darkness wrapped her up in a soft cocoon of sleep and dreams. Doing the figures in my diary has started to give me a twinkling and a tinkling and an inkling of hope again. Don’t have it in me to do it because it wouldn’t feel real to me. Drives in the evening, the sky pitch-black, my mind automatically and inevitably goes to my mother.

Everything seems to have become lush and green so suddenly. Even if I don’t get to my writing today, at least I will have more time for it tomorrow if I do all of these things. Even the simplest things are so beautiful.

Felt we were sitting somewhere at the bottom of the sea together. Fiction is the telling of lies to reveal the truth. For the past three nights I’ve been having dreams about my mother. Four poems about water/the sea that capture that liquid languor: Coral Bracho’s “Water’s Lubricious Edges,” Marianne Moore’s “The Fish,” Elizabeth Bishop’s “A Jellyfish,” and Sylvia Plath’s “Aquatic Nocturne.” Fritz Kreisler—car accident—coma—woke up speaking Ancient Greek, which he had studied along with Latin at school. Full of beautiful old furniture and china and lots of knickknacks, everything covered with a thick layer of dust.

Glad to have him back to normal, glad to understand him better. Gleaming off the gold dome of the State House. God smiles on those who believe. Good strong tea infused with orange and spice. Got into a staring contest with a squirrel. Green willows bent down along the paths, and there were a few benches here and there for lovers and two small bridges across the water where we stood a little bit contemplating the evening. Greens and purples separate themselves into a thousand varieties and filaments of color.

Have been reading The Pickwick Papers and now appreciate a good Wellerism. He can be very hard on people in a way that feels very scary. He had a long table that was marked “William Randolph Hearst.” He is very lovable to me then, sleeping on his side, his hands tucked under his cheek, his legs drawn up to his chest, a large man curled up like a baby. He kept telling me to STOP COMPARING MYSELF and to not listen to my mother. He looked more like the lawyers than those they were defending. He saw a pair of beautiful chairs with inlay in the back and green velvet seats, and I spotted a beautiful little vanity that I could use as a desk, and I also liked a Monet print that was coincidentally of a painting I had written about yesterday, and we saw a china set that was white bordered with gold that R was drawn to and a beautiful set of floral Limoges plates and a green plate with a little chip in it and a gold border and a Roman chariot in the middle, which of course I had to get. He says I bring a lot of joy to his life. Her happiness was so fragile that a speck of dust could dash it to pieces.

I can always start over and do better. I don’t even know how to begin excavating this grief. I don’t know why or how she gets so mean like that. I ended up going to the BPL and sitting in the dark room with all the Sargent frescos on a hard wooden bench, reading Daniel Deronda. I kept thinking about Daddy and how he used to hold my hand after my eye doctor appointments. I know what it is—I think I have discovered the root of the problem. I said between now and when I die you don’t know what I’m capable of. I sat on his lap, and he asked me questions that frightened me. I shouldn’t have gotten so emotional over the whole thing. Imagination is the engine of empathy. I showed him The Young Girls of Rochefort, and he loved it. I took a kind of detached, human interest in it, a writerly interest, and I thought of Dickens and how he’d worked very early on as a court reporter. I will write and hope; I will submit and hope; I will receive rejections and hope. In Boston you can always blame the T. It felt like spring because the snow had melted. It imparts a warmness to everything, in spite of the gray. It was a wet, bleak December morning, two days before the New Year. It was one of those gossamer, periwinkle blue-hued dusks. It was very foggy.

Jealousy of his passion for the stock market could not have been the reason I was so bothered by it. Just want to tap into the power of deep focus.

Kindling this feeling was the episode of SATC I watched yesterday.

La primavera, le printemps, the first time. Later he said that my friends were funny and that he had enjoyed talking to them. Listened to The Carpenters; we were very happy. Listening to Schumann’s Träumerei with the sound of birds outside. Little desk only $32, Limoges plates $25.

Men haven’t learned the relief of weeping. Might think artists a vagrant bunch, living off the sweat of other people’s brows. Minutes and hours seem to just be seeping and leaking away. Mouse spotted—it paused in front of the bedroom door, very boldly in my opinion, and seemed to look at me with an impertinent eye before scurrying off. My feet sweated in my black flats, I moved my hair from the back of my neck to my shoulder, from my shoulder to the back of my neck. Mysteries of life and death seem to hover above me like the wind moving through trees.

Never acknowledges that other people might have their own goals and priorities. Nice to poke around in everything together. Not able to shower because I’m out of leggings and camisoles. No peace of mind at all, always people continuously, noise, headaches, no chance to write, botherations by everybody. Not that I have quite executed it. Not that I was able to articulate it that fully or intelligently back then, because all I had were these great vague furies of emotion. Nothing better on Earth than a baby smiling. Now it is afternoon, early afternoon, calm and gentle, and the morning has melted away like light ice into grass. “Now sleeps the crimson petal”—“waves”—> “winks” —> “wakens”; “droops”—“lies”—“slides”—“folds”—“slips”/“folds”—“slips”; “sleeps” and “slips.”

On the way back I liked the building for European Studies. One black bird like a Roman statesman, orating, proud, senatorial, sharp-eyed. One path in the park took us through a thicket of trees out into a clearing where a quiet Grecian temple looked over a small pond; there a fountain sent forth its stream. Only on one side is there such a burst of orange that catches the eye and shows the handiwork of the fairy Autumn. Onyx vases look beautiful in candlelight. Or does she worry about my safety and happiness? Our lives running side by side like two streams. Our zenith as a family was that beautiful trip to Greece. Outside a fierce wind is whipping the bare, sunlit, white tree branches into a froth, and the sky is a good strong blue that presages spring.

Pearly Everlasting. Pile of dishes in the sink—when R came home from the gym, he called it “Mount Ramya” and said that monks would scale it in order to achieve nirvana. Portland is the “rose city.” Pranks begin in jest and end in sorrow. Probably one of the longest weeks I’ve ever experienced in my life. Puzzle-patches of river and sky recede into their new light.

Quarrelsome day for us. Quite sweet indeed.

R put his 6’3” frame in a tiny child’s chair and pretended to sip tea from a child’s tiny tea set. R rubbed olive oil all over my legs, very gently and lovingly and sweetly, and I felt better instantly. Read Shakespeare and was very happy doing so. Reconciliation without accountability is impossible.

Saturday—in the morning I saw an ant, and then another ant, and then another ant, and R killed all of them. She didn’t want to have anything to do with him, and she didn’t want me to have anything to do with her, either. She entered his arms like a ship sailing into harbor. She is like a basin that collects his tears and reflects him as he is, human, not a marble pillar or a god. She runs races and won something to run a marathon, I think, in Berlin. She was kind to me, and we embraced. Shimmeringly alive characters. Snakemouth Orchid, Crested Yellow Orchid, Small Purple- fringed Orchid. Some kind of orange oil on the wood so that it would have a beautiful glow. Sounds emitting from the soft featherball of a bird body. Structure is paramount in poetry.

Telephone poles stretching into the distance and mountains blanketed by evergreens in the background, lots of wildflowers, a little gopher poking his two buckteeth out of a hole in the ground. That was what I wanted anyway, but now that I got what I wanted I feel sad about not seeing him. That we had done a murder and eloped so that we couldn’t testify against each other. The Charles was frozen over, strange to see, and the sun setting behind the clouds looked beautiful. The cinematography was beautiful and the first part was great, but the second made no sense. The clothes were dripping all over the floor. The silhouettes of the trees and the soft warm lamps in the flowers and the faint pinpricks of stars in the dark blue sky made a very pretty picture. The sunlight flashed in and out of our embrace, warm and golden. Then all of a sudden the man said that everything was now half off, which changed everything. Then they asked me what shape it was, and I just made up something, which was not a real shape, and the whole thing was a mess, and then I felt put on the spot and embarrassed. There is a magic to names, over and apart from the common sounds of words. There is a strange kind of twilight hanging in the air. There is something morally beneficial to cleaning—something good and self-respecting. These summer days in Oregon are very long and beautiful. Thinking of her made me think of peaches and sunlight. Tints and hazes of gold in the thick green leafage that hung over the little brown rustling brook. Took the T to Park Street, then transferred to the Red Line and got down at MGH, whence we walked to the Esplanade.

Umbrella Tree. Unto forever.

Valentine’s Day: R and I got married. Venus is a slippery, sea-born goddess. Very rude, abrupt, unaware of social graces. Very sensitive to any perceived criticism. Viridian green to cool blue to deep violet to a pinky magenta. Voices and laughs through the open windows.

We are going to make coronation chicken sandwiches. We rearranged the items on the dresser. We treated each other badly because we knew we could get away with it. We went home in a magic spell. Well, that turned out to be the accursed place we had gone on Mother’s Day. When I heard that I felt sick, foul, scared, unspeakably sad. When it flew up all of a sudden, I almost gasped to see that white stripe expand into a flourish of vermilion. When she saw me she gave me a tremulous smile, and I smiled back. While we were on the trail we found a baby freshwater turtle, whom we later namer Arnold. Will try to use a safety pin. Wind, sand, sun, sea. Woolf again, my beloved Virginia Woolf. Working on myself to be less reactive, to not absorb people’s emotions, even when they are very intense, to take deep breaths and calm myself, to remind myself that between action and reaction there can always be a pause.

X-ray a harmonious marriage and you will find its skeleton is comprised of the calcified bits of all such tricks.

Yes, that is what happened to us when our plane landed. Yesterday when I was taking a nap he went out to the bakery and got a beautiful cake—a strawberry cake. You may find this cynical and unromantic. You, whoever may be reading this—(I am a voice crying out in the wilderness)—if you are married, has that also been your experience?

Zero art is zero romance, feeling, poetry, life. Zones of something higher and truer swam above me, and I reached up to them.

Please let me know how your 2025 was and what you are looking forward to in 2026! As always, I love hearing from you in the comments.

I sometimes think that I was meant to be a professional reader. No, I don’t mean a professor, although the idea of toiling over some obscure bit of literary analysis few people will ever read has its undeniable charm. I don’t mean a literary critic, either, though my fingers just itch to eviscerate one bad book after another with blow after blow of sharp remark, stroke after stroke of my fountain pen’s steel, until the victim lies in rags and tatters, bleeding ink. I don’t mean someone who works at a publishing house, panning for gold and seldom finding it, or having to alchemize it to mere gilt for the sake of the profit motive. No, I mean nothing so useful, so productive, so fruitful as that. I mean someone who does nothing but read all day, read and read and read and read, drifting out to the Isle of Dreams over the Sea of Imagination on my barque of pages. Perhaps my little flat would spring a leak while I am playing Elaine, the lily maid of Astolat, on my way to Camelot, but that is no matter.

Of course, as it rightly should be, in this world all rewards flow to those who create, not those who consume. It is true that I love writing, that I describe myself as a writer, that being someone who puts pen to paper (or finger to keyboard) in elusive search for Truth and Beauty is an unalterable fact of my existence. But when the crowds disperse and all the busy doings of the world die away and darkness settles over evening and I am alone with myself once more, I must admit that I love writing less than I love reading. I prefer playing the violin to listening to music, and I can even say that I derive more enjoyment from baking than from eating baked goods, but I cannot truthfully say that, given a choice between only being able to read for the rest of my life and only being able to write, I would chose writing.

All this came home to me about a week ago, when I began rereading L. M. Montgomery’s “Anne” books. There are eight in all; the first, Anne of Green Gables, published in 1908, is Montgomery’s first and most famous novel. The copy I received at the age of six or seven came with a little gold chain and heart-shaped locket; I still remember its cover: against a red background and a house that can be none other than Green Gables stands a straw-hatted, gingham-and-wincey-garbed, redheaded, freckle-faced young girl, carrying, with both hands, the carpetbag that contains all her “worldly goods.” The back cover describes this girl, Anne Shirley, as only “one of the most delightful, irrepressible young heroines of all time.”

After reading many novels and acquainting myself with many heroines since first reading Anne of Green Gables, I am inclined to agree. Mark Twain called Anne “the dearest and most lovable child in fiction since the immortal Alice.” I love Alice, but she seems to me a flatter heroine than Anne. In the Anne books, what we get is basically the arc of a whole life. The first book introduces us to 11-year-old orphan Anne waiting at the Bright River train station; a fortunate mix-up has sent her—not the boy wanted for farm work—to middle-aged brother and sister Matthew and Marilla Cuthbert of Green Gables. Shy, retiring Matthew, always at a loss around the female of the species, nevertheless takes an immediate liking to Anne, with her big words and her wide eyes, her fancy about sleeping in a wild cherry tree and her curiosity about P.E.I.’s red roads, her raptures over the beauties of nature and her own frank nature. Anne and Matthew are “kindred spirits,” and Matthew’s attachment to Anne, along with Marilla’s intuition of what a lonely, impoverished, love-starved life Anne must have led, prevail upon Marilla to let Anne stay at Green Gables. Alas, Anne’s impulsivity, her open expression of emotion, her habit of daydreaming, and sometimes just sheer bad luck contrive to get her into scrape after hilarious scrape: accidentally inebriating her best friend Diana Barry with “raspberry cordial,” accidentally dying her hair green, not-so-accidentally breaking a slate over the head of her handsome classmate Gilbert Blythe when he calls her “Carrots” (her red hair is a sore spot).

As she ages from 11 to 16, she sheds her “heathen ways,” her talkativeness, her propensity for big words. She becomes more responsible without losing all her romance (“Don’t give up all your romance… keep a little of it, Anne, keep a little of it,” Matthew says to her), she sees what ambition can do when coupled with hard work (and a bit of academic rivalry with Gilbert), she learns the cost of holding a grudge, she is visited by “the reaper whose name is death” and finds that real tragedy is seldom like the “tragical” stories she and her friends make up in their Story Club. At the end of the novel, with Matthew gone and Marilla’s eyesight going, Anne must put off college to stay behind at Green Gables.

The sequel, Anne of Avonlea, covers Anne’s life from ages 16 to 18; as she teaches at the local school and founds, with Gilbert, the Avolea Village Improvement Society (A.V.I.S.), we see her step into more responsibility and leadership in her community. Now “brought up,” she assists in the bringing up of the twins Marilla adopts from a distant relative and guides several of her pupils. Still, not entirely grown-up, she cannot help get into the occasional, comical scrape. By the end of this phase of Anne’s life, “the page of girlhood had been turned, as by an unseen finger, and the page of womanhood was before [Anne] with all its charm and mystery, its pain and gladness.” The third book covers Anne’s college years, the fourth the post-college, pre-marriage period, the fifth the first year or so of marriage, and the last three give us Anne’s middle age as wife and mother, turning from Anne to focus on her children as they themselves grow up and face the specter of WWI.

Other authors may give you a lovable heroine, but in most cases you are only with them for a small slice of their lives: childhood is not lingered over; marriage is a stopping point. Anne, however, is a character who offers you different things at different stages of life, and somehow I always find that I tend to come to an Anne book—or an Anne book comes to me—just when I am in the same stage of life as Anne herself. This past June, newly married, I happened to find in a Little Free Library by the side of a road Anne’s House of Dreams, covering Anne’s early married days—it was, as Mrs. Spencer says, “positively providential.” Where are the books now that offer so much whimsy and so much wisdom, that are always a delight, that always have something new to show you and teach you? This most recent rereading, I was struck by the amount of responsibility many of the characters have at a young age: they had jobs earlier, married earlier, had children earlier, faced the sorrows of death earlier, and therefore emerge better equipped to handle the ups and downs of life.

When I reread the Anne books a few years ago, I was niggled by Anne’s seeming perfection. Actually, I realized this time, she is not so perfect after all—she always has something she can learn and grow from, no matter how old she is. Anne of Avonlea introduces us to Anne the matchmaker, Anne as catalyst for a couple’s happy getting together, and yet ironically it takes her several years and Gilbert’s near-death experience to realize what true love looks like in real life. Ever inclined to see the best in others, and especially in children, she eventually finds that not everyone is worth winning over, not every child corrigible.

As the books progress, familiar characters come and go, and we get introduced to several new ones. Some stay with us for many books, becoming Anne’s lifelong friends; others are there for just an evening or a season, a comical incident or a poignant moment. One or two, we feel, may be grating (the child Paul Irving) or receive unfair treatment from the author (Dora Keith), but even those with minor roles to play come out at us like flesh-and-blood people, friends we are glad to revisit. Anne has a gift of winning over grumps, and she makes us see that most people are not bad or hostile: under a prickly surface may lie a heart as starved for love as her own once was.

Readers may be disappointed that Anne, in spite of her B.A. (she is the first woman in Avonlea to obtain a degree), her way with words, her love of literature, her boundless “scope for imagination,” and her early attempts to publish stories, does not become a professional writer, instead choosing to devote her life to the domestic sphere. But Anne’s talent has always been for people—for understanding them, for bringing out the best in them, for cultivating love and spreading kindness and fostering community: “I’d like to add some beauty to life… I don’t exactly want to make people know more… but I’d love to make them have a pleasanter time because of me… to have some little joy or happy thought that would never have existed if I hadn’t been born.”

In the wake of modernism, Anne was dismissed for being too sentimental, too overwrought, too easy. When you study literature academically, you find it hard to shake the notion of difficulty as a virtue in and of itself. My first copy of Anne of Green Gables testifies to what a small child considers difficult: I had underlined all of the “big” words in pencil so that I could look them up. Now nearly two decades later, I can zip through the novel in a few quiet hours, and yet that does not mean I am not collecting jewels along the way. On each reread, like Anne, “I have a conviction that there are scores of beautiful nooks there that have never really been seen although they may have been looked at.”

Bloom does not include Montgomery in his Western canon or his “mosaic of geniuses.” Yet biographer Mary Henley Rubio is right to point out that “[Montgomery’s books’] sales were not inflated by being required novels on courses.” Few books can make me laugh and cry as the Anne books do, and few books have ingrained themselves that deeply into my soul. Having first read Anne at a young, impressionable age, before personality was solidified and memory shored up, I often wonder about my drive to do well academically, my love of whimsy, my belief in the importance of pretty dresses, my imagination, my willingness to see all people as fundamentally good, my optimism, my romanticism, my idealism—do they merely coincide with Anne’s, or did Anne plant them there? Where does Anne end, and where do I begin?

Jane Austen once advised her teenaged niece that “three or four families in a country village is the very thing to work on,” and I feel that Montgomery would agree; somehow, though I’ll admit that Austen is the better novelist, I find the “country village” of Avonlea a warmer and more familiar place than any in Austen’s work. Montgomery has Austen’s flair for sharp social satire, but Austen’s witticisms can flash out with an edge of shrewish meanness that Montgomery’s never stoop to. Unlike Austen, who seems to think romantic love impossible for women after the ripe old age of 27, Montgomery has several women who marry past 40, and it is beautiful to see that age is no barrier to love.

No novelist is better than Montgomery at charting the comings and goings of each season, being alive to the particular beauties that belong to each month and time of year. In the wake of so many lesser Hemingways peddling their barren minimalism, it is nice to read something full and ripe and lush. The sweetness of purplish—or shall we say lavender—prose, however, is cut by acidic irony; comic scenes are given depth by being mingled with sorrow and loss. The Anne books are as rich with literary allusions as any modernist text, drawing on Browning and Tennyson and Shakespeare. Rereading them, though, I am content to simply read, not underline and annotate and analyze, to remain the “common reader,” one of the masses, a member of the still vast hordes of the reading public.

As a child, as a teenager, and even as an adult, I was persecuted by certain unimaginative people for “reading storybooks.” I cannot defend “storybooks” on the solid grounds of usefulness or practicality. It is true, when I take off my critic’s glasses and lay down my writer’s pen: I do read for pleasure, pure, untrammeled, boundless pleasure. I do read to escape into another, fairy world, leaving behind all the humdrum bore of this one. I do read for fun, I read to get lost, I read to go “Over the mountains of the moon, / Down the valley of the shadow,” and when I am in that opalescent land, nothing can pain me (or if it does, it is a sweet pain), nothing can age me, nothing can tether my floating soul. I am in eternal time and not human time, I am in “Tomorrow,” as little Elizabeth says in Windy Poplars, I am at my soul’s true home.

There are books that feel like sea voyages, and there are books that feel like long, rambling walks; there are books that feel like journeys to far-off lands, and there are books that feel like coming home. I am not yet at the end of my reread, and I will be very sad to say goodbye to Anne and all of the other friends I have met along the way. But—and this is the good thing about fiction that is not true of life—you can turn back to page one and live it all over again.

Dear Readers, I hope you have been having a lovely autumn. The 1985 Anne of Green Gables used to come on PBS on Thanksgiving when I was a child, so I always associate it with the coziness of time of year. What books for you feel like home? Please let me know in the comments!

We argue and I take a shower and by the time we leave it’s late. I wonder if people who are so different from each other in so many ways are always bound to argue. Or is it that people who love passionately and intensely also fight passionately and intensely? I am wearing an ugly outfit because we are going to do what they call “hiking,” although to be honest I have never been able to tell the difference between “hiking” and walking. I have a suspicion “hiking” is just walking but in ugly clothes.

Weather is sunny and placable, cool enough not to burn, warm enough not to bite. Early October. The last time I visited the White Mountains was four years ago; now my father is dead and I am married. Do places remember people who have visited them, just as we remember places? Do they sense us coming back to them, do they thrill at the respectful, the awed lover of beauty, dread the indifferent, the boorish and rude?

Leaves flash goldly as we drive. The foliage is like an ornate border for the highway’s black ribbon. When you cross over from Massachusetts to New Hampshire you can sense an immediate change in the drivers. They are calmer; perhaps it’s the nature, though it’s not as though New Hampshire lacks cities. We pass through several: Derry, Manchester, Concord. The gleaming dome of the New Hampshire State House provides another friendly flash of gold. An hour’s drive or so later, we find ourselves suddenly in the mountains: lofty vistas, thick with trees, rise up around and beyond us; the road dips and arches. The world is vast here. Beauty dispels bad feelings, or at least distracts from them, and we are happy. Beauty is the cure for all maladies.

The town of Lincoln, with its ski lodges and resorts and ziplines and restaurants all crammed into the center of it, as though deposited in a heap at the foot of the mountains, is just as I remembered it. True, usually nothing changes in four years, but when your life itself has changed so much in that interval, you half-expect the world to follow suit. The Kancamagus Highway is much slower: it is a scenic highway, a fun highway, a highway of diversions and amusements and views and secrets, with rivers and waterfalls lurking behind its screen of trees and hikes every few feet that trail off into sylvan delights and overlooks that are tailor-made for that drone you bought three years ago—a road that, as they say, is its own destination.

We abandon plans to visit a gorge—it turns out to require an $18 ticket, and all the tickets are sold out, anyway. Kancamagus was the last sagamore, or chief, of the Pennacook confederacy of Native Americans. Tired of dissension with and disease from the English settlers, he moved his people northward. What would he thought of a waterfall you have to pay to see? But before I can indulge in this thrilling thought experiment my husband locates a waterfall that requires no ticket, is not sold out, and costs nothing to see but a short, lovely trek through the woods.

The woods. What I love about them is their layering of textures, which in itself becomes a texture: rough, rich, earthy, scarred, dark. There is so much detail in everything your eyes land upon—bark so scratchy and knobbly you seem feel it with your sense of sight; the green spongy fur of moss; dark, water-stained rock sprinkled with faded, pale fallen leaves. The roots of trees twist down into mysterious recesses, and overhead leaves tinged yellow and ochre make a rustic roof. A brook lisps over stones and in the distance falls in a continuous chime, collecting in a clear, sapphire pool.

Walking up a flight of wooden stairs and across a narrow bridge, we follow the water as it runs from its source deeper and deeper into the woods’ tawny heart, until all others are left behind and it is just ourselves in a secluded hollow. The shallow water courses swiftly around the large round rocks; the rocky waterbed is very close to the surface and lucid in the late afternoon light, and the river runs over it like invisible silk. Between the evergreens are sparks of glorious orange. We are tempted by beauty and seclusion into taking our shoes and socks off and clamber over the rocks until we reach a moss-blanketed seat, just large enough for two, with two smaller rocks in front of it like little footstools. Indeed it as though the woods have formed a kind of living room for us, “sheltered from annoy,”1 where instead of screens we can contemplate the streams. How could Shelley have compared autumn leaves to “ghosts” and “pestilence-stricken multitudes”?2 Moving downstream, bright, vivid, whirled, they look instead like tiny barges for pixies, or like thoughts, some lazy, eddying, content to float and drift, others passing rapidly, revolved this way and that in the current.

The air here is bracing and cool and pure. The water is cold when we dip our feet in but “absolutely clear,”3 shallow, swift, cleaner than the wind. Our feet emerge rosy, slightly wrinkled, and we rub them against each other’s for warmth and lie down on the rock and look up at the sky, whose blue is crowded in with cloud and pine and flamelike maple. The air darkens quickly; we are loath to leave. The sky is an October purple, the trees black silhouettes, and the full moon peeps out of them, an eye aglow. We stop at a scenic overlook. The daytime crowds have dispersed. Over the jeweled acres of multicolored foliage the moon is the principal jewel, a mother-of-pearl pendant set in amethyst. It follows us in the rearview mirror as the woods get darker and darker, watchful, I’d like to think, and protective.

My husband takes us to the Gypsy Cafe in Lincoln, a place I’ve been badly wanting to return to, remembering my father, how we stopped by for lunch and my father’s sugar was running low then and we ordered dessert first, a chocolate lava cake, and my father shared it with my mother and me. We are turned away at the door; the restaurant is full. My husband asks me if I want to go anywhere else, but my dream is shattered, and to go anywhere else would only crush its fragments more finely. Absurdly, thinking of my father, I cry in the car. Had I thought that by reliving every experience we’d had together I’d be able to bring him back somehow?

Husband is tired. Tempers fray. I make myself useful by locating cheap gas in what turns out to be the cutest imaginable town. It is called Plymouth but is sans Rock. Instead there is a strip of old-fashioned storefronts on Main Street that looks like a movie set, as though you could push any one of these façades over with a touch of the finger. The words “ICE CREAM PARLOR” in noble tall gold lettering catch my eye. “ICE CREAM PARLOR” is really called MnM Scoops. It shares its space with “The READERY BOOKS & THINGS,” which is disappointingly closed and dark but temptingly visible. The menu is handwritten on chalkboard set off by a pastel pink-yellow-and-sea-green-striped wall. A handsome wooden counter with tall rickety wooden chairs. We get a sundae, salted caramel chocolate pretzel with hot fudge and Heath bar and whipped cream and a cherry on top, and smile at each other between creamy, melting spoonfuls. I have wanted so badly to repeat the past that I have blinded myself to the present. I take a pastel-striped “Frequent Licker Card” as a souvenir. Nine more scoops and the tenth is free.

Hi readers, I hope you enjoyed this little piece! It was a little more diaristic than what I usually write, but I love the task of sifting through my memories and trying to describe different places and experiences—please let me know your thoughts in the comments, as I always enjoy hearing from you!

“We’ll be raided again by the village of East Hampton,” Edith Bouvier Beale, “Little Edie,” says to Edith Bouvier Beale, “Big Edie,” in that unmistakable voice of hers: mid-century, mid-Atlantic, upper-class, New York. “You know, they can get you in East Hampton for wearing red shoes on a Thursday and all that sort of thing.” Shots of cars driving by trim houses on manicured streets. Neat windmills, neat beaches, neat ponds with neat reflections. Neat mansions, neat lawns. Roses twine symmetrically, artfully rustically, around a wooden paling. Grass is green and short and swept. Not a stray twig or branch peeps out of the bushes that dot the landscape like little green puddings. Then there is another house. Half-hidden, ambushed (pun intended) by shrubbery, encroached upon by the green growth that springs and spreads and chaoses around it like a suburban jungle, it nevertheless has an unassuming dignity about it, the dignity of old things gone half to seed. In large white letters appear the words “Grey Gardens”: the name of the house, the name of the movie.

The raid whose repetition Little Edie so feared occurred in 1971. Complaints had been coming in from neighbors, so one October day a team of twelve inspectors sallied forth to see what kind of double trouble the witches of East Hampton had been getting up to in their haunted house. They were greeted by feral cats and cobwebs, fleas and raccoons and garbage. The water didn’t run, the furnace didn’t work. The Suffolk County Health Department issued an order to the Beales: Clean up. Clean up—or face eviction. This story would have been content to remain just an interesting little piece of neighborhood lore, a mere local curiosity, had the two women not been aunt and first cousin to Jacqueline Lee Kennedy Onassis, née Bouvier, former First Lady of the United States.

When the media got wind of the fact that the relations of one of the richest, one of the most glamorous, one of the most elegant women in the world were living in such poverty, such filth and such squalor, they took the story and ran with it. To her credit, Onassis, along with her sister Lee Radziwill, contributed tens of thousands of dollars for the house to be cleaned and repaired and made inhabitable. Radziwill, moreover, introduced the Beales to the Maysles, the Maysles to the Beales. She had the idea that a documentary should be made about East Hampton, about the world of her childhood, a world of debutantes and the Maidstone Club and homemade peach ice cream. As they started shooting some footage, the filmmakers realized that the real fascination lay not in Jackie and Lee but in Edie and Edie. It was they who were the more stylish, the more “staunch,” the more stupendously, starrily stagy. So Jackie and Lee left, but Albert and David came back, came back to shoot the film that would grow in stature and in influence over the next five decades to be voted by the public as the best documentary ever made.

Documentary: “The Sublime is a documentary technique,” says Anne Carson. When the strange Sublime of the Beales reached its critical mass, documents came fast and thick. The order issued by the Suffolk County Health Department was a document of one kind, the newspaper and magazine articles that began to appear were documents of another. What the Maysles brothers were creating was also a document—document, from the Latin docere, “to teach.” What kind of Sublime is it we are being taught through this documentary? It is a documentary thin on plot and fact. No narrator, no nondiegetic music. Instead, there are little sunny slices of this odd life, like slices of an orange: bright, zesty, there to be sucked to the rind. If you saw someone lecturing on an orange, you would roll your eyes. The best way to learn about an orange is to eat it.

But in Grey Gardens edibility is questionable. You may not even notice the oranges because of all the rubbish; I didn’t. When I first watched the film I was appalled by disorder and disintegration; a visceral sense of disgust furred through me like mold. I shuddered when I saw raccoons abscond with half-eaten slices of Wonder Bread; I shivered as Little Edie went up those dark horror-movie steps in her high heels to the damp, dank attic. Yet the more times you watch the movie, the more all of that melts into the background. You let the raccoons have their slices, and you come to enjoy your own. You can start to taste the beauty, the zest. And you realize that perhaps this is what has happened to the Beales, this is maybe why they can stand to live like this.

Life was not always like this for them. Everywhere are remnants of past glory, like the tatters of a silk taffeta ballgown. Early on in the film, Little Edie—her instincts as an artist are unerring—brings out some of this memorabalia (how my more fallible artistic instincts itch to type “memoraBealeia”!) for the camera. In the world’s and in the Beales’ history, these poignant black-and-white photographs document another era. Here is Big Edie’s wedding picture, here is her husband and his handwritten scrawl (“So we did love each other”), here are the children when they were young, here is an old, old picture of Big Edie, a soft sepia profile in an oval. “It’s just a girl from a good French family… It’s a very beautiful face,” says Little Edie.

The same description does very well for Little Edie herself, and it is hard not to compare her to her more famous cousin. Wealthy, beautiful, stylish girls, twelve years apart, from the same “good family.” Little Edie was known then as “The Body Beautiful.” From photographs of her at fashion shows, she seems to have been a natural model, not only beautiful but poised and interesting, the kind of body that knows in its bones how to wear clothes. Throughout the film, she names rich men who proposed to her, men like the men Jackie actually married. Both are fashion icons today, one a byword for elegance, the other for eccentricity; with her retro bathing suits, Edie seems perpetually frozen at the end of a diving board, forever about to leap off into the life Jackie actually lived out.

So what happened? While Big Edie lives in a world of protesting “had”s (“I had everything I wanted,” “I was a great singer,” “I had a perfect marriage”) and Little Edie lives in a world of pregnant “could have”s (could have stayed in New York, could have become a star dancer, could have married this man or that man or that man or that man), one wonders if they really had or could have, given their family circumstances. John Vernou Bouvier Jr., patriarch of that “good French family,” was a New York stockbroker and a lawyer. Edith Ewing Bouvier, his daughter, was a New York eccentric and a singer. She married Phelan Beale, a partner in her father’s law firm, in 1917. In 1924, they bought the 28-room Grey Gardens, and in 1931, after they had had a daughter and two sons together, Phelan left her, left her dependent on her father for resources. But her father was no more tolerant of her love for singing and piano-playing, her artistic, theatric quirks, than her husband had been. After she turned up late to her son’s wedding, making a grand entrance in operatic costume, her father neatly trimmed her inheritance down from $825,000 to $65,000 in his will, doled out at an allowance of $300 per month, controlled by her sons. This was a document clearly intended to teach something. But it is very well neither Edie bothered to learn the lesson.

Fathers, brothers, husbands, sons—they all recede, or remain as spectral presences, either revered or feared. Little Edie recalls the rattling knees and dry mouth that were the symptoms of entering her father’s orbit: “Take that hat off, take that lipstick off, take that nail polish off.” Nom du père, indeed! Ever speculating about the past, she muses, “I needed training, where was I to get the training?” Then she remembers. “My father was alive, that was it. Mr. Beale would’ve had me committed.” Big Edie, meanwhile, is “crazy about” the sons who left, drives crazy the daughter who stayed behind.

The world of Grey Gardens is thus a feminine world, a matriarchal world. How to characterize the relationship between Big and Little Edie, except to say that the mother-daughter relationship, in all its fraught, tender intricacies, has never been so well-documented? Here is affection, and here is resentment; here is attachment, and here is reproach. Sharing the same name, the same house, the same unfulfilled artistic yearning, the same disregard for convention, the same taste for performance, mother and daughter overlap, blur, clash. Mother is who daughter might become, daughter is who mother could have been. Mother suffocates daughter, while daughter alternately resists and bends willingly to mother.

It is easy to read Big Edie as villain and Little Edie as victim. Big Edie limited her daughter’s life simply because and in the same way her own was limited. Big Edie unleashed her revenge for her life’s regrets upon her daughter. Big Edie subsumed her daughter’s needs and desires into her own. There were men Little Edie liked, but Mother didn’t like them. There were proposals Little Edie got, but Mother rejected them. There was an audition Little Edie had, but Mother pressured her all from March through July of 1952 to come back home—come back home and stay there for a quarter of a century. Abandoned by everybody, Big Edie has tightened the umbilical leash (or noose, if you ask Little Edie) on the only person who will stay. When Little Edie sings, Big Edie screeches at her to stop, even though when Little Edie leaves the room, Big Edie confesses to the Maysles that her daughter sings beautifully: “Better voice than I have.”

As for Little Edie, the environment of her mother’s home is both fertile womb and airless tomb. Maybe it really is all because of her mother that she never married, never had children, never had a career. Then again, you get the feeling that it is the dream she cherishes and not the realization, the possibility, not the fulfillment, the “road not taken” (she quotes from Frost’s poem at one point in the film), stretching on and on to who knows where. In contrast to the unreal unlived life, Grey Gardens is the real realm of make-believe; in their odd Eden, Edie and Edie need never curb their Edie-osyncrasies.1

So as much as Grey Gardens suffocates, it also protects, serving as the walled garden that shelters its inhabitants from the outside world, which is ever threatening to break through the thick green tangle that envelops the house. “You’re in this world, you know, you’re not out of this world,” Big Edie tells Little Edie. But the viewer doubts the veracity of that statement as it applies to both Edies. They are constantly losing their grasp of time. Little Edie doesn’t wear a watch, has to ask for the date. The way she sees the world is metamorphosed through magnifying glasses and binoculars. Things get lost around the house, outside of the house in the “complete sea of leaves.” A book is found in the attic that Little Edie doesn’t remember putting there, setting off a chain of increasingly paranoid conjectures. Men—the Maysles brothers; the gardener Brooks; Jerry “the Marble Faun” Torre, a teenager who helps the women around the house; Norman Vincent Peale, who thunders out an ethos of “No emotionalism, never give up”; the absent Mr. Beale, whom Little Edie recalls for his unforgiving punctuality; the longed-for “Libra man” who might provide “an ordered life” by acting as “a manager”—are the outside world’s representatives. They are trappers and escape hatches, controllers of time and money and chances. They could organize the chaos but could also destroy the creativity it engenders. They threaten the women with order, sex, washing machines.2

“It’s very difficult to keep the line between the past and the present. You know what I mean? It’s awfully difficult,” says Little Edie. But between them, the women are content to be two ghosts drifting between passed present and present past, speaking their own private language of memories and songs and squabbles that repeat so often they become like lines from a play. “Tea for two / and two for tea / Me for you / and you for me,” Big Edie sings. The words become tenderly touching as they wrap around this intimacy both tragic and sublime.

In one corner of the yellow bedroom the women share is a beautiful painted portrait of a young Mrs. Beale, classically, startlingly lovely in her gilt frame. A little black cat pokes out his naughty head; he’s been using it to screen his potty time from the world. “Oh, isn’t that awful?” asks Little Edie. “No, I’m glad he is,” replies Big Edie. “I’m glad somebody’s doing something they want to do.” And indeed, where else can they encourage the free run of a thousand cats, where else can they write lines of poetry on the walls, but Grey Gardens? With whom else can they sing old songs while wearing big stripy floppy hats, dance old dances while wearing wild headscarves and makeshift skirts pinned over tights, but with each other?

One gets the feeling that they were performers in search of a camera, waiting, readying, steadying themselves for their closeup. Proponents of what they called “direct cinema,” cinéma vérité’s North American cousin, the Maysles were a camera in search of performers. They were not exactly flies on the wall, though; you can hear the Beales talking to them almost as if they were close friends, and near the end of the film, panning away to give Mrs. Beale some privacy in her dishabille, they land on themselves in the mirror, decked in their filming equipment. This lends the movie a peculiar warmth: “It’s the Maysles!” “Hi Edie, gentleman callers.”

After these gentlemen callers “toss[ed] the rind and skate[d] away,”3 what happened? In 1977, Big Edie died of pneumonia. Little Edie moved to New York City and starred in her own campy cabaret show, performing to her own songs and songs of a bygone era, including “Tea for Two.” Then she moved to Florida, where she could pursue to her heart’s content another of her favorite passions—swimming. She died in 2002, having kept sporadic contact with Albert Maysles.4 As for Grey Gardens, the house was sold first to Ben Bradlee and Sally Quinn, who then sold it to Liz Lange, a fashion designer. As for Grey Gardens, it has found an afterlife in parodies and in musicals, on runways and in books. Nothing, however, beats the original. “There’s nothing more to say, it’s all in the film,” Big Edie reportedly told Little Edie on her deathbed when asked if she had any last words. There is a truth, then, after all, to what she says in the film—“I did, I had my cake, loved it, masticated it, chewed it… I had everything I wanted.”

All good works of art are like the river of Heraclitus; you can swim in them again and again and find them different again and again, offering up different facets, different lessons, different glints and glimmers. Being capacious, they can hold your Protean shifts of self, expanding with you, growing with you. Grey Gardens especially so. This, I think, is what chiefly lies behind its popularity and its staying power. Depending on who you are or where you are in life, it could be a reminder to give your living space a good scrubbing. A portrait of the love and pain, the push and pull, the million tensions and emotions and complications that underscore the relationship between mother and daughter, parent and child. An exhortation to move out, a warning to live life according your own laws, on your own income, in your own home. A gentle nudge to move in, to spend more time with an aging parent, to hear their stories, which will soon pass out of memory like the stories of us all, so that the past may find a continuance in the present. A lookbook, an endless fount of fashion at its most resourceful, a masterclass in personal style. A radical vision of the animal world coexisting with the human, an acknowledgement that we are all God’s creatures. A raid. An homage to S-T-A-U-N-C-H women. A comedy with a great double act. A tragedy. A camp musical, staged domestically. A gothic horror story. A reality show, precursor to both Hoarders and Keeping Up with the Kardashians. A house tour, a strange lesson in interior design. A gathering up of the tatters of a faded aristocracy. An anthropological study. A feminist argument for women’s financial independence. An interesting way to spend an afternoon on Mother’s Day. An ode to aging, to the joys of growing older, to wrinkled sunwarmed flesh.

Most of all, I suspect, Grey Gardens owes its success to the fact that no one has yet devised a medium that can transmit smell. “We couldn’t take it. The smell was too pervasive” is the reason Albert gives for why the Maysles didn’t live in the house while filming. What is preserved instead is a series of images, moments, amber-colored dreams. The film’s first shot is of the house’s porch from the inside, a screen door and two windows that glow with greenery, and then the camera turns around to zoom in on Big Edie talking, rocking on a chair from behind a railing. The film’s last shot is of Little Edie dancing with zest and abandon, crooning to herself, also from behind a railing. The camera is just a guest in this ghost realm that teems with life, just a visitor to the Garden of Edie. But even a glimpse, even a slice of sight can be enough to see someone clearly by, if our minds and our hearts are open. “Mother used to say there’s good in everybody,” said Albert Maysles. “I make sure to get that.”

Dear Readers, last week was the 50th anniversary of Grey Gardens, which prompted me to rewatch it, which prompted me to write this essay! I hope you enjoyed. If you did, please like this post, restack, share with a friend, subscribe to Soul-Making, or tell me your thoughts in the comments—I always love hearing from you!

There is nothing more beautiful than a prospect of pure, unspoiled snow, and there is nothing more fun than to walk across it, step in it, stamp on it, kick it, pack it, throw it, ruffle it. “It all comes back to that, to my and your ‘fun,’” Henry James tells us archly in the preface to his 1904 novel The Golden Bowl. But The Golden Bowl is written in a style so dense and convoluted that any notion of “fun” may be the furthest thing from your mind when you read it. It is a book that makes the brain feel all wobbly around the edges, like custard.

At the opening of Bleak House, Charles Dickens describes fog blanketing landscapes and rolling down rivers, fog settling over marshes and clouding moors, fog sailing in on ships and setting out on barges, fog ruining the respiratory systems of wheezing geezers and pinching the toes of young “’prentices,” fog drooping, creeping, falling, looming, mystifying the world with its great gauzy scarves of mist. He traces this fog to the High Court of Chancery, seat of obfuscation and complication. In The Golden Bowl, fog, too, is general, but what it pervades is the text, not the streets of London, and its source is James himself, seat of obfuscation and complication.

One may explain this fog by pointing to James’ personality, to his preference as a writer for labyrinthine elaboration and baroque complexity, to the fact that the novel was not actually written, in the strictest sense, by James, but rather dictated, like Milton’s Paradise Lost, or to the fact that it was written during James’ last, third phase as a novelist (rehearsing, of course, the old joke of naming these phases “James I,” “James II,” and “The Old Pretender”). “Pretend” is actually the operative word here; it happens often in the novel, and its action is perfectly suited to James’ prevaricating words.

A quick rundown of the plot: a rich young American woman, Maggie Verver, and her rich American industrialist father, Adam Verver, are in London for Maggie’s wedding to the cash-poor but status-rich Italian Prince Amerigo, whom Adam has “bought” for his daughter. Unbeknownst to Maggie or her father, the Prince once had a relationship with Maggie’s childhood friend, Charlotte Stant, but—she being as impoverished as he—the two failed to marry. Charlotte rematerializes on the eve of Maggie’s wedding, ends up marrying Maggie’s father, and what is set in motion is a kind of backwards Elective Affinities, where the chemical reaction AB + CD = AD + BC must be reversed.

James explains his novel as operating by a “rotary” motion, a “vicious circle.”1 Fanny Assingham, who set Maggie up with the Prince in the first place in spite of being fully aware of his romance with Charlotte, gives us a fuller picture of this “vicious circle,” explaining it to her husband Colonel Bob Assingham (Fanny and Bob function as stand-ins for James and the reader). First Maggie has to “make up to her father” for having become “so intensely married.” Then she has to “make up to her husband” for spending so much time with her father; this she accomplishes by “allowing the Prince the use, the enjoyment, whatever you may call it, of Charlotte.” This, in turn, has the result of taking her father’s new wife from his side, so to make up for that, Maggie is “saddle[d]… with a positively new obligation to her father, an obligation created and aggravated by her unfortunate, even if quite heroic, little sense of justice.” So the circle turns and turns, and Maggie and her father go off blithely to enjoy the same father-daughter chumminess they’ve always enjoyed, and Charlotte and Amerigo tryst in wayside inns, and Fanny Assingham gossips about it all to Bob Assingham, and everyone lies and lies.

The first part of the novel is told from the perspective of the Prince, but really most of the novel is from Maggie’s point of view, and it is Maggie who is our main character. She is a more interesting heroine than we—and the Prince and Charlotte—can appreciate at first, and that is mainly because everyone underestimates her. For the Prince and Charlotte, Maggie and her father can be nothing but good and innocent. “I can feel that I’d do anything—to shield [Maggie’s skin] from a bruise,” Charlotte says to the Prince. Adam, too, is “in truth of a sweet simplicity—!” So they vow to lie, to take “a conscious care” that their affair does not get back to their respective sposi, and “with a violence that had sighed itself the next moment to the longest and deepest of stillnesses they passionately sealed their pledge.” But little by little, little Maggie Verver is in the background gathering up the clues, sniffing out the lies, reading between the lines of the fragments and half-sentences everyone speaks in. She becomes gradually aware of “the horror of the thing hideously behind, behind so much trusted, so much pretended nobleness, cleverness, tenderness.”

But her object above all is to keep this from her father. It was she, after all, who encouraged him to marry, it was she who introduced him to Charlotte, it was for her sake that he married. I suspect that Maggie’s father is much more clever, much more knowledgeable than Maggie and the others believe him to be (how else could he have become as wealthy as he is, or as reputed an art collector, if he were not a shrewd businessman?), and also much less simple and innocent. It is “for his daughter,” so that his daughter does not feel any guilt of having placed him in an unhappy situation, that he pretends he does not “so vividly see,” just as he marries so that she does not feel she has abandoned him. Father and daughter have a circumlocuitous conversation in the garden. They understand each other. The result is that Charlotte and Adam will sail back to “American City,” while Maggie and Amerigo will continue to live in London. The threats to their marriage shipped off, husband and wife, Prince and Princess, can now, at last, safely turn to each other.

Critics complain that James’ symbolism of the golden bowl is too heavy-handed to be elegant, but in a world built on evasions and insinuations, can one wonder that metaphor is mighty? On the eve of Maggie’s wedding, Charlotte asks the Prince to accompany her to find a wedding present for Maggie. They end up in the shop of an antiquary, who offers them an old, golden bowl, a bowl of gilded crystal. Amerigo instantly sees that it “has a crack” and dissuades Charlotte from buying it:

“Per Dio, I’m superstitious! A crack is a crack—and an omen’s an omen.”

“You’d be afraid—?”

“Per Bacco!”

“For your happiness?”

“For my happiness.”

“For your safety?”

“For my safety.”

She just paused. “For your marriage?”

“For my marriage. For everything.”

Later, four years later, Maggie decides to walk home one evening and pauses at the same antiquary’s shop, thinking to get a birthday present for her father. The antiquary shows Maggie the golden bowl, and she purchases it. She doesn’t notice the crack. Regretting that he has overcharged her and failed to point out the flaw, the antiquary drops by Maggie and the Prince’s home to personally deliver the bowl. While at their home, he sees photographs of the Prince and Charlotte and recognizes them as the striking couple who had almost bought the bowl. The pair had spoken Italian, but he happens to understand Italian. How unforgettable this couple, how close and how intimate!

That day he reveals not only that there is a crack in Maggie’s bowl, there is a crack in Maggie’s marriage. The bowl is gilded, not gold; the marriage is gilded, not gold. Crystal does not break like glass, but it can split “on lines and by laws of its own.” Before they all go out for dinner, Maggie calls for Fanny Assingham, tells her what she has learned, points out the flaw in the gilded crystal. “I want a happiness without a hole in it…. The golden bowl—as it WAS to have been…. The bowl without the crack.” In the novel’s most violent scene, Fanny holds the bowl up and drops it to the marble floor, as though dropping it, destroying it, sweeping it away, will simply drop and destroy and sweep away the affair:

“Or ever the silver cord be loosed, or the golden bowl be broken, or the pitcher be broken at the fountain, or the wheel broken at the cistern. Then shall the dust return to the earth as it was: and the spirit shall return unto God who gave it. Vanity of vanities, saith the preacher; all is vanity.”2

To anyone looking from the outside in, the tale of this claustrophobic but gilded foursome, ensconced in the Ververs’ wealth, going from city house to country house, from country house to city house, playing cards, paying visits, lying and deceiving and hiding and dissimulating—it all really does look like “vanity of vanities.” But for Maggie Verver, on the inside, to let the broken bowl be broken is unthinkable, unbearable. She picks up the pieces. Anybody can break a bowl, but it takes a certain special skill to mend one.

Maggie Verver reminds me of the similarly named and similarly underestimated May Archer (née Welland) of Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence, published 16 years later in 1920. May is not the novel’s main character; in fact, she seems rather peripheral to the requited but unconsummated love between her fiancée, then husband, Newland Archer, and her cousin, Countess Ellen Olenska. The novel is basically a history of his blunders; as my husband remarked, watching the excellent Scorsese adaptation with me, he “takes an L in every scene.” In that way it operates on a principle similar to James’ “rotary” motion, where one mistake spawns another, which has to be covered up by yet another, which only reinforces the original mistake.

Because Ellen’s separation from her husband brings an unwelcome whiff of scandal to his fiancée’s family, Newland feels he must waft it away by announcing his engagement to May as soon as possible. To continue this project of endorsing Ellen for his fiancée’s sake, or so he thinks, he visits her, sits with her, talks to her. He tells her not to go through her divorce and puts in a request to the mountainous, mighty matriarch of his fiancée’s clan for a hasty engagement period. But just when he and Ellen realize their feelings for one another, a telegram comes in like a clap of thunder, stating that his and May’s wedding will take place within a month. He runs after Ellen, then runs away to May. There is still possibly a window in which he might break off his engagement, but he goes through with the wedding. This way and that way, then, he attempts to loose the fetters of matrimony, but his new wife is smarter than he suspects, and society itself—of which his wife is simply the ideal figurehead—is smarter than he suspects, and so May, by revealing her pregnancy, manages it so that Ellen will be shipped off to Europe, will be given independent means, will not have to return to her dreaded husband, but will be out of May’s hair and out of May’s marriage. Newland now, dream as he might, cannot travel—to Europe or anywhere—without bringing his pregnant wife along with him. His wife’s “blue eyes,” into which he has looked so many times and seen only surfaces, shine “wet with victory.”

Always for him May has been blank, smooth, simple, incurious, unimaginative. Twice he looks at her with “the simple joy of possessorship,” with “a thrill of possessorship in which pride in his own masculine initiation was mingled with a tender reverence for her abysmal purity.” He, with the great education that being male has afforded him in this society, thinks with a benevolent condescension of how he might expand May’s mind, introduce to her the great works of literature, throw open vistas “which it would be his manly privilege to reveal to his bride.” He laments the plight of “‘nice’ women” of his class who do not “speak for themselves”; he sees them as having “bandaged eyes,” or eyes like those of “the Kentucky cave-fish, which had ceased to develop eyes because they had no use for them.” He thinks that even if he were to remove the bandage, these eyes would “only look out blankly at blankness.”

But May’s final masterstroke reveals her social and emotional genius. Poor Newland is somewhere stumbling around, blundering, floundering, falling into traps, all the while thinking himself so much smarter, so much more advanced, so much more evolved than the people around him. Meanwhile, May with her blank look and blank simplicity and “blank” questions is playing a game so subtle he can’t even see where he is on the board. It is only near the end of the novel, when May is hosting, triumphantly, a farewell dinner to send her cousin Ellen off to Europe, that Newland realizes that

The silent organisation which held his little world together was determined to put itself on record as never for a moment having questioned the propriety of Madame Olenska’s conduct, or the completeness of Archer’s domestic felicity…. from this tissue of elaborate mutual dissimulation Archer once more disengaged the fact that New York believed him to be Madame Olenska’s lover. He caught the glitter of victory in his wife’s eyes, and for the first time understood that she shared the belief.

Both James and Wharton were friends, both were chroniclers of the lives of upper class Americans, and both were expats. Expats are better at understanding their native country; distance, geographical or emotional, enhances understanding. With distance one sees the whole picture and the picture frame, one sees the wall where the picture is hung, one compares the picture with the others hung in the gallery and notices perhaps that brushstroke, this flaw. Just as Joyce left Dublin but his imagination could not, so, too, had James and Wharton left America and Americans only to write about them with a renewed depth and verve.

Maggie and May are portraits of a certain type of American womanhood, embodiments of a certain type of American virtue. We may see them as morally bad, or at least gray, for separating two lovers, trapping their husbands (and themselves) in marriages that are not wholly happy. Yet the endings of their two novels present them as triumphant, embodiments of the winged goddess Nike, or if chaste Diana, Diana the huntress who hits her mark straight through the heart. Whatever we may think of the domestic sphere they defend, they are successful in its defense; they manage to fend off foreign threats to American morality.

For it is no accident that their romantic rivals are Europeanized Americans. Charlotte Stant spent her childhood in Florence and speaks perfect Italian, an Italian that the Prince “had known neither man nor woman who showed for it Charlotte’s almost mystifying instinct.” Ellen, meanwhile, spent many of her formative years in Europe, married a Polish count, and often shows an ignorance of American conventions and unspoken norms. Both of them suggest sexual experience and a kind of European worldliness—an instinctual kinship with art and culture and good conversation and bohemian je ne sais quoi. When Adam takes Charlotte back with him to American City, we feel that she is just another one of the Old World objets d’art he brings back with him, one of the fine paintings or marble sculptures, to be shut up in what will be for her less a museum than a mausoleum.

Where the Europeans differ from the Americans in the way that matters is morally. Europe is a land of experience, America of innocence. The Americans are content to enjoy—want to enjoy, with all their wealth—all the fruits of European culture, in however bastardized a form (think of the performance of Faust Newland watches at the opera house, German sung in Italian for an English-speaking audience), and at the same time cut out the canker in the apple, the rot in the fruit they see as slack European morals. “We haven’t got it—not as you have,” Prince Amerigo, woefully Italian, tells Fanny Assingham of the moral sense,

“I mean, always, as you others consider it. I’ve of course something that in our poor dear backward old Rome sufficiently passes for it. But it’s no more like yours than the tortuous stone staircase—half-ruined into the bargain!—in some castle of our quattrocento is like the ‘lightning elevator’ in one of Mr. Verver’s fifteen-storey buildings. Your moral sense works by steam—it sends you up like a rocket. Ours is slow and steep and unlighted, with so many of the steps missing that—well, that it’s as short, in almost any case, to turn round and come down again.”

We can contrast this with Edith Wharton’s characterization of old New York society, which she recollects from her childhood in A Backwards Glance. Though this society had a few families who “could show a pedigree leading back to the aristocracy of their ancestral country,” the origins of most families lay in “a mercantile middle class”; it was primarily a “commercial community” who felt it tantamount to uphold a “scrupulous probity in business and private affairs.” New Money though he may be, Adam Verver, coming from the archetypal “American City,” is the archetypal American businessman, an inheritor of this American moral tradition. James compares his face to a “small decent room, clean-swept and unencumbered with furniture.” He dresses, “every day of the year,” the same way, and he keeps his “unfathomable heart” behind “the constant flawless freshness of [his] white waistcoat.”

Everyone in the novel wrings their hands so much about what Adam Verver may or may not know, how—as though he is a frail old man and not the sprightly 47-year-old that he is—to protect him, how to cover his ears, how to keep him ignorant and therefore innocent. It is true that he mostly seems to recede into the background. Yet he has mastered the skill of knowing without seeming to know, saying without speaking, maneuvering without moving, a skill his daughter learns over the course of the novel, a skill May has from the beginning of The Age of Innocence. The Maggie version of What Maisie Knew would be What Maggie Knew, but the May version would be Does May Know?—a delicious ambiguity that is ever fruitful.

Reticence, blankness, innocence—these are survival skills. The surface of the fruit remains unspoiled and golden as ever, but underneath it something is ripening, something is maturing. One must cast off the rosy romantic ideal, the girlish, childish quest for the Holy Grail that is the bowl never broken. Like Newland Archer, Maggie comes to see that “marriage was not the safe anchorage [s]he had been taught to think, but a voyage on uncharted seas,” that faith cannot be “divided… into water-tight compartments” after all. Life is no flawless crystal; its cracks are its “lines and laws.” Moral perfection is impossible, for there is always some sacrifice, some compromise we must make, some invisible flaw we must allow for in order to possess the beautiful object. Maggie cannot fulfill her duties as a wife without a painful rending from the father who is like a second self to her, nor without hurting her childhood friend, nor even her husband himself, who must become indifferent to a woman he was once intimate with.

Maggie begins the novel as a moral idealist and ends it as a moral pragmatist. May, too, I think, is a moral pragmatist, and makes the best choices she can in her circumstances, though they are necessarily imperfect ones. Before her wedding with Newland, she is shrewd enough to detect that something is “off” about him and gives him an out—if there is someone else, she tells him, she wants to know: “You mustn’t think that a girl knows as little as her parents imagine.” If her fiancée loves this other person, she will relinquish her claim on him, she won’t get in the way of “two people [who] really love each other,” she is even, against her upbringing and her training, willing to approve that these two people “should go against public opinion.” All this, as she tells him, because “I couldn’t have my happiness made out of a wrong—an unfairness—to somebody else.”

But it is Newland who messes up, who does not have the emotional awareness to know what he feels and the moral strength to choose private feeling over public opinion at the moment it would cause the least damage to others. He doubles his mistake by doubling down on the necessity for a sped-up engagement. Once married, divorce is simply not an option in this society. So the best choice May can make is to banish her rival with as much dignity as can be managed, which is as much as Maggie does in The Golden Bowl. Nothing is broadcasted or made public about Newland and Ellen, allowing them (and May) to escape shame and embarrassment. Ellen is not sent back to the husband she hates; she can have Paris and conversation and art and beauty. Charlotte Stant, too, though doomed to be shut up in the airless, artless America, will be the wife of one of its richest denizens, which is not such a bad fate for someone who had been willing to give up love for pecuniary reasons in the past.

I admire the subtlety and the cunning with which these ends are achieved. Before the final coup de grâce, both women go to confront their rivals. May reveals her pregnancy to Ellen, a revelation that makes it morally impossible, especially in this time and this society, for Ellen to “take” Newland away from May. Later May unfolds another revelation, to Newland, that she had done this before she was really sure of her pregnancy—she had told a lie.

When Maggie confronts Charlotte in the garden, she, too, tells a lie. Charlotte tells Maggie that she is “tired,” tired of the life that all of them have been leading, the life in which Maggie and her father’s intimacy leaves Charlotte to sort for herself. Maggie leads Charlotte on with a series of “innocent” questions; “her chance somehow was at hand,” and she takes the chance, attempting with every step of conversation “to follow the right line.” When Charlotte says that she knows what “[her] difficulty” is in making a “definite break” from Europe, Maggie feels, “far down below the level of attention, in she could scarce have said what sacred depths,” a flash of inspiration, and asks ingeniously, “Do you mean I’M your difficulty?” She plays her role perfectly, deliciously perfectly. With a “sharp, successful, almost primitive wail,” she adds, “You want to take my father FROM me?” Charlotte’s reaction confirms “for the Princess the felicity of her deceit.” The trick is that, in making Charlotte believe that she (Maggie) wants to cling on to her father, that she “loathe[s]” the marriage between her father and Charlotte, she inflames Charlotte’s desire all the more to save her marriage, which cannot be done without saving Maggie’s marriage. “You recognise then that you’ve failed?” Charlotte asks Maggie, thinking that what Maggie wants is to drive apart Charlotte and Adam. But what Maggie wants is to drive apart Charlotte and Amerigo. “I’ve failed!” Maggie replies, her victory complete. “Yes,” James confirms for us, “she had done all.”

All this is always conducted with scrupulous tact. Feelings may roil and boil, but no one is made to be publicly humiliated, scorned, or shamed. Losers are made to believe they’ve won, or at least given the face-saving of graceful defeat. Such games of tact and reticence, lying and manipulation, are largely women’s games. “I see it’s ALWAYS terrible for women,” Maggie says to her husband. The wife is cheated on; the mistress is callously cast off. In the absence of overt power, power must take covert forms, fighting its battles in the drawing room, the ballroom, the garden. As defenders of the moral sphere, women are supposed to be innocent; they are cosseted, coddled, kept in the dark; their sexuality, without which they cannot fully win the love of their husbands, is repressed. And yet their task requires that they not be ignorant: to drive out a snake lurking in the garden, one must first see it.

Sometimes I find myself filled with a strange nostalgia for this social world of such subtlety and such subterfuge, this “hieroglyphic world, where the real thing was never said or done or even thought, but only represented by a set of arbitrary signs,” and yet its moral trade-offs make me uncomfortable. I hate lying and yet I love reticence; I hate manipulation and yet I love tact. In this world a woman must have both the businessman’s “scrupulous probity” and his smarts. She must be a savvy trader in the commerce of words, in the market of emotions, but her wins cannot come at the total expense of another’s, for then the whole market would collapse; business would not be possible.

The Europeans in these stories are immoral (think of poor Ellen’s dastardly Polish count of a husband) or at least amoral; they experience life, life diverges from morals, they cast off morals. But the Americans at least seek to maintain the form of morals; they experience life, life diverges from morals, they try to effect a compromise between life and morals. Eaton Square where Maggie and the Prince live cannot be Eden—Adam gone from it, whisking away the serpentine Charlotte—but with the variance of a few letters it is as close as we may get in our fallen, our dropped bowl of a world. In Amerigo Vespucci’s time, the Old World colonized the New; in Prince Amerigo’s time, the New World colonizes the Old. “I see nothing but you,” Amerigo says to Maggie at the end of The Golden Bowl. So, too, in both novels, does the woman colonize the man, and the effects of it are difficult to look at in the face: “And the truth of it had, with this force, after a moment, so strangely lighted his eyes that, as for pity and dread of them, she buried her own in his breast.”

“Pity and dread,” yes, but not enough to swerve her from her mission. “He didn’t undertake to break down…. He had never in his life proposed to himself to have failed,” Fanny Assingham says of Maggie’s father, and the golden fruit does not fall far from the golden tree. Winning—this is a consistent pillar of American values, but Maggie and May, I think, love and respect the game, not just the victory. Now the game is gone, for this society is gone. It has its drawbacks, but it has its beauty, too. Its fascination, Wharton reflects, lies “for the imaginative few in the recognition of the moral treasures that went with it.”

Today, in a society where we are encouraged to “communicate,” where so much is exposed, exhibited, explicit, we may not fully appreciate such “moral treasures.” But I think Wharton is right in making a connection to the imagination. Fiction is a lie, but a lie that reveals the truth more than the truth itself would reveal it. What would be the point of fiction, would fiction even be possible, if everyone were able to say everything and know everything? Wharton masks knowledge by employing as her narrative vessel Newland Archer, who is always one step behind; James masks knowledge by the fine, silken spirals of words he weaves. Maybe it all really does come down to that, in the end, “to my and your ‘fun.’” Thank goodness there are “cracks in things that we don’t know.” Were we to know all the cracks and all the flaws, we could “never then give each other anything.” Ah! but we don’t know the cracks, and we are given to and given to, and our bowl runneth over, and our fun is endless.

Dear Readers, this essay is a bit longer than usual, but I hope you’ve enjoyed it! If you did, please like this post and share with a friend. And if you’ve read either of this books, I’d love to know your thoughts in the comments!

It is true that, female or male, our generation has thoroughly adopted the no caps style when it comes to texting and messaging each other. I remember, several years ago, going into the settings of my phone and purposely turning off auto-correction and auto-capitalization. To text each other with proper grammar, with periods and question marks and commas, with the beginnings of sentences and with proper nouns capitalized, in actual sentences, was like advertising your lack of cool. Visually, you were aligning yourself with the digitally clumsy Boomer generation. In recent years I’ve found myself adopting a kind of compromise—mostly lowercase with some punctuation, a properly capitalized sentence here or there—which must be a latent indicator of my now slow, now gradual, nevertheless deadly descent into middle age.

But I was surprised to see all lowercase afflict the essay form. Unless these essays were written on people’s phones—I can’t imagine writing an entire essay on a phone, but maybe, miraculously, people do it—writing something, especially something with pretensions to seriousness, something contemplative, something reflective, something that tries to say something meaningful, that tries to grapple with what words, even properly capitalized, are too often inadequate to grasp, that tries to traffic in the broader marketplace of ideas, in all lowercase is very difficult. It requires a continual dishabituation of learned conventions and the studied assumption of new ones.

If all caps shouts at you through the screen, no caps murmurs. If all caps is loud, aggressive, hostile, rude, no caps is quiet, passive, demure, sweet. All caps gets all up in your face, while no caps sits there with her ankles crossed, her hands folded neatly in her lap, waiting for you to start a conversation with her. To write in all lowercase is to broadcast yourself as cool, casual, accessible, deep in a low-fi sort of way. i’m just speaking to you from the heart, it says, i’m just showing you a page of my diary. this is just a silly little musing i had today under a tree. <3

Why is it that it bothers me so much? After all, over the course of its history, shifts in capitalization have been largely arbitrary. The Romans only had majuscule; it wasn’t until the scholar Alcuin of York came to Charlemagne’s court in the 780s and spurred the development of Carolingian minuscule that the usage of lowercase letters was widely adopted. Things became more standardized after the invention of the printing press, and in the 17th century printers began to be influenced by the typographical conventions of German, a language in which all nouns are capitalized. Having taken to reading 18th-century novels over the past couple of months, like Samuel Richardson’s Pamela and Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, I must admit there’s something about this Capitalization of Nouns that really touches my Soul, that catches my Fancy. It must have caught Emily Dickinson’s, too, because her poetry would not be the same were certain select nouns not capitalized, raised to the airy abstraction of purer Forms, as in “I dwell in Possibility—” or “I died for Beauty—”

I think what disturbs me most about all lowercase is that it functions (or wants to function) as a visual marker of authenticity while actually being the exact opposite. Taylor Swift adopted it for two of her albums (“folklore” and “evermore”), self-conscious attempts to strip off the stellification of pop stardom and present herself as just a woman wearing a braid and a cardigan, strumming a guitar, humming through the woods. All lowercase is ubiquitous in the atrocious thing that dares to call itself “poetry” plastered over Instagram and hogging shelf space in bookstores, a signifier of poeticness for a poetry that—when you bother to read it, not just look at it—signifies nothing.

bell hooks and e e cummings are the two most frequently cited writers when one wants to find literary precedents for the adoption of all lowercase. hooks’ prose employs proper capitalization, but her name, always appearing with its “b” and “h” lowercased, is distinctive. For Gloria Jean Watkins, who took the pen name from her great-grandmother, that lowercasing was a way to emphasize the “substance of [her] books, not who [she was].” Her idea of the “oppositional gaze,” that the person—black, female, subordinate—who, looked at, was trapped in the gaze of an oppressor, could reclaim part of her power by looking back defiantly, is embedded in that lowercasing, which welcomes the reader to the page as an intellectual equal, a fellow-gazer and seeker of truth. e e cummings has rather the opposite case: the lowercasing of his name was a choice by publishers that Edward Estlin himself rarely partook of, but lowercasing of expected capitals abounds in his poetry. Because it is part of a larger project of breaking typographical and grammatical conventions, however, expressing a uniquely idiosyncratic approach to the written word, it makes sense, it suits style to substance.

Formality is something our culture has largely done away with. Men in suits have wrested themselves free of the chokehold of ties, refusing to be led by the leash; nobody really dresses for dinner; sweatpants are ubiquitous. With lowercasing, the eye, not needing to make the subtle leap a capital letter requires, is handed a more “frictionless” experience—but so is the brain. Sit up, I want to say when I encounter an essay in all lowercase, stop slouching.

Most egregious is the lowercasing of the vertical pronoun I. Of all the pronouns in English—we, he, she, it, you, thou, they—only the first person singular is capitalized wherever it appears, whether at the beginning of a sentence or the middle or the end. One letter, long and vertical, it stands as proudly as a pillar, a solid column of marble supporting an edifice of emotions and reflections, pondering and wanderings, trains of thought and flights of fancy. It’s a watchtower from which one can survey the world, maybe a ladder that, through the act of writing, actually helps us climb out of ourselves, the bottom rung rooted in our egos, the top rung ascending to a higher heaven.

As a child I used to love the book Utterly Me, Clarice Bean by Lauren Child, which took a picture book heroine and put her in a chapter book, upping the substance while still having a bit—actually a lot—of fun with the style. Words varied in size, lines sometimes tilted sideways, letters edged out of their neat alignments, elbowing each other or drifting off into waves and circles, falling and spilling and expanding and shrinking, undergoing Protean shifts in font. I wish we could capture more of this sort of playfulness when writing on the Internet, where experimenting this way is theoretically far easier than it would be in print and yet remains shockingly unexplored. As any good typographer knows, the way letters look does change the relationship between signified and signifier. The scrawl of a handwritten note conveys intimacy, love, warmth, the immediacy of feeling. A multicolored birthday banner is a harbinger of fun. A corporate slogan on a billboard broadcasts whatever it’s trying to sell you.

“There has not yet been any writing that inscribes femininity,” wrote Hélène Cixous in 1975.1 Maybe all lowercase writing is the “writing that inscribes femininity”; at least, it has the appearance of being so. Cixous argues that the history of writing has been wound up with the history of reason, a “phallocentric tradition.” The capitalized “I,” then, might merely be seen as the phallic center around which such writing orbits, and the lowercase “i” deflates it, puts it in its proper place. To convey a woman’s consciousness in Molly’s monologue at the end of Ulysses, Joyce reverts to a prose without punctuation, an endless, fluctuating flow of thought and feeling.

But I remain unconvinced that either this or all lowercase writing liberates the potential so sought for in the elusive écriture féminine. Writing according to conventionalized codes of style allows us to not get so caught up in surfaces; after all, women have been circumscribed for so long by their surfaces. Maybe it’s in the text, not on it, that we should be seeking authenticity, immediacy, beauty. Who knows how strangely, how wonderfully, our voices might bloom then?

Dear readers, I hope you enjoyed reading this essay! If it brought joy into your life, changed the way you look at something, or felt intellectually enriching to you, I would really appreciate it if you hit the like button, restacked, shared with a friend, sent this post via carrier pigeon across the ends of the globe. As always, I love to hear your thoughts in the comments!

It was an algorithm, not an editor, that led me down the rabbit hole that ultimately resulted in my rejecting algorithms in favor of editors, the TikTok algorithm specifically, but I’d like to think such ironies are God’s sense of humor. My TikTok use is rare; it consists mostly of—once a month, when I remember the app exists—flicking yearningly through footage of golden-hour mountains and lakes, bookmarking makeup tutorials I’ll never revisit and don’t have the products for anyway, and living vicariously through fellow 20-something-year-old women, usually in New York, who light candles in clean, minimalistic apartments or rearrange the expensive, beautiful perfume bottles on their perfect vanities. This time it brought me clips of the filming of The Devil Wears Prada 2, which I watched at first reluctantly, then fervently, until I cracked and coerced my husband into rewatching the original 2006 The Devil Wears Prada with me late, too late into the night.

The Devil Wears Prada is about a young woman in New York City—Andrea “Andy” Sachs (played by Anne Hathaway)—who has just graduated from college. Wide-eyed and wet behind the ears, she arrives woefully unprepared and tragically unstylish into the clean glass glamor of Runway magazine (a thinly veiled fictionalization of Vogue), where assistants and stylists and art directors and editors and indeed a veritable small army of fashion underlings are running to and fro, slipping off flats and sliding into high heels, retouching their lipstick in the desktop Mac’s Photo Booth, wheeling away racks of designer garb, laying out a glossy swathe of magazines, filling a glass with Pellegrino water, detecting onion bagels on breath.

What is all this flurry and flummox, all this rustle and rush for—or rather, who? The answer is Miranda Priestly (Meryl Streep), for whom car doors open and the golden gates of the Elias Clarke office building swing wide, for whom young women step out of elevators they were in first, apologizing, deferent, for whom loins are girded, chaos is cleared, and panic induced, for whom the silken gears and the beaded cogs of fashion grind and churn. Ding! The elevator doors open. There she is, the magisterial sweep of her white hair coiffed to perfection, her hands gloved in leather, her form clad in black, the mockup of Runway’s next issue tucked beneath her arm. With an imperial toss of her head, she takes off those unforgettable Gucci sunglasses, and we at last come face-to-face with the commander of the whole operation, the captain of the ship, the general of the army, Runway’s editor-in-chief.

This is a woman who would have ruled empires and masterminded the razing of cities in days of old. In the no less cruel but perhaps more polished realm of corporate America she is content to rule a fiefdom of New York’s glossiest and raze lumpy cerulean sweaters, worn by aspiring journalists with enough hubris to think themselves exempt from something so silly, so frivolous, so trivial and superficial as outer beauty. The last two assistants were dismal; with a queenly wave of the hand and one of those soft, deadly “that’s all”s, she dismisses Emily, the first assistant, who was supposed to be interviewing Andy, and interviews her herself. Within two minutes Andy is scrutinized, sized up, appraised and picked apart, all while Miranda multitasks, her attention seemingly half there. In spite of Andy’s abysmal ignorance of Miranda, Runway, and names like de la Renta and Demarchelier, she gets the job. Then commences her torture.

Over the next hour or so of runtime, Miranda will put her through a series of increasingly draconian tasks, Herculean labors that require her to make frantic calls and miss birthdays and scamper around Manhattan carrying impossible amounts of shopping bags and implode her ego and her personal life. She cries; she considers quitting.

In the book, Miranda is clearly a villain; her sole purpose seems to be to torture our protagonist. In the movie, that’s not quite the picture we get. Is Miranda demanding, critical, haughty, cold, elitist, backstabbing? Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. And yet it’s not for the demands of her ego that she sends everyone around her into a tizzy, that she shoots down ideas in meetings, that she purses her lips in displeasure at a designer’s fashion show, that her main mood—emotionally, grammatically—is the imperative. It’s because she’s doing her job.

And it’s because she’s good at her job. Take the famous “cerulean” speech. God, I love that speech. I get so stoked when Andy snorts and everyone’s heads swivel towards her and Miranda asks her if something’s funny and we know she’s really in for it now and we are going to see the master—Meryl the actor, Miranda the editor—at work. In my head I am rubbing my palms together in glee.

Miranda can prise apart a color—“blue”—into its precise shades: “turquoise,” “lapis,” “cerulean.” Miranda can recollect the whole sartorial history of a hue, tracing its lineage back to its first appearance on the runway (2002, Oscar de la Renta). Miranda can point out exact items of clothing the color used as its canvas (military jackets, Yves Saint Laurent). Everything off the top of her head, no notes, no smartphones to look things up. And all this while she’s working. It’s true: the two turquoise belts she’s choosing between—the impetus for Andy’s snorting in laugher—are not the same at all. One has a round, sparse, slender buckle; the other has a chunky, squarish, glittery buckle. Our untrained eye may see little difference. Miranda’s trained eye sees all the difference. The devil, it turns out, is in the details.

II. Kill the Gatekeeper

The years between 2006 and 2025 saw a shrinking of the editor role. Needless to say, that went hand-in-hand with the decline of traditional newspapers and magazines. Read about the magazine heyday of the 1970s or even the “halcyon era”1 of the 1990s and early 2000s and a young writer (I don’t exclude myself) can start to foam a little at the mouth for envy: the greater number of full-time opportunities, the salaries, the expense accounts, the perks, the loftier stature of the writer in society, the large readership, the general glamor and the gloss of it all. In these institutions it was the editors, not the writers (or the illustrators or the photographers or the fact-checkers), who ruled the roost.

Before social media and the Internet, if you were an artist—a writer, a filmmaker, a musician—and you wanted to get your work out there, you had to go through any number of gatekeepers. As an artist, it’s easy to hate these people, who seem to be put on the planet solely to torture you and make you want to pitch yourself not to them but out of the nearest window, so damaging is it to nervously, hopefully, willingly expose yourself to rejection over and over and over again. The gatekeepers kept out the marginalized; they shored up the privileged. They followed the imperatives of large corporations; their tastes were stultified, boring, biased, ossified, unable to admit anything fresh or experimental. They were too few people barring the gates of paradise to too many. They were mean. They killed your darlings and seriously injured your slightly less beloveds.

For Silicon Valley, the solution was simple: kill the gatekeepers. Then snobbiness would be exchanged for democracy, restriction for freedom, closed doors for open. Anyone could create, anyone could publish, anyone could get their work, their art, their soul “out there,” anyone could find their audience, cultivate their 1000 superfans, make money doing what they loved. It was a brave new world, and you only had to be enterprising enough to snatch it.

Excuse me for saying this, but there is a lot of crap on the Internet. There is a lot of crap on social media, and there is a lot of crap on Substack. There is a lot of good stuff, too, but you often have to filter through a lot of crap to get to it. Often the same sorts of work—now we call it “content”—emerge, are pushed out in front of our eyeballs. Who—or rather, what—are the pushers? The answer is algorithms, which on social media have functionally replaced editors.

Here, more often than not, is my experience on Substack: I see a post with an interesting headline, the sort of thing I know I’d be interested in reading. I read, and I am disappointed. The post usually ends earlier than I would have liked it to, is shorter than I expected. It seems to have been gathering steam, some philosopher, some theory, some academic monograph is invoked, I think it is really going somewhere this time, and then the argument collapses into a dustheap of clichés and banalities. A lot of the writing sounds the same, too, stylistically and tonally; a lot of the topics are the same. Lists after lists after lists of book recommendations—often the recommendations overlap. Aesthetically, too, things seem to converge. There are the pink girly Substacks with their ribbons or swans or love letters, there are the minimalistic cool girl sorts, there is the profusion of all-lowercase, which seems to have infected every level of Substack and even writers I respect.2

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So what we have is that instead of writing for editors, writers write for algorithms. According to research from MIT’s Initiative on the Digital Economy, human editors seem to have the advantage when it comes to stories like breaking news, where algorithms have a limited amount of data to work with, in figuring out what readers are likely to click on and read.3 After about 10 clicks, the algorithm pulls ahead in predicting reader behavior. The algorithm builds on that data, continuing to push more and more content towards you that is similar to content you’ve clicked on, read, and interacted with in the past. But the Algorithmic Cocoon, first a comfortable swaddle, can choke the life out of you.

An editor, obviously, is a human being (resemblances to Satan aside) with whom a writer can interact with, have a conversation with, go back and forth with. An editor has a personality, a sensibility. An editor can tell you about the affect of your piece, an editor can push you to think harder, think deeper, think more. An editor can call you out when you have a badly constructed sentence or a lazy paragraph, an editor can eliminate tired expressions with the stroke of a red pen, an editor can cut the crap.

At a higher level, an editor is someone like Miranda: someone with a mission and a vision. “They all act like they’re curing cancer or something,” Andy complains early on about her colleagues. The inference she wants us to make is that fashion is trivial, curing cancer important. Yet one gets the sense from Miranda that she does view her job from the same life-and-death angle most people would view “curing cancer.” Somehow it is vital to her, existential. And getting it right is almost a life-and-death matter.

A writer may or may not be a perfectionist as the chips fall. But it is the editor’s job to be a perfectionist. Miranda doesn’t reject everything wholesale, just because she wants to, just because she’s having a bad day, just because someone didn’t get her her coffee on time, just because she woke up on the wrong side of the bed. She has a working archive in her brain of past issues; she can’t brook lazy repeats. Things done two years ago are unacceptable. Ideas have to be original, sparkling, new. Pieces that don’t work with the issue are cut; pieces that don’t meet the mark demand rewriting: “I need to see a new draft on that piece about shopping for a plastic surgeon, it’s dull.” A “Winter Wonderland” spread is “not wonderful yet,” with the implication that it better be, pronto. When Nigel (Stanley Tucci) proffers the one idea in the editorial meeting that fits her exacting vision, she smiles and calls it (what else?), “Per-fect.”

I’m not going to argue for legacy media over platforms like Substack; that’s not what this essay is about. Substack has given me a way to get my work out into the world, an audience I feel proud of having grown myself, a writing routine, crucial practice on a regular basis, fodder for the intellect and the imagination, a community whose worth is invaluable. But I am skeptical about the exchange of non-human algorithms for human editors. The editor says, witheringly, “Florals? For spring? Groundbreaking,” but the algorithm says, blithely, “Essay on yearning? Here’s 1,000 more!”

There are tastemakers on Substack; in fact, many popular newsletters are aggregators, filters of articles and art and media found elsewhere, curators. But the sheer numbers bewilder. They pile on top of each other, one after another; the mind boggles. Now we need someone to filter the filterers, aggregate the aggregators. Who’s going to curate the curators?

Magazines and journals, like or , with their own editorial staff, exist on Substack, too. But they are only a very small piece of the pie. Not only that, but they’re subject to the same algorithmic and aesthetic constraints everyone else is subject to. Even if you wanted to run a magazine on Substack, you wouldn’t be able to impose your vision the way Miranda does on Runway because the algorithm would always and ever be your editor-in-chief.

This is a fact that our tech overlords like to keep hidden in the shadows. Tech CEOs emphatically disavow their platforms as publishers and themselves as editors. That explains the laissez-faire approach: AI goes, plagiarism goes, Nazis go, anything goes, I go, you go, he/she/it goes, we go, they go. This they defend on the basis of “free speech.” When Elon Musk took over Twitter and turned it into X, he declared it needed to “fulfill its potential as ‘the platform for free speech around the world.’”4 Lover of free speech though I am, I retain my doubts. “No verse is free,” wrote T. S. Eliot, “for the man who wants to do a good job.” And for the writer who wants to do a good job, no speech is free. Refusal to filter is also an editorial decision, just the laziest.

Increasingly on Substack, I’ve come across obviously AI-generated posts—soulless, trite, dull, sometimes senseless—that, optimized by AI for the engagement optimizer that is the algorithm, have thousands upon thousands of likes. These likes mean they get pushed to more readers, which means they get more likes, which means they get pushed to even more readers, and so on and on. The logic goes that for the writer who wants to be successful (“successful”), it is necessary to write about these topics, shape your prose into this style, follow these aesthetic conventions, so as to catch an algorithmic wave. A writer who optimizes to appeal to an editor, a good editor, optimizes for quality. But a writer who writes to appeal to an algorithm optimizes for, well, crap, more often than not.

True, magazines are subject to the same market demands as social media. They’re art gone corporate. And yet they still retain something of art. “What they did, what they created was greater than art because you live your life in it,” Nigel tells Andy of the fashion greats who’ve graced Runway’s halls. The same might be said of magazines themselves. At their best, magazines are helmed by the best editors: sharp, exacting, precise, with discerning enough judgment to be closed to what’s bad, even if it’s popular or conventional, and open to what’s good, even if it’s strange and unfamiliar. Like a laser beam, the editorial eye is able to look past the lumpy sweater and the schoolgirl skirt and the woeful unpreparedness and see something that no one else can. Lasers transmit data through communication networks; they are used in eye surgery to mend vision; they are also excellent cutting tools.

Trial by rejection is an important part of every young writer’s development. There is rejection on Substack, too, but it is rejection by numbers: not having X number of likes on a post, not having X number of subscribers. Is that the kind of rejection that pushes you to become a better writer? In The Devil Wears Prada, Andy fails and fails again. Her boss is cryptic and terse; there’s not much in the way of helpful feedback. And yet by the end of the film she’s better at her job; she’s learned a lot, grown a lot, changed a lot, and when you see her in the offices of The New York Mirror, interviewing for another job, there is, after all, something different about her. She’s more mature, more confident in herself. She seems prepared, put together. And she hasn’t become this way by herself. It’s because somebody—a real human person, with all the strength and vigor and passion and force of personality that that entails—pushed her to be. Tough love is tough, yes, but it is also love. A machine, we all know, is incapable of love.

III. Ex Materia

Before the Big Bang was theorized, there were two theories of how the world was created. The Biblical theory is creatio ex nihilo, creation from nothing. God woke up and just decided to create the universe one day; before that, nothing was. The Ancient Greek theory is creatio ex materia, creation from pre-existing matter, usually Chaos. Ovid describes creation from chaos in the Metamorphoses. First the universe was a “rude and undigested mass,” and all the “seeds of things” were “discordant, not well-joined together.” Land and sea and sky were jumbled up into a heap, the land unwalkable, the sea unsailable. Then “deus et melior… natura” came along, “God and a better nature,” and cleaved the sky from the land and the land from the waves and shaped and carved and guided and molded.

Because of this, the water sloughed off into usable rivers and streams. The sky was able to take stars into her bosom; the land could be carpeted with green. From the rude “seeds of things,” life itself could take root, grow and flourish. Ovid calls this god fabricator, “builder, maker, artificer.” This god, too, is an artist, just as much as the one who creates from nothing, who braves the blank page and its infinite white miles and puts the first tentative mark there.

Right now it is a beautiful summer day. The sun brings out an almost aching greenness from the leaves, a pure, almost holy blue (is it cerulean?) from the sky. From the window, I can see my husband deadheading roses in the back garden. The withered blooms fall off one by one, leaving the green stems headless, rather sad and ugly things. But I know because of this pruning new roses will come, larger roses, taller, healthier, more vibrant, more abundant, more lovely. They will flourish into beauty.

Editing is important. It involves that rarest of things, good judgment. Something that has to be honed and trained and refined, something that isn’t backwards-looking and reactive but forward-looking and active, something that cuts not out of malice but only because it sees the shape of the stencil.

Growing up is a process of editing. We delete bad habits, thoughts, urges, environments, jobs, lovers, friends. This can be emotionally difficult. Yet we do it because we see something better on the other side, because we have a vision, because we want to grow, because sometimes you have to burn away the infected tissue in order to allow the healthy to heal.

At the end of The Devil Wears Prada, Andy and Nigel toast Nigel’s anticipated promotion to creative director of a new brand with the rising star of the fashion world, designer James Holt. After 18 years, Nigel says, he’ll finally have some kind of freedom. Later, Andy hears word that behind the scenes, Elias Clarke is devising to replace Miranda at Runway with a new editor-in-chief, someone younger, ostensibly more “hip,” a certain Jacqueline Follet, Miranda’s rival and the editor-in-chief of French Runway. She takes off in a panic to tell Miranda, but it turns out Miranda, always one step ahead, already knows. In a stunning (for Nigel, for Andy) betrayal, Miranda has Jacqueline given the position with James Holt, keeping Nigel at Runway and, most importantly, herself at Runway. “The truth is,” she tells Andy in the car, “there is no one that can do what I do, including her. Any of the other choices would have found that job impossible, and the magazine would have suffered.”

From someone else’s mouth, these words might have sounded arrogant, egotistical, narcissistic, self-aggrandizing. But we believe Miranda. We understand her choice, even if we reel from it. It’s a calculated risk, the calculation being that Nigel is too nice to stab her back, that feelings can change, that sometimes they have to be flattened for the sake of a vision, a mission. But this is a choice Andy can’t condone. It’s a cold calculus, the human becoming algorithmic. Miranda points out the similarities between herself and Andy; like herself, she tells Andy, “You can see beyond what people want and people need and you can choose for yourself.”

So Andy chooses for herself, too. She chooses not to follow Miranda. She chooses to walk away—from the job, from the designer clothes, from Paris, from Miranda. She chooses to drop her cell phone, ever ringing with calls from Miranda, into a fountain, and walk away smiling. These are not career choices, not aesthetic choices, not even selfish choices. They are the highest of all kinds of choices: they are moral choices. We, too, can choose the human over the algorithmic, the compassionate over the calculating, the forward- over the backward-looking, the warm over the cold. Today we can drop the phone in the fountain not because the editor is calling but because it’s an algorithm that’s culling. What is editing, after all, but making choices?

Further Reading:

• On the subject of magazines, particularly within the Condé Nast stable, has written a number of illuminating essays here, here, and here.

• does make an argument for legacy media > Substack here

• In the wake of the plagiarism scandal, I enjoyed reading the following, which got my noggin joggin’ for some of the issues related to this essay: on women, ambition, and moral integrity; on “the voice of Substack,” LLMs, and “the Echoborg”; and ’s “I respect grift and I respect stupidity”

• For The New Yorker’s 100th anniversary, Jill Lepore writes about the editorial battles behind the scenes at the storied magazine, the important and often invisible role of its editors

• I’ve been really enjoying reading The Editor Function: Literary Publishing in Postwar America by Abram Foley, which traces the development and history of the editor role post-WWII

Comedy is necessary, restorative, sacred, and transformative.

By “comedy” I don’t necessarily mean the jokester on the stage, plying his wit before a guffawing audience, the hijinks of two clowns making themselves stumble around and look silly, but rather the happy endings in Shakespeare where mix-ups resolve themselves and true lovers are restored to one another; the cheerful, easeful relief, the glow cast over the next hour or so, that the end of a rom-com brings; the spirit of a sunlit summer afternoon, the sky blue and cloudless, nature in all her full-throated glory; the sense, walking home from a soirée with old friends, that “God’s in his heaven— / All’s right with the world!”1

This orientation towards life might be referred to by what people call “good humor,” and only lately have I come to appreciate its importance. Good humor makes possible all positive social relationships; it makes possible that best relationship to the self, where one can take in the vista of oneself with an honest, forthright eye, without illusions and yet without despair, without egotism and yet without self-loathing, sending out warm rays from the heart equally to the highest bird that soars above and the humblest worm that crawls in the dirt below.

At one point or another, everyone comes to that crossroads where a sudden spiritual directive, a divine injunction like the voice of God comes out of the woodwork of the everyday and tells you you must change your life. But it is impossible to change one’s life if one does not change oneself, and it is impossible to change oneself if one cannot laugh at oneself. That reminds me: I have a picture of myself at the age of about two. In it I am looking at myself in the mirror and pointing. My hair sticks up riotously. I am saturated in an eye-splitting pink. On my face in the mirror is an expression of absolutely unhinged, uproarious laughter. I think my two-year-old self knew instinctually what my two-decade-old self would have to falter towards in the difficult darkness of intellectualization, overanalysis, painful firsthand experience.

To make us laugh at ourselves: this is what comedy does at its best and—make no mistake about it—it is an important task. To laugh at yourself means that you know yourself, that you can look into the nooks and crannies of yourself, the cobweb-covered corners, the dusty attic and the drafty basement, without trembling in fear of what army of spiders may scuttle out, what cloud of bats swarm out. Dictators and tyrants cannot laugh at themselves, and there you plainly see the consequences; they have little good humor and less good will.

True comedy is never mean-spirited; as the popular saying goes, it laughs with you, not at you, for what it laughs at is the world and everyone—the million little absurdities of life and of people, the daily foibles, the quirks and peculiarities, the inconveniences, the ridiculous mishaps, the scoundrelism of the politician, the fog (or Fogg) of the legal system, the vanity of this old woman, the foolishness of that young man: in short, that such-and-such is such-and-such, that so-and-so is so-and-so, and so the world spins merrily on.

All the quarrels in the world, all the strife and the anger and the wars and the division—might not this tension be solved, one wonders, if only someone were to crack a joke or fall victim to some harmless but hilarious peccadillo? Then enemy would laugh with enemy, the stiff mask of indifference fracturing under the pressure of an irrepressible smile, and all would be forgiven, all would be well again.

Good humor is the attitude in which one feels that life is essentially meaningful and that people are essentially good. Were the faults too deep, the conflicts irredeemable, then we would not laugh, we would put our heads down and weep. But good humor says, “None of that, now, sweep away the tears, it is really not so bad as you imagined,” and pats you on the shoulder and stokes the hearth fires in your heart.

Most comedy rests on a foundation of wit (even in certain kinds of stupidity there is a sort of wit), and wit tends to have a humorous air about it. But say something witty with a bad attitude, make a mean comment cleverly, and you will probably receive very little in the way of ha-has. Wit is a knife, and it can be cruel, biting, stinging, cutting to the quick. But humor, good humor, is like a butter knife. It could never kill anybody. It spreads, it shares the richness and extends the sweetness. It is the spirit that unites families and forgives foibles, that makes lasting friendship possible and love and romance, too, that bends parent and child in a common kinship of the soul and forms the bedrock of long, healthy, happy, ever-renewing marriage. From it flows a fount of goodness; it waters the garden of the light side of the soul.

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All this is a long prelude to Charles Dickens’ Pickwick Papers, his first novel, in which the seeds—no, I should rather say the fruitful crop, the wide-arching, full-flourishing branches—of that attitude of good humor are wonderfully, delightfully present. It is a humor without sharp edges, a rounded humor, a humor that rounds us out.

Dickens was commissioned to write The Pickwick Papers by publishers Chapman & Hall, who wanted text to accompany a series of illustrations (“cockney sporting plates”) by Robert Seymour. Seymour blew his brains out after the second week of Pickwick;2 he was replaced by artists who learned quickly to suit image to text, rather than expecting the 24-year-old novelist, quickly expanding into the contours of his own genius, to suit text to image. Correlation does not imply causation, but Pickwick would also be the death of Dickens: Seymour shot himself, Dickens chose suicide by reading, lending voice and fire to his own creations as he exhausted himself from stage to stage. Pickwick was the most popular of his works during his lifetime; the Pickwick trial received prolonged applause when he read it before a rapt audience in the year of his death 1870.

It works in Dickens’ favor that The Pickwick Papers really is more a heap of papers than that well-organized, carefully plotted, more likely than not scrupulously arranged thing we call a novel. A novel—though its path may wind and twist and curl and make any number of curious loops—can generally be trusted to take us from A to B. But The Pickwick Papers picks us up here and wicks us away like a mere drop there. “Wick” comes from the German Wieche, “yarn,” and Dickens has yarns of many fibers to spin here, not all of which assimilate into the larger fabric.

Dickens, after all, began literary life as a sketch artist. From disparate delineations of omnibuses and gin shops, pawnbrokers and hackney cabs, dinners and Christmases (even early on, Dickens was good at Christmas), men and women, garden parties and parish elections, he progressed to a series of related drawings, loosely stitched together. Nevertheless we get frequent interruptions—stories-within-a-story—as though Dickens had tugged on a little stitch, pulled and pulled, and, spinning it out into a yarn, knitted it after an entirely different pattern. The gothic, the melodramatic, the romantic, and the ghostly perch for a moment like black birds in this sunny, Pickwickian landscape, bringing us some tale of a curmudgeonly, goblin-beset gravedigger or the swashbuckling saga of an uncle who rescues an impossibly beautiful maiden from two scoundrels, then—the maiden disappearing in a chimera puff—resolves never to marry, ever faithful to his dream damsel.

It is as if our author has suddenly gotten bored in the middle of the story—the ball and chain of having to produce a chapter of the same serial every week over the course of 20 months sometimes chafing, one imagines—and invented an escape hatch, his imagination too capacious, too expansive, too tendrilling out in a hundred opposite directions to be so confined. Pickwick & co. leave their usual haunts frequently and escape to Dingley Dell, to Bath, to Ipswich, even to Fleet Prison, one suspects not because of the exigencies of the plot but simply because its creator wanted a change of scenery.

In his later novels Dickens learns to weave subplots within subplots, to unite comedy with darker strands of pathos, tragedy, realism. Here what we have instead is a kind of witches’ brew from which you might scoop out with one ladling a shoe, with another a wrinkled ear. You can see Dickens improving as a novelist over the course of it: what begins as a series of farcical adventures by a club of stock types ends with the touching episode of Mr. Pickwick in prison; characters are inflated from flat to well-rounded, taking on body and heft.

The four principal characters we begin with are the four members of that incomparable consortium, the Pickwick Club. There is Mr. Snodgrass, a poet who—as far as we can see—has little literary talent. There is Mr. Winkle, a sportsman who fails disastrously—move out of the way!—every time he is invited to go shooting. There is Mr. Tupman, a lover whose prospects in romance are sadly thwarted, who ends the novel single while Snodgrass and Winkle exit having yoked themselves to counterparts of the fairer sex and tied themselves in the sweet bonds of holy matrimony. Then there is Mr. Pickwick himself, the Club’s eponymous founder.

Mr Pickwick is the kind of man every young person would like to have as a grandfather, every no longer young person as a father. Indeed he is older than his three friends; retired, unmarried, and childless, his friendship more often than not melts into a kind of paternal benevolence. Nobody better could have been dreamt up to fulfill the responsibilities of in loco parentis; under his auspices, you may be assured that things will turn out well, that people will be happy, that all will be settled, dignified, moral, joyous. However hard he is pressed upon by fate—harried by lawyers, given the runaround by scoundrels, drawn into the “widder’s” web—he always acts with uprightness and virtue. He is ever benevolent, ever compassionate, ever gallant, ever honest, ever quick to bristle at deception and trickery, ever ready to come to the aid of a friend, ever willing to defend the honor of a woman, ever wanting to intervene on behalf of a couple whose love lines are tangled and mangled, smoothing over improprieties and putting himself in the way of disapproving parents so love and laughter can prevail at last.

But it is not Mr. Snodgrass, not Mr. Winkle, not Mr. Tupman, not even Mr. Pickwick to whom The Pickwick Papers owes its success. It is Sam Weller. We can divide Dickens’ life into two ages: B.W. (Before Weller) and A.S. (Anno Sameulis). Before Sam the circulation of Pickwick was about 400; after Sam, it steadily ballooned up to 40,000. Sam Weller is to Dickens what Falstaff was to Shakespeare: the soul of his comic genius. Strange, then, that he arrives in the novel ten chapters in, an unobtrusive boot blacker, a personage little to be taken notice of, one first thinks, only a cog to keep the mechanism of the episode ticking.

Until he speaks. Then unfurls one of the best comic speeches in literature. I cannot describe it; you will have to read it. It concerns Sam Weller’s father, who encounters a “touter” of marriage licenses:

‘Licence, sir, licence?’—‘What’s that?’ says my father.—‘License, sir,” says he,—‘What licence,’ says my father.—‘Marriage licence,’ says the touter.—‘Dash my veskit,’ says my father, ‘I never thought o’ that.’—‘I think you wants one, sir,’ says the touter. My father pulls up and thinks a bit—‘No,’ says he, ‘damme, I’m too old, b’sides I’m a many sizes too large,’ says he.—‘Not a bit on it, sir,’ says the touter.—‘Think not?’ says my father.—‘I’m sure not,’ says he; ‘we married a gen’lm’n twice your size, last Monday.’—‘Did you, though,’ said my father.—‘to be sure we did,’ says the touter, ‘you’re a babby to him—this way, sir—this way!’—and sure enough my father walks arter him, like a tame monkey behind a horgan, into a little back office, vere a feller sat among dirty papers and tin boxes, making believe he was busy. ‘Pray, take a seat, vile I makes out the affidavit, sir,’ says the lawyer. ‘Thank’ee, sir’ says my father, and down he sat, and stared with all his eyes, and his mouth vide open, at the names on the boxes. ‘What’s your name, sir,’ says the lawyer.—‘Tony Weller,’ says my father.—‘Parish?’ says the lawyer.—‘Belle Savage,’ says my father; for he stopped there wen he drove up, and he know’d nothing about parishes, he didn’t.—‘And what’s the lady’s name?’ says the lawyer. My father was stuck all of a heap. ‘Blessed if I know,’ says he.—‘Not know!’ says the lawyer.—‘No more nor you do,’ says my father, ‘can’t I put that in arterwards?’—‘Impossible!’ says the lawyer. ‘Wery well,’ says my father, after he’d thought a moment, ‘put down Mrs. Clarke.’—‘What Clarke?’ says the lawyer, dipping his pen in the ink.—‘Susan Clarke, Markis o’Granby, Dorking,’ says my father; ‘she’ll have me, if I ask, I des-say—I never said nothing to her, but she’ll have me, I know.’ The license was made out, and she did have him, and what’s more she’s got him now…”

Impossible for both writer and reader to let such a character go. Sam Weller becomes Mr. Pickwick’s faithful servant, and master and man trot on together congenially for the rest of the novel, as the old song goes, like horse and carriage. Mr. Pickwick plays the straight man to Sam Weller’s funny man, Mr. Pickwick old, Sam Weller young, Mr. Pickwick naïve, Sam Weller worldly, Mr. Pickwick respectable and educated, Sam Weller educated on the streets—“the only way to make a boy sharp,” as his father says.

The ages of Pickwick and Sam seem to suggest a father-son relationship, but Sam Weller has a father, who is brought in frequently, to great comic effect. As master and servant, they cannot exactly be friends, though there is something over and above amicability in their relationship. Neither is their relationship hierarchical, domineering, superior on one side, slavish, servile, obsequious on the other. They simply love each other, and depend on each other, and that is why Sam cannot leave Pickwick, even when Pickwick, with all the care and love and solicitation in the world, entreats him to.

Samuel Weller and Samuel Pickwick are the two presiding daemons, the two sides of the coin of good humor.3 Pickwick embraces the world because he does not know it; Sam embraces the world because he knows it thoroughly. It is entirely because of Mr. Pickwick’s good humor that he is able to roll through a series of ridiculous, exasperating, sometimes embarrassing misadventures and emerge unscathed. It is entirely because of Sam Weller’s good humor that he can make such statements as “There; now we look compact and comfortable, as the father said ven he cut his little boy’s head off, to cure him o’ squintin’” without so much as batting an eye. It is with this aura of good humor that is so thoroughly the substance of Dickens as a comedian that Sam Weller and his father contrive to have Sam put in prison so that he can remain with his master, that Mr. Pickwick abandons his so firm, so stubborn resolution to not hand over a single shilling to the corrupt lawyers Dodson and Fogg so poor Mrs. Bardell, his onetime persecutor, does not have to endure the dismal debtors’ dump.

The most touching part in all 800 pages of Pickwick is when Mr. Pickwick encounters his old enemy, the unscrupulous Alfred Jingle, and his servant Job Trotter. Because Mr. Pickwick is in debtor’s prison on the grounds of principle, not finance, he can afford to better his situation a little. But Jingle and Job can do no such thing. They are dirty and hungry, desperate and dejected, as most who found themselves in debtor’s prison must have been, as Dickens’ own father was when he was incarcerated in Marshalsea in 1824, when Dickens was 12. “As the world runs,” Dickens tells us, given what he has suffered from Jingle and Job, it would be within Mr. Pickwick’s rights to hand him a sound blow. But instead he hands him something which “clinked” and “somehow or other imparted a sparkle to the eye, and a swelling to the heart.” More aggressively, with as much love and goodness, does Sam march an empty-stomached Job into the kitchen, give him a pot of porter, and order him to “drink that up, ev’ry drop on it, and then turn the pot upside down, to let me see as you’ve took the med’cine.”

Here are love and goodness personified. Here is what we would like to be in our best moments; here is how we would like to be treated in our worst. Bad characters (except unscrupulous lawyers, who are irredeemable), with a sudden reversal in fortune, with compassion and kindness, can reform; bad situations can be resolved. What Dickens writes, Northrop Frye says, “are not realistic novels but fairy tales.”4 The older we get, the more we tend to scoff at fairy tales. They are too unrealistic, too dreamlike, too woven of moonbeams and gossamer. In the 19th century literary realism reached its apex; critics have often focused on Dickens’ social commentary and critique of Victorian society.

But why should the two—fairy tale and realistic novel—be opposed? Why should the fairy tale of Pickwick and Sam not also be at one and the same time delightfully, eminently real? Why should we not believe that such people are all around us everywhere, washing the world with the healing waters of their good humor, their kindness, their love?

Some of my happiest memories with my father are of reading Dickens together, he reading out loud in his slow, sweet voice, I resting on his chest, feeling the vibrations as he went from word to thrilling word, sentence to wonderful sentence, sometimes following along with the text, sometimes content to simply drift along with the aural stream. In Pickwick we find Dickens not at his best, perhaps, but at the purest of his comic spirit. It is a comedy that embraces, unites, enlightens, ennobles. It never fails to impart “a sparkle to the eye, a swelling to the heart.” It clinks.

MESSENGER
When your two children came
with their father and came into the bride’s home,
we servants who were afflicted by your troubles
were delighted: our ears immediately received the widespread word
that you and your husband had made a truce of your old quarrel.
And someone kissed the hand, another the blond heads
of your children: and I myself from joy
together with the children followed the women into the chamber.
And the mistress whom we now honor instead of you,
before she saw the pair of your children,
fastened her eager gaze onto Jason:
then, however, she put a veil over her eyes,
and she turned back her white cheek,
feeling disgust at the entrance of the children. And your husband
tried to remove the girl’s temper and gall,
saying these words: “Do not be angry towards your kin
but end your anger and turn back your head,
acknowledging as kin those whom your husband does,
and accept their gifts and beg of your father
to release these children from exile as a favor to me.”

And she, when she saw the adornments, could not hold herself back,
but she agreed with everything her husband said, and before her father
and your children were far away from the house,
taking the many-colored garment, she covered herself
and placed the gold crown around her curls,
arranging her hair in the bright mirror,
smiling at the lifeless likeness of her body.
And then, getting up from her seat, she passed
through the room, walking gracefully with her white feet,
rejoicing greatly at the gifts, often again
and again looking with her eyes at her outstretched ankle.
From then on, however, the sight was terrible to see:
for, her color changing, she fell back
sideways, her limbs trembling, and, falling upon the chair,
she hardly escaped falling to the floor.
And one old woman among the servants, thinking perhaps
it was either a frenzy of Pan or that one of the gods moved her,
shouted out loud, until she saw white foam coming
through her mouth and her pupils twisting
away from her eyes, and there was no blood in her skin:
then instead of a loud cry there came
a wailing. And straightaway one of the servants
went to her father’s rooms, and another went to her new husband,
telling the misfortune of the bride: and all
the house resounded with incessant running.

And already a quick runner, moving his limbs swiftly,
would have touched the finish line of a six-plethra race,
when from her silence and closed eyes, 
sighing a terrible sigh, the wretched woman woke.
For a twofold calamity was marching upon her:
The golden chaplet lying around her head
sent forth a wonderful stream of all-devouring fire,
and the delicate garments, the gifts of your children,
devoured the white flesh of the unhappy girl.
And she fled, rising from the seat, burning in flames,
shaking the hair on her head this way and that way,
wishing to cast off the crown: but the gold
closely held its fastenings, and the fire, when she shook
her head, shone forth more, twice as greatly.
And she fell to the floor, conquered by misfortune,
hard to recognize except to the one who’d begotten her:
for neither did her eyes appear with their usual form,
nor was her face well-shaped, but blood from the tip
of her head dropped, kneaded with fire,
and the flesh from her bones, like pine resin,
by the invisible jaws of the poison, was flowing,
a terrible sight: and all were afraid to touch
her corpse: for what had happened checked them, a teacher.

But her wretched father, out of ignorance of the misfortune,
arriving unaware to the chamber, fell upon the corpse.
And he wailed out loud at once and, enfolding his arms around her,
kissed her, speaking these words: “O unhappy child,
which of the gods in this dishonorable way has destroyed you?
Which god has placed me in a tomb, bereft
of you? Oh me!—let me die with you, child.”
But when he stopped his wailing and weeping,
wanting to raise up his body, the old man
held like ivy to a young laurel plant 
to the fine garments, and there was a terrible wrestling.
For he wished to rise up on his knees,
but she took hold of him: and if he acted with force,
he would rend his aged flesh from his bones.
And in time the unfortunate man gave up and set loose
his soul: for no longer was he victorious over the evil.
And they lie dead, the child and her old father,
close together, a misfortune that calls for tears.

But yours I leave without mention:
for you yourself will come to know a return for your punishment.
As for mortal life, now is not the first time I think it a shadow,
and I would not hesitate to say that those who seem to be wise
among mortals and anxious about words,
these men are liable to incur the greatest folly.
For among mortals, there is no one who is a blessed man:
one may become more fortunate than another
when happiness flows to him, but not blessed.

—Euripides, Medea ll. 1136-1230, my translation

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I’ve been reading Euripides’ Medea, on and off (mostly off), in the original Ancient Greek, for the past year or so. Last week I came across this passage, closer towards the end of the play. It is violent, vivid, it rips the flesh off your bones.

Some background: before the events of the play, Medea was the princess of Colchis, daughter of King Aeëtes. When Jason arrives with the Argonauts to get the Golden Fleece, she uses her powers of sorcery and magic to help him, then flees with him, even cutting her own brother into pieces and throwing the fraternal fragments into the sea to help them avoid pursuit. When Jason’s rightful claim to his father’s throne in Iolcus is blocked, they go to live in Corinth, and he and Medea have two children together.

Jason should only be so lucky to have a wife who’s willing to kill her own brother for him, who leaves her homeland and everything she knows for him, who is willing to put up with being treated by everyone in Corinth as a stranger, a foreigner, an outsider for him. But he doesn’t see it this way, and—whether out of love or lust or ambition (ambition mainly)—his wandering eye lands on Glauce, King Creon’s daughter and a princess of Corinth.

This is where the play begins, with Medea the woman scorned and Creon planning to send her and her children into exile from Corinth. This is a bad fate for Medea: she has forsaken her father and fatherland, she has been dishonored by her husband, she has nobody left to turn to, and she has two young children to care for. But Medea is a clever woman, and she dissembles her way through the play while plotting and scheming and hatching her revenge. Putting on the role of the distressed mother who only thinks of her children, appealing to Creon as a fellow parent, she begs him to allow her to stay in Corinth just one more day, which gives her the time she needs to fulfill her vengeful ends.

Meanwhile, Jason has the audacity to try to justify his betrayal to Medea, speaking of the benefits it will confer on herself and their children: with Jason married to Corinth’s princess, Medea and her children will be granted a higher status, the children will have more resources, Medea will safely be an insider now. At first Medea spurns him, then later—in the interest of her revenge—smiles to his face and gives him the appearance that these logical, rational, manly considerations have worked their way through her poor, small, feminine brain: they make sense to her, she sees the wisdom in them, she is glad to hear that her man is making such an advantageous match only for her benefit. She pretends to make up with Jason in front of their children, then asks him to entreat his new bride to ask her father if the children, at least, can be pardoned from exile. In order to make it easier for Glauce to say yes, she gives the children sumptuous gifts to bring to her and asks them to go with their father and deliver them (who, after all, is going to say no to a gift from a child?).

All this, of course, is only a vehicle for Medea’s murderous plots, for Medea, drawing on her powers as a sorceress, has poisoned the golden crown and the delicate garments. Medea—and we, the audience—do not see the actual murders. Instead, we hear of them secondhand, when a messenger rushes in to share the shocking news and tell the terrible story. He does this with great vividness, taking us through every moment, every excruciating detail. First we see Glauce’s initial disgust and anger when the children come in, the way she veils her face and turns away from their sight. Then we see the power of Medea’s gifts already, their ability to soften Glauce and flatter her girlish vanity. She can hardly wait to try them on, rushing to look at herself “in the bright mirror.” She is conscious of the way the dress adorns her body, and it’s easy to picture her stretching her leg back, flexing her foot to look down “again and again” at the graceful way it hangs on her.

These few lines accomplish many things: they emphasize the youth and beauty of Glauce as Medea’s sexual rival and replacement; they humanize her in a moment of girlish innocence; they use that innocence to emphasize by contrast the horror of the terrible events that will follow; and they foreshadow those events, Euripides using the words ἄψυχον εἰκὼ (“soulless image”) to describe Glauce’s reflection in the mirror.

Then there are the terrible, visceral details of the violence wrought upon Glauce and Creon: the way she shakes her head to try to get the crown off, which only makes the flames redouble their intensity; the way her deforming body becomes recognizable only to her father; the way Creon’s attempt to disentangle himself from his daughter’s body—the natural human instinct for self-preservation—ironically counters his earlier wish to die with her; the way the ululation of the old female servant—the loud cry that typically accompanies an important moment like birth or victory—becomes a grief-filled lamentation. Euripides’ natural metaphors of the “pine resin” and the ivy clinging to a laurel plant bring out the scene’s horror in all its fullness, generating the “bright unbearable reality” (in Alice Oswald’s words) the Greeks called enargeia.

It reminds me of Ingmar Bergman’s Persona, the scene where Alma (Bibi Andersson) tells Elisabeth (Liv Ullmann) about a sexual encounter she had years ago on the beach. All we see on the screen are Alma and Elisabet, Elisabet reclining on the bed in the background, Alma seated in an armchair in the foreground. Elisabet stares at Alma intently, silently, as she tells this tale, and she becomes a stand-in for us, the audience, a listener just as we are. You could theoretically put this scene on mute, remove the subtitles, and show it to a child. But it is I think one of the most erotic, sexually charged scenes in cinema. Language has a power of its own, speech in its inflections, in the emotions thrumming beneath the surface, a power that brings images to life more vividly than if we had seen them with our own two eyes.

In Ancient Greek tragedy, deaths always took place off-stage (strange to us now, when we can access all manner of explicit things quite readily and often without wanting to). Scholars argue this was probably because of practical difficulties in staging these usually violent scenes, because of not wanting to offend the sensibilities of the audience, or because of certain religious prohibitions. Whether intentionally or not, this convention had many beneficial aesthetic consequences, and Euripides exploits them to the fullest here, as only a master dramatist can.

In the Poetics, Aristotle calls Euripides the “most tragic” of the Greek tragedians. In this scene, it’s easy to see why. Euripides refuses to simplify the complexities of human relationships and emotions: Medea, monstrous though her deeds may be, is also someone whose pain and grief and anger we can empathize with. Jason, the least sympathetic character in the whole drama, seems almost sincere at times in his belief that his marriage with Glauce will result in a better life for Medea and their children. Glauce, who could have just been a flat, cardboard cutout of a character, is here given her own moment of humanity. Creon, whom we might have been content to let remain a cold tyrant, hostile to foreigners, is also shown with a father’s more tender feelings of love for his child and desperation at her demise.

The attention given to their deaths is not gratuitous or gory for the sake of being gory. On the contrary, it lends pathos to the messenger’s final words about human life and makes us reflect more deeply on our condition. It is true that nobody’s life is happy all the way through, at every moment and in every minute, but to know that others suffer and have suffered as we do can make those painful moments more bearable.

Perhaps that’s why when I translated this scene, going through it more slowly and minutely than I would have had I read it straight through in English, I found that it clung to me, you might say, like ivy to a laurel plant, refusing to let go.

Dear readers, I hope you enjoyed this translation and bit of commentary! If you did, please give this post a like, subscribe to Soul-Making for more on literature and culture, and share with a friend. As always, I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments! I hope you all have a wonderful and beautiful weekend.

More Unhinged Women:

More Translation:

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A Trip to an Elbow

Summer in Boston means the Cape, that ragged, curving promontory that juts out from Massachusetts like an arm, elbow level with shoulder, fist curled in a rather pugilistic stance, as though it were defending our fair state, though whether from pirates or Leviathans, from the too strong tempests and tantrums of the sea, or from our cousins across the pond (still wary, perhaps, 250 years later, of a repetition of the old brawl, and keeping herself in good shape and a ready attitude for it) remains to be seen.

Cape Cod takes its name from an abundance of that piscine specimen. Originally calling it “Shoal Hope,” Bartholomew Gosnold and his crew changed their minds (and for the better, I say, for “Let’s go to the Shoal this weekend” doesn’t have quite the same ring) when their ship was mobbed by an immoderately large cod greeting party. But alas, though the name remains with the place, the good creatures who lent the name do not: overfishing has depleted the cod population to a tenth of its former levels, although thankfully the cod who remain are still kind enough to sacrifice the material portions of their selves (let us say nothing of the spiritual) for the tasty delight of fish and chips.

Fish and chips—or in my case, scallops and onion rings—no sooner than June arrives and the memory of that taste reappears on my tongue, churning the salivary glands into motion and bidding me to endure the more than two hours’ drive eastward, as well as the excruciating traffic that accompanies it. For whatever reason—for our driving or for Dunkin’ or for our calling a roundabout a “rotary”—God has cursed us Bostonians with good weather during the week, when it can only be enjoyed by vacationers, retirees, and the unemployed, and clouds, cold, drizzle, or outright lightning and thunder on the weekends. However, this year we were in luck. Finding ourselves with an unoccupied Thursday—a Thursday that coincided, of course, with the aforementioned good weather—we set out under the auspices of the sun, Massachusetts showing off her bicep in the estival dazzle, happily demonstrating that she could still flex her old and weathered muscles.

There are many towns on the Cape, and each has its own flavor and peculiar charm. Provincetown, the fist, is probably the most well-known, for its preponderance of artists and gays. Hyannisport, in the fleshier part of the arm, is famous for being the location of the Kennedy Compound, where the Kennedy clan, I hear, still summer, gathering to sail and walk along the shore and maintain what is left of the magic of Camelot. Driving along, we passed through Sandwich but didn’t eat it—ditto for Mashpee (less appetizing-sounding). The Sagamore Bridge, stretching across the Cape Cod Canal with its 1930s typography, was successfully traversed, and then I really felt at last that old feeling I always get when entering the Cape, of sand and sun, of salt and sea, of endless, eternal summer.

What can compare with the charm of a Cape house? The steeply peaked roofs, the grey, weathered shingles, the neat little windows with their neat little shutters, the white picket fences or the low, rustic wooden ones, the white lampposts and the iron mailboxes perched on their white mounts, an abundance of hydrangeas blooming in thick clusters, blue and purple and pink and white, in the front gardens, the green lawns and bushes setting off the tidy appearance of the homes—it all seems to have been here since time immemorial, enduring summer after summer, keeping this little seaside corner of the world from the taint of ugliness, the vicissitudes of time, or any ghastly alterations in the fashions of house-building.

Growing up, my parents’ favorite town on the Cape was always Chatham, where our first stop was always Chatham Fish & Chips, tucked away on Old Harbor Road. Sitting outside on the patio by a thrill of pink hydrangeas, you could fatten yourself up for the sharks with a platter of seafood, fries, onion rings, coleslaw and tartar sauce. Chatham is right at the elbow—the bony part, not the soft, inner flesh, and its Main Street has not lost its picturesque quaintness over the years. Free parking by the rotary (do not utter to a Bay Stater the terms “roundabout” or “traffic circle”) is the perfect launchpad for exploring Main Street.

However many times I encounter the same façades, however many times I wander into the same stores, it’s always a treat to see the work of local artists in the art galleries, to grab an ice cream to cool off from the summer heat, to walk away from Uncommon Thrift, an antiques shop staffed by volunteers from nearby St. Christopher’s, with some new treasure, like the old Nichols & Stone rocking chair my father bought for me last summer. Somehow he had squeezed it into the back of our little car, somehow he had squeezed it out, and perhaps it was some kind of Cape magic that had enabled him to do so.

Walk along Main Street long enough and you will reach Lighthouse Beach. Though its twin, Nauset Light, which was moved a century ago to Eastham and has since attained the fame of adorning the Cape Cod Chips packet, is the Cape’s most renowned lighthouse, and though I concede that the Three Sisters have their threefold charm, I prefer no other lighthouse to Chatham Light when the sunset is streaked out behind it in glorious colors of flame and purple.

And the beaches themselves and the sea—as Virginia Woolf said of clouds, “if I could describe them I would.” The water is very clear and pure, lying upon the sand like a transparent cloth. Its folds ripple and crease, reflect striations of light over the fine, tan sand-grains. Gradually it darkens to a deep cerulean in the distance and would almost merge with the sky, were it not for the thin bar of sand at the horizon, layered over with thin green beach grass. The sky and the sea and the sand extend forever—neither to the left of you nor to the right will you find their limit. The single white sail of a boat floats serenely over the blue, and the sail’s reflection sparkles and glimmers in the water, sending out myriad diamonds and crystals. The clouds are a light, white gossamer, themselves sails in the sea of the sky, and they give me the feeling that summer will never end.

But the beauty of the sea—its fresh, inviting appearance, its achingly clear acres of blue—is a lie. First of all, the water is treacherously cold. Keep your feet in the water for ten minutes and you will probably find yourself having to amputate the appendage now grown useless in its glacial freeze. Then there are the sharks. Right away when you arrive at the beach, you will see large shark warning signs informing you of the presence of great white sharks hovering somewhere menacingly in the water. These signs are helpfully accompanied by vaguely threatening pictures of said great white, jaws opening to reveal unsettlingly pointy teeth, and even more helpful captions about downloading the “sharktivity app” and calling 911 in case of “severe bleeding.”

If the threat of bleeding to death in hyperborean waters is not enough to put you off from swimming, further warnings enumerate a litany of additional dangers: strong rip currents; heavy surf; “dangerous marine life.” No wonder my father was so alarmed when my mother and I were taking pictures of each other with his phone right by the waves, fearing that it would be lost in a squall and sink to a grave from which its body could never be exhumed. For those used to the milder waters of the Pacific: beware. West coast living is easier, it seems, not just on land but at sea.

And yet I would not give up my eastern seashore for anything in the world. Freezing though the waves may be, shark-infested more often than not, apt to be found in an irksome mood, I love it nonetheless and will probably continue to love it to the end of my days.

Meditating on it has made me realize that with a keen eye and a curious mind, you can travel wherever you are. You need not be jetting off to the Himalayas or sailing across Lake Como. All you need are the awareness that results in close observation, the capacity for wonder, and the willingness to explore. Bring these along with you wherever you go, and the world will open up to you, almost as splendid and capacious as the maw of a great white shark.

of Food Hag has just published a wonderful guide to the Cape if you are looking to travel there. I also love Henry David Thoreau’s Cape Cod, an interesting and very thorough account of the Cape in the mid-1800s, when it was far less crammed with tourists.

Mood Board of the Week

1. Winslow Homer, Berry Pickers (1873): American artist Winslow Homer (1836–1910) captures the delights of summer in this watercolor of seaside berry-picking. The subjects, all children, bend down in the low brambles with their metal pails, every head shielded from the sun by a summer hat. I like to imagine they’re tasting as they go.

2. Giuseppe Gentile, Maria Callas, and Pier Paolo Pasolini on the set of Medea (1969): I’ve been translating Euripides’ Medea, probably one of my favorite Greek tragedies because of the complexity of Medea’s character and the way that readers can empathize with her in spite of some of her more… questionable actions. Famed opera singer Maria Callas became closely associated with the character of Medea because of her starring role in Cherubini’s 1797 opera based on the Greek tragedy. In a fascinating case of life imitating art, Callas could relate to Euripides’ heroine and his tale of a woman scorned: the day after she agreed to do this film, her first and only, her lover, the Greek shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis, married Jackie Kennedy. This behind-the-scenes image is very funny to me because of the contrast between Pasolini’s obviously 1960s, brightly, zanily patterned swimming trunks and Medea and Gentile’s historical getup.

3. Chloé Spring/Summer 2004: In 2003, stylist Bay Garnett took a banana-print top she had found at a flea market for a few pounds and put it on Kate Moss for an issue of British Vogue. Phoebe Philo, then the creative director of Chloé, evidently read that issue, because an almost exact replica of that top appeared on the Spring 2004 runway, along with variations on the banana-print theme: a short dress, a cut-out bodysuit. This proves the old adage, that great artists steal. You can Garnett herself tell the story in this video.

   

4. Intertitle from Claire’s Knee (1970): Éric Rohmer is the perfect filmmaker to watch in the summer. There’s La Collectionneuse, of course, with Haydée Politoff sauntering along the beach in the south of France in her yellow bikini, A Summer’s Tale, The Green Ray. But I have a soft spot for Le genou de Claire, a movie about desire and the way that it can center around something so strange and so specific, like touching a knee. The film’s events take place over the course of a month, from June 29 to July 29, and these little intertitles handwritten in blue ink like diary entries preface the events of each day, somehow capturing so perfectly the way long summer days just seem to float by, one after another, without a care in the world.

5. Yasmeen Ghauri by Walter Chin for Vogue Deutsch in 1993: I love the way Ghauri is styled in this editorial, barefoot, wearing lots of large statement jewelry, her hair long and messy and wild, here adorned with whimsical jeweled turtles. Though her stunning, symmetrical features may be hard to replicate, the laidback summer vibes may be not.

6. Conch pearls, photographed for Cayman Pearl Company: This week, while flicking through the pages of a book called Pearls: A Natural History (2001), I came across a little picture of a beautiful pink gem, accompanied by the caption “This magnification of a conch pearl shows the flamelike pattern known as chatoyancy.” I was immediately entranced and had to know more. It turns out that conch shells can also produce pearls, though these pearls are much, much rarer. Unlike oyster pearls, they are non-nacreous, much harder and tougher, and display a flamelike pattern due to the arrangement of their prismatic crystals. The most coveted of these are the pink ones, and it’s easy to see why.

7. La Piscine (1969): If you’re looking for the perfect summer aesthetic, look no further than Jacques Deray’s tale of sexual tension and jealousy on the Côte d’Azur. The chemistry between Romy Schneider and Alain Delon, who once had a passionate relationship, is undeniable, and young Jane Birkin provides summer fashion inspiration for days.

8. Alexandra de Steiguer, Engaging the Oceanic (2023): Photographer Alexandra de Steiguer (1966–) spent nine years working aboard traditionally rigged ships, going on long voyages to “find peace, inner strength, and wonder” on the waves and studying marine biology and oceanography. Though she now lives in a small, solar-powered cottage in the woods of New Hampshire, every winter she moves to the Isles of Shoals, their sole resident and caretaker. Her images of the desolate, winter-swept landscape, of Arctic sea smoke and dark black rocks, old shacks standing alone in a wild, treacherous world, are haunting. This image—the black and white, the sea and the rocks, the lone woman looking out into the distance—reminds me of Ingmar Bergman’s Persona, and there is a certain serenity in it that I love.

9. Fatima Karashaeva, Girl Reading Book (2024): Fatima Karashaeva is a Russian-Canadian painter who currently lives in Montréal. Inspired by Impressionism and 20th-century naturalism, she primarily paints portraits, and I love the naturalistic effect of the light here, the way the girl’s face and hand is shaded, the hand resting atop a (very relatable) heap of books, the bottom of her skirt transparent and casually revealing glimpses of her skin beneath. I did a post back in November where the mood board was solely images of people reading, and I’d definitely include Karashaeva’s painting in a larger iteration!

3 Things I’m in Love With This Week

1. The beauty of the Pacific Northwest: This New Englander has found herself flung across to the other end of the country and, against her expectations and preconceived notions (a result primarily of ignorance), fallen in love. The weather is so temperate here, the landscape so green and big and bountiful, teeming with life. Hummingbirds, mountains, wildflowers, apples and berries growing spontaneously like little delights nature makes in her free time, for the fun of it—who could not help being thoroughly charmed?

   

2. Taking walks with other people: Due to circumstances and a solitary nature, I have become accustomed over the past few years to walking alone, and I never minded it, for I loved the opportunity for reflection, meditation, pondering, and mind-wandering that a solitary walk provided. Not only could I follow my feet into some strange by-lane or amble further down this street or that street than the customary route allowed, but so too could my imagination ramble over sundry musings and consort with itself, going deeper into that thicket of self that lies too often unexplored. However, the past few months have entailed fewer walks alone and more walks with others, and I have found that a walk is a good stimulus for conversation and—especially when the weather gets nicer—a fun and free way to spend meaningful quality time with the people you care about.

3. Reading more on Substack: I feel guilty admitting this as a Substack writer, but until recently, I hadn’t really embraced the breadth and diversity of writing there is to read here on Substack. Somehow it just felt too overwhelming—scrolling through my feed, I was met by so much content, all jumbled up together, and it was easier to just click out and go elsewhere. However, I realized a) because people can write about literally anything on Substack, you can find so many more interesting things to read here and b) I was doing a disservice to all the very talented, hardworking people who post their work (often for free!) on this platform. Here are a few pieces I enjoyed this week:

   1. “We Love Potential Too Much” by at Salieri Redemption: Chris Jesu Lee writes about coming to the end of rewriting his latest novel draft and the feeling of dread that accompanies it. While being in the middle of something can be exhilarating for its pure potential, arriving at the finish line—hard, final, solid—takes us into the less rosy realm of reality, and so we’re always chasing after the next arena of potential: “We work hard to build the lives we want, only to become dissatisfied because we keep needing for there to be some great next.” As someone with an embarrassing number of unfinished projects lying around, I can relate. But I’m trying to remind myself of the growth that lies on the other end of the finish line.

   2. “Cézanne Summer!” by at The Crossroads Gazette: I always find it so fascinating to read about artists’ lives, and here Nicole Miras delves into the history of Cézanne’s family estate in Aix-en-Provence, where the painter spent many a childhood summer. He would return often in adulthood to recapture the summer delights, the peace and the restorative powers of the countryside, especially when he needed to recover from the hubbub of the city or the sting of rejection. Forget about hot girl summer—a Cézanne summer sounds pretty close to perfect.

   3. Note by : There’s been a lot of discourse on Substack lately about contemporary literature, the state of the publishing industry today, and the supposed disappearance of the literary man. Henry Begler hits on a different angle and—I think—gets closer to the truth: “hardly anyone I know in real life reads or writes extensively.” But because of Substack, we’re starting to see the emergence of a new literary community, where people can get together and share their honest opinions about books. I’m really excited to see what more will come from this scene!

Words of Wisdom

“When a man bleeds inwardly, it is a dangerous thing for himself; but when he laughs inwardly, it bodes no good to other people.”

— Charles Dickens, The Pickwick Papers

The Pickwick Papers is Dickens’ first significant work, published in serialized form over a 20-month period from 1836 to 1837, when Dickens was only 24-25. Mr. Pickwick, the Papers’ eponymous hero, involves himself in a rather unfortunate misunderstanding with his landlady, the widowed Mrs. Bardell, who brings a lawsuit against him “for a breach of promise of marriage” with damages of £1500. Mr. Pickwick and his solicitor try to sort this out. In the process, the honest and forthright Mr. Pickwick encounters several of the slimy, shady, unscrupulous specimens who represent and uphold the legal system. It is one such specimen from whom this sinister inward laugh emanates.

Indeed, Dickens himself was no fan of the legal world and those who dealt in its shadowy operations. Like David Copperfield, he got his start at a law office, working as a junior clerk before becoming a court reporter. Bleak House famously begins with a description of thick fog drifting down the streets of London, blanketing the city, drifting into every corner, obscuring everything from sight. The origin of all this fog? The Court of Chancery, of course.

By the by, I wonder that serialized novels are not more popular on Substack. It seems that something similar to the way most of Dickens’s novels first appeared as installments in magazines or newspapers would occur on Substack, but other than John Pistelli’s Major Arcana, I haven’t really heard of any—and certainly not any that have achieved the fraction of the popularity Dickens’s novels garnered in his day. That’s a shame, because serializing a novel through a newsletter seems like something that would combine the success and popularity of fanfiction with the creative freedom that makes Substack so appealing.

Poetry Corner

“From My Diary”

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published

Leaves
Murmuring by myriads in the shimmering trees.
Lives
Wakening with wonder in the Pyrenees. 
Birds
Cheerily chirping in the early day.
Bards
Singing of summer, scything thro’ the hay.
Bees
Shaking the heavy dews from bloom and frond.
Boys
Bursting the surface of the ebony pond.
Flashes
Of swimmers carving thro’ the sparkling cold.
Fleshes
Gleaming with wetness to the morning gold.
A mead
Bordered about with warbling water brooks.
A maid
Laughing the love-laugh with me; proud of looks.
The heat
Throbbing between the upland and the peak.
Her heart
Quivering with passion to my pressed cheek.
Braiding
Of floating flames across the mountain brow.
Brooding
Of stillness; and a sighing of the bough.
Stirs
Of leaflets in the gloom; soft petal-showers;
Stars
Expanding with the starr’d nocturnal flowers.

—Wilfred Owen

Wilfred Owen (1893-1918) based this poem on his memories from the summer of 1914, when he was staying at the Villa Lorenzo in the French Pyrenees with the Léger family. Unable to afford university, he had spent the past few years working as a Vicar’s assistant and attending classes at the local University of Reading, before becoming a private English tutor, the position for which he went to live with the Légers. There he was introduced to a new circle of artists, musicians, academics, and poets, a wonderful opportunity for a budding poet. However, he would soon have to give up this idyllic life, for WWI had just begun, and Owen would enlist in October 1915. Like his early influence John Keats, he would die at just 25, killed in action one week before the end of the war in 1918, though not before penning several lasting poems.

It’s possible that “From My Diary” was composed in 1917 when Owen was at Craiglockhart War Hospital in Edinburgh being treated for shell shock, where he would meet Siegfried Sassoon, the other great poet of WWI, and be encouraged to revisit his dreams and experiences through poetry. Perhaps reliving these idyllic summer days in the Pyrenees soothed and comforted him, reminding him of simpler days of peace and tranquility. Each couplet presents a vivid image from that summer, starting with a word that appears like title of the couplet, then following it up with a longer line completing or elaborating on that idea. I love the way that the first and third lines of each quartet present a half-rhyme, often unexpected, like “Flashes” and “Fleshes,” “A mead” and “A maid,” “Braiding” and “Brooding,” and you can rarely predict where Owen will take that word in the next line. In contrast, the end words of the second and fourth lines are neater, more exact rhymes, lending a sense of closure to each quartet.

I love the vividness of the imagery here, which Owen brings out through his careful attention to the sounds of words—“Murmuring by myriads,” “warbling water brooks.” There is no need to settle on any one image here, no need to philosophize, search for a deeper meaning, or expand anything—the “maid” (Nénette Léger), for example—into a larger story. Like a summer butterfly flitting among the flowers, the poet goes from one impression to another, drawing out the nectar of each sweet moment.

Beauty Tip

Go berry-picking! I went for the first time last weekend and discovered that blackberries, raspberries, and blueberries come not in one variety but several, tasted a boysenberry for the first time, and stained my fingers and mouth with the beautiful sticky deep reddish-purple of berry juice, understanding why Victorian ladies used it to color their lips and lend a blush to their cheeks. Also, I never knew before that berries could be so filling, that those little jewel-like orbs could provide so much sustenance. I was reminded of Sylvia Plath’s “blood sisterhood” of “Blackberries / Big as the ball of my thumb, and dumb as eyes / Ebon in the hedges, fat / With blue-red juices” and Seamus Heaney’s “Blackberry-Picking,” though thankfully no “rat-grey fungus” has yet appeared on our cache.

Lingering Question

What more than anything says “summer” to you?

Dear Readers, this one ended up very long, but I had a lot of fun writing the little essay at the beginning, and I hope you had fun reading! If you enjoyed, please like this post, subscribe to Soul-Making for more, and leave a comment—it always means a lot to me to hear from you.

More travel

More summer

You see, a couple of weekends ago I picked up Anne’s House of Dreams from a Little Free Library by the side of the road, ecstatic to have encountered my favorite heroine by chance, ecstatic to pick up just where I’d left off with her, ecstatic to have yet more of the magic of Montgomery’s amethyst evenings and “kindred spirits” and the delicious, homespun delights, the virtues and charms of her Prince Edward Island, one of those rare fictional places you can enter after an absence of any length and find that a place setting is still laid for you on the table and a fire still roars in the hearth. I had meant to savor the novel, to let Montgomery’s words and world melt, dissolve, spread slowly and lingeringly across the palate of my mind, but instead I bit with relish and devoured greedily, quickly, all too quickly.

The end of a good book always leaves you with a bittersweet taste in your mouth: the pleasure of a beautiful experience mingled with the pain that no good thing lasts forever, the triumph of having scaled the mountain mingled with the tragedy of having no more mountain to scale, the satisfaction of finding out at last what fate befalls each character mingled with the sorrow of having to say goodbye to creatures now dear and familiar. In the wake of this absence, I cast around for something to fill the void, came across Lillian Fishman’s story “Travesty” in The New Yorker, liked it, and decided to read her debut novel, Acts of Service, which came out in 2022.

Acts of Service concerns a young woman, Eve, who lives in New York City, has a girlfriend, Romi, and “had talked [her]self all the way from an attraction to women into a political commitment to lesbianism.” This political commitment is shaken when she posts her nudes online, is messaged by a woman, Olivia, and learns that Olivia is not just acting “single spies” but on behalf of her boyfriend, Nathan. Though it is Olivia Eve is first drawn to, it is Nathan who keeps her coming back again and again, Nathan who splits open the core of her being (literally and figuratively) and transforms her life, Nathan who is everything she shouldn’t want but does—straight, white, male, wealthy, in his professional life the head of a private family investment office, in his personal life sexually dominant, able to pleasure and please a litany of women with perfect ease.

If Acts of Service has a thesis, it’s that sex, in and of itself, without being bound to the institution of marriage, scaffolded by the safety of a relationship, or underpinned by the spiritual magic of love, can be a profoundly transformative experience. Eve’s friend Fatima invokes Eve Babitz’s notion of “sex masterpieces,” that these are “the only creative adventures” that most people will ever have—as Nathan says early on in the novel, “My art is fucking.”

Sex occurs in Anne’s House of Dreams, too, but never explicitly, not even really implicitly, just gestured to in the vaguest possible manner, as something that must by logic have happened in the deepest, most shadowy recesses backstage in order for certain other things to have been effected, namely babies. The novel’s heroine, the beloved Anne Shirley, is about the same age as Acts of Service’s Eve, maybe a year or two younger, but at 25 her life has a very different shape. She begins the book by marrying her childhood enemy and longtime sweetheart, Gilbert Blythe, and moving with him from their hometown of Avonlea to Four Winds, a little community by the sea, where, as a newly minted medical doctor, he takes over his uncle’s medical practice.

There she meets and befriends Captain Jim, an old, kindhearted sailor who operates the local lighthouse and has a knack for storytelling; Miss Cornelia Bryant, an unmarried middle-aged woman who uses any chance she can get to upbraid, vituperate, and castigate the less fair sex; and Leslie Moore, Anne’s 28-year-old neighbor, whose beauty and brilliance have been thwarted by a series of unspeakable tragedies, leaving her in a precarious financial situation and burdened with the care of her cognitively disabled husband, who, when his faculties were intact, was once cruel to her, whom she married out of coercion, and whom she does not love.

Here is how Montgomery describes the process by which Anne and Gilbert have a baby:

“One morning, when a windy golden sunrise was billowing over the gulf in waves of light, a certain weary stork flew over the bar of Four Winds Harbour on his way from the Land of Evening Stars. Under his wing was tucked a sleepy, starry-eyed, little creature. The stork was tired, and he looked wistfully about him. He knew he was somewhere near his destination, but he could not see it. The big, white light-house on the red sandstone cliff had its good points; but no stork possessed of any gumption would leave a new, velvet baby there. An old gray house, surrounded by willows, in a blossomy brook valley, looked more promising, but did not seem quite the thing either. The staring green abode further on was manifestly out of the question. Then the stork brightened up. He had caught sight of the very place—a little white house nestled against a big, whispering fir-wood, with a spiral of blue smoke winding up from its kitchen chimney—a house which just looked as if it were meant for babies. The stork gave a sigh of satisfaction, and softly alighted on the ridge-pole.”

In the years since the sexual revolution, we’ve exulted in the freedom to both have and depict sex, reveling in our new abandon, cherishing the pleasures of the flesh. But I can’t tell you how immeasurably tickled I was by this passage, the way it imbues a rather silly cliché, more often than not used like a parent’s hands over a child’s ears to protect those tender organs from the more unpleasant, messier truth of how babies come into the world, with imagination, entering into the subjectivity of the stork, personifying him as “weary,” as “look[ing] wistfully,” as weighing the pros and cons of the homes he sees, as “brighten[ing] up” and sighing in satisfaction. Montgomery never gives us a glimpse into this most private interior of Anne and Gilbert’s newlywed days, is reticent even about giving us moments of marital romance, as though we the reader were a young Victorian lady and she our severe Victorian chaperone, shielding our eyes and leading us away with a brisk, “Come, come,” to look instead at the flowers or go in to tea. Though a part of me desperately wanted a peek, the imagination, humor, and delicacy of the stork passage I found a more than satisfactory substitute for the titillation, passion, and excitement of sex.

We are in an interesting moment for young women. Against the previous decade’s prevailing mores of girlboss feminism and sexual license, that women can and should leave marriage and babies for later (or for never), that men are evil oppressors upholding an evil, oppressive patriarchy, that women can “have it all” with all the agility and coordination of an octopus, younger women are preferring to opt for a “soft life,” to invest in the idea of the “divine feminine,” to tout marriage and motherhood as attractive alternatives to a careerism they see as unfulfilling and exhausting.

So the question of these two novels, it seems to me, is how should a young woman live? What kind of life should a woman in her 20s lead—what should she value, and what should she choose? The answers in Anne’s House of Dreams are pretty clear. Anne’s marriage with Gilbert, a loving marriage based on mutual respect, admiration, and kindness towards each other, serves as the foundation of her adult life, the stable base from which she can explore the world and and to which she can return to heal when the world wounds. There is the natural beauty of her new surroundings—the great beauty of the sea and the changing of the seasons and the “great glory of pink wild roses.” There is, as always, Anne’s imagination, which gives this landscape its human touches and inquires into the lives of others not nosily, not spitefully or intrusively, but to learn a fellow human heart, to find perhaps a “kindred spirit.” There are her close relationships with the Green Gables folk that remain in spite of her change of address, especially her guardian Marilla, who visits during holidays, who paces and prays when the baby comes, who gives succor and comfort when the baby passes.

But where in previous novels Anne had school or university or teaching or writing, here, while Gilbert is out doctoring, in the gap between girlhood and motherhood, her life derives the most meaning from the community around her and the new friendships she forges. Her meaning comes from understanding Captain Jim, Miss Cornelia, Leslie, from appreciating them with all their quirks and follies and foibles, from conversations and laughter and shared memories and storytelling, from the joy they bring to each other’s lives and the connection they create in the little “house of dreams.”

Not everything is sunshine and roses. Bad things happen—Anne and Gilbert’s first baby dies soon after birth; their marriage is not wholly free from rifts and conflicts; good friends must cross the bar, while other friendships are tainted with the sourness of envy. Fishman, in an essay for , writes that in our era, “the pillars of faith, marriage, and children have been emptied out.” In Anne’s era, these pillars remain firm, and they allow characters in Anne’s House of Dreams to navigate life’s difficulties, to puzzle out its conundrums and steer through its choppier waters, emerging not unscathed but at least in tact.

Take faith. Near the end of the novel, a major disagreement arises between Anne and Gilbert over the subject of curing Leslie’s once cruel, now disabled husband George. Gilbert comes across a surgery that would restore George’s faculties and believes he has a duty to tell Leslie; Anne vehemently wants Gilbert to keep this information to himself, lest George return to his former cruel self and make poor Leslie’s already hard, unhappy life yet harder and unhappier. But Gilbert cannot shake off a sense of moral duty, turning at last to his faith:

“‘Ye shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free.’ I believe that, Anne, with all my heart. It’s the greatest and grandest verse in the Bible—or in any literature—and the TRUEST, if there are comparative degrees of trueness. And it’s the first duty of a man to tell the truth, as he sees it and believes it.”

Anne decides to “disagree and commit” (though not without torturing her husband a little first), Leslie is told, the operation is performed, and—in a turn of events nobody could have predicted, the truth does indeed, happily, “make free.”

Acts of Service presents a vastly different life for a woman in her 20s. Eve seems to drift along aimlessly, and neither her sexuality nor her job nor her relationships nor the city seem to offer her much in terms of making something meaningful out of her life. As a character I find her hard to imagine, hard to picture holding a conversation with—she’s almost a ghostly presence; she could be any young, liberal woman in New York City. The most vivid thing about her is her perfect, beautiful body, which is in fact what sets the novel’s plot in motion: her urge to photograph that body and have its beauty validated by strangers online is what leads her to enter a relationship with Nathan and Olivia. Later on, she muses that she is only really herself when “undressed in Nathan’s living room.”

Olivia is obsessed with Nathan, totally under his thumb and his spell, but outside of him she has her art, which she feels intensely about and which she approaches with the same fervor and dedication. Outside of the threesome, Nathan has his work at the investment office and—he eventually reveals—his wife of seven years. But what does Eve have outside of this bizarre love triangle? Her relationship falls apart, her lesbianism unravels. Her job as a barista promises little in terms of career growth or financial prospects—it’s just something to do while she waits for her father’s money to drift on down to her. We only see her having one friendship, that which she has with her roommate Fatima, but this has neither the depth nor the richness of Anne’s friendships with her neighbors. Her relationship with her father mainly consists of him pressuring her to find a “real” job; she lies to him, then reveals the lie—not that it has much effect on the relationship anyway.

With the collapse of the old pillars, young, intelligent women in such novels either choose to opt out of life altogether or revert to the realm of the senses. In Acts of Service, the single pillar becomes Nathan’s penis, which single-penisedly does away with all the beliefs and ideology a young, liberal, supposedly lesbian woman living in a big city can be thought to have in our day and age:

“When I was with Nathan I was compelled by him into a kind of raw state, a state of grotesque candor, in which I had unfettered access… to the beliefs that had been instilled in me against my will.”

Sex is a world in which you can forget everything, escape everything—beliefs can be suspended, rules, norms, and conventions go out the window, everything narrows to only pleasure, and the question is not “Is it right?” or “What does it mean?” but “Does this feel good?” And what feels good, it turns out, rarely takes its cue from what we think should feel good. If sex with Nathan is the transformative, magical experience Eve and the novel seem to want us to think it is, I’m not quite sure what we are left with in the end. Pillars of marble (faith, marriage, children) are replaced by pillars of sand (feminism, lesbianism) are replaced by pillars of air (threesomes).

As a young woman, I often find myself grappling with the question “How should a life be?” and as a writer with the question “How should a novel be?” What makes a life and a novel meaningful? As much as I loved Fishman’s prose, as much as I didn’t want to stop reading, I found it hard to put my faith in sex—a sex not underscored by love, a sex that served only to negate rather than to affirm.

Both a life and a novel need a strong sense of values. I think this is what is missing in so much of contemporary life and fiction. I don’t mean values in a conservative, traditional sense, I mean values in the sense of something positive and life-affirming that lends lasting meaning. In “The Cultural Decline of Literary Fiction,” says that “Something about literary fiction has changed in recent years that has put it off to mass audiences.” Likewise, , in a piece about the general reader, describes a reader who’s “baffled” by all the discourse about the publishing industry, who simply reads “what they like”—and what they like often turns out to be “older books.”

I wonder if it’s because the newer books just don’t seem to be as meaningful. Characters in them lack a strong sense of their values, and they don’t commit. They exist in a perpetual confusion; they find it easy to reject what they don’t want but hard to accept or even know what they do want. In James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, young Stephen Dedalus rejects Ireland, the church, mother and father, but in passages of great beauty and transformation and joy, he exultantly discovers and affirms his purpose “to recreate life out of life,” to “forge in the smithy of [his] soul the uncreated conscience of [his] race.”

As I see it, the pillars that uphold the older classics are aesthetic beauty; a sense of moral wisdom; plots where actions and events feel significant, not arbitrary; characters who are real and fully fleshed, who dream and hope and strive and make you laugh and cry. It may be unfair of me to compare and contrast two such different books that came into my life together rather accidentally or uphold them as models of older and contemporary fiction. There are many contemporary novels like Acts of Service—Namwali Serpell rounds up at least ten of them that she dubs “remaster novels,” novels in which a young, powerless woman becomes involved with an older, powerful man who often has a shadowy wife lurking in the background. She traces their descent from Jane Eyre, but Jane and Rochester are both characters who have suffered, who know what they want and don’t want, who are real and passionate and see one another when others don’t. More than love or lust or a desire for security, Jane is led by her values: at a crucial moment, she chooses her self-respect over her love for Rochester, even if it leads her to abject poverty and begging.

One can have fun in a threesome, experiment, have a little adventure. But if I had to pick between the threesome and the stork, I’d throw my lot in with the stork. Lifting me up on its great broad wings, it might just take me somewhere.

Dear Readers, I haven’t written a long essay like this in a while and found it really fun to write. Please let me know your thoughts in the comments—I always love hearing from you—and give this post a like, share with a friend, and subscribe to Soul-Making if you enjoyed!

—

Some Reflections on Furniture

There comes a point in everybody’s life when one must begin to think about furniture. Hitherto the bed, the sideboard, the armchair in the corner with the sagging seat, the dresser whose drawers one opened and shut a thousand times, the desk, the nightstand, were taken for granted and never thought of much. They disappeared into the background of one’s life, objects which one ran around as a child but never stopped to look at, things which one tried not to scratch, scrape, break, impair, damage, or abrade, for fear of the parent’s stern look, wagging finger, or ineluctable scolding, entities that were just there somehow, there for the coffee cup or the weary body, significant only in function and hardly noticed.

Recent entrance into married life has changed my perspective on furniture. Setting up house together, little by little, my better half and I begin to ask ourselves how we want to fill our spaces, how we might unite form and function in such a way that a house becomes a home, how—to tweak a sentiment from Coleridge—to put the best things in the best order such that some kind of domestic poetry sings forth.1 What is this place that we are fashioning together, what kind of shape do we want it to take on, how can it be conducive to our happiest living together, what kind of dreams will it make come true or help breathe life into, what moments will it serve as backdrop to, what sort of stage does it set?

Being fond of old things, which generally can’t be beat nowadays for price, quality, beauty, variety, and functionality, we hit up an estate sale a couple of months ago and made out like bandits. Chief among our spoils were a wooden kidney-bean shaped desk that had been entirely engulfed by stacks and heaps of china, and a pair of handsome, green velvet-upholstered dark wooden chairs, ornately carved, their backs inlaid with flowers, their feet in the shape of lion’s paws. Now whenever I sit on one of these chairs in front of this desk, which has become my writing desk, I remember my husband picking his way over a treacherous path of ice and snow, making use of his masculine strength and all those years of working out to carry our new old treasures from the estate to the car, the two of us somehow managing to lift that desk up the stairs and into our apartment, my husband cleaning and polishing it until it looked good as new and smelled beautifully of orange oil. All our newlywed happiness and love seemed to have become a part of it, all his encouragement of my writing and our cherishing of each other’s dreams, the warm glow and thrill of beginning to build a life together.

A couple of weeks ago we went to Brimfield, the famed flea market, where a man showed us some superlative antiques—18th century chests of drawers with delicate inlays and marble tops, a fine 19th century china hutch—explained to us the difference between flat fronted and serpentine chests, and told us about how certain elements, like handles and locks, could be customized back in the day depending on the customer’s budget. We had to pass over his trove for pecuniary reasons, but the knowledge he’d so kindly and enthusiastically imparted served us well: we left the market with a mahogany dresser we now knew was serpentine, with rows of drawers on either side and a row of smaller drawers down the middle, beautiful in form, fruitful in function, and a miracle that we managed to fit it into the car.

If the architectural elements—the walls, the floors, the wainscoting, the crown molding and what have you—are the bones of a living space, then surely furniture must be its muscles. At the Museum of Fine Arts with my friend a few days ago, we stumbled into the American wing, where we were met by a preponderance of early American furniture and decorative objects. Beautiful clocks painted with the goddess Aurora ablaze in her sun-hauling chariot, tabletops and drawers inlaid with conch shells and urns, Chippendale bonnet-tops, desks with what seemed to be hundreds of little slots and compartments and cubbies and nooks, mirrors atop which gilded birds perched, games tables with cabriole legs, paw feet and scrolled armrests. I learned of the Newport “block and shell” style, pioneered by John Townsend, where a pattern of alternating concave and convex shells mark out the blocks that make up a piece. One piece that tickled me particularly was a little tea table from 1760 with scalloped edges, each scallop perfectly designed to hug a saucer.

Everyday things that delight through both aesthetic beauty and practical perfection, relinquishing neither in favor of the other, things that age well and accrue history and memory, things that are made with care and kept with care, things that are worthy of time’s blessings, things that one can have and love over a lifetime and pass down to one’s children—these are what I love most of all. If there is one benefit to living in an era in which most things are mass-produced and made to be thrown away in a year’s time, it is that we may have a better appreciation for handcraft, for the purposeful, human making of meaningful things.

The home I grew up in had lovely furniture, made by hand and of beautiful wood, but it was very plain, Shaker-style furniture, not nearly interesting enough for a child with a more fanciful eye. Its plain, honest appearance, its minimalism and simplicity, made it fade into the background, useful but silent on the subject of its own beauty, like a pretty woman who wears no makeup and dresses as inconspicuously as possible. Then again, to the untrained eye (or the eye that fails to look closely), no makeup and “no makeup” makeup appear indistinguishable, and the dress that looks simplest on the surface may belie its true complexity; as David Pye writes, “Our environment in its visible aspect owes far more to workmanship than we realize.”

There is a magic in the making of beautiful things, in the care and skill, the knowledge and dedication. When beauty is lent to an everyday object, it seems to become more solid somehow and is a source of endless joy. It makes me think of these lines by André Breton, which have always stuck with me from Bachelard’s Poetics of Space:

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The wardrobe is filled with linen
There are even moonbeams which I can unfold

May we all live in spaces where we can open a drawer and discover a moonbeam or two hiding under the papers and all the long-forgotten things, where a sliver of silver slips out from a crevice and greets us like a smile.

—

I really love this post by from a furniture maker’s perspective on the feelings he wants his pieces to evoke:

The true reason that furniture endures is that it has meaning in the lives of those who own and use it, because it’s special to them.

As always, there’s so much inspiration to find on where dredges up the best on eBay, and I loved the vintage and secondhand furniture issue that came out earlier this month. I also got a ton of inspiration from ’s newsletter Second Story, especially these tips from interior designer Max Sinsteden, and from ’s reflections on the Arts and Crafts movement here.

Mood Board of the Week

(left to right, top to bottom)

1. Avel de Knight, Saint Sebastian (1991): Avel de Knight (1923–1995) was an African-American painter, teacher, and art critic who produced this lovely watercolor and ink drawing towards the end of his career. His work often has a sketch-like, almost unfinished quality to it, which doesn’t detract from the work but instead makes it more dreamlike and poetic, like images left behind from a half-forgotten memory.

2. Alberta Tiburzi shot for Rocco Barocco in 1979: Fashion designer Rocco Barocco got his start in Rome in the 1960s, and his brand took off due to its fruitful combinations of avant-garde experimentation with high glamor, sensuous femininity, classic tailoring, and bright, bold colors and prints. Here I love the dynamism of this yellow and purple dress worn by model Alberta Tiburzi, the purple drama of her red underskirt, large purple hat, and the purple shadows she casts on the wall, almost in the pose of a female matador.

3. Mu’in Musavvir, Amorous Couple and Servant (1696): One of the most important and prolific Persian artists during the Safavid dynasty, Mu’in Musavvir produced exquisite miniatures illustrating people, events, histories, and epics like the Shahnama. In the 17th century Persian art world, there was significant competition among artists, leading each artist to develop a distinctive and recognizable way of handling his brush. Mu’in’s brush was fluid and dynamic, producing looser lines. I like the yellow background of this scene, the slight tree that sways behind the couple, the delicate details of their clothing, like the woman’s colorful striped pants and pink overgarment. She and her lover must have been so used to servants as to render them nearly invisible, because having someone watching my intimate moments that close up would make me pretty uncomfortable.

   

4. Elderly garden enthusiasts in an iris garden in Concord, Massachusetts, photographed by M. William Woodbridge for National Geographic in 1959: I love the enthusiasm of these, well, enthusiasts, standing in the rain and taking notes in a springtime garden blooming with yellow, white, and purple irises, following in the tradition of their fellow Concord nature-lovers, Emerson and Thoreau. The gentleman courteously holds an umbrella over one of the ladies who are jotting down on their notepads—what? If it were me, I know, it’d be poetry.

5. Jean Honoré Fragonard, A Game of Hot Cockles (ca. 1775-80): I love the rococo sweetness of Fragonard, whose paintings to me are like little French bonbons or cream puffs. Here, however, he takes a little detour to Rome, which gave him the inspiration for this painting’s vivid colors and the scenery of its background. These men and ladies are certainly not afraid to get their precious silks dirty, and their fine attire belies the naughtiness of the game they partake in. Apparently, hot cockles was a game in which one person placed their head in another person’s lap while a third person spanked their bottom. The challenge was to guess who had spanked you. The French nobility really did have a lot of time on their hands.

   

6. Erwin Poell, cover design for n+m (Naturwissenschaft und Medizin) in 1964: Who says that science can’t be beautiful? I recently came across a series of vintage covers for the German science journal n+m designed by graphic designer and typographer Erwin Poell (1930–) in the 1960s and 1970s. Poell started his own design company in the 1950s, and he spent over three decades of his career designing postage stamps for the German Federal Post Office. Most of these covers embrace minimalism, but here nature in all her intricacy and color takes over.

7. Oscar de la Renta, Spring 2015 Ready-to-Wear: In his Spring 2015 collection, Oscar de la Renta embraced spring in all its glory through beautiful pastel pinks and bright greens, robin’s egg blues and buttercup yellows, lace and embroidery and, yes, florals. Green is not a color I wear a lot, but if I had to pick a shade, it would be this one.

8. Flowers photographed by Kelli Soukup: Because who doesn’t need a touch of pale pink dreaminess in their life?

9. Devon Aoki backstage at Fendi’s Fall 2001 show: This collection may have been for fall and winter, but the makeup paired with it on the runway, bright yellow eyeshadow melting into copious pink blush and bright pink lips, says nothing but spring to me.

Three Things I’m in Love With This Week

1. Beethoven, String Quartet No. 14 in C-sharp Minor, op. 131: At the beginning of this month, I was rendered speechless by a performance of this string quartet, one of Beethoven’s sublime late quartets and, I think, the greatest of them. Beethoven, too, considered his String Quartet No. 14, composed a year before his death, to be his most perfect work, and though the late quartets’ genius perplexed contemporary listeners, Franz Schubert was so amazed he said, “After this, what is left for us to write?” and promptly died the next day.

   In seven movements played without a pause, the piece begins with a contemplative, mournful fugue, then shifts into liveliness, vivacity, counterpoint, and the dazzling majesty of the finale in which the fugue is revisited once again. Was it his deafness that enabled Beethoven to cast a bucket so deep into the well of his own soul?

2. Vincent d’Indy, Istar, Variations Symphoniques, op. 42: Maybe it’s unfair to French composer Vincent d’Indy to have him follow Beethoven (and Beethoven’s best, at that), but it turns out that one of his biggest influences was Beethoven anyway, so maybe he’d be happy. I’d never heard of d’Indy before this piece was mentioned in a book of literary criticism I was reading but, upon listening, I liked it immensely. It takes inspiration from the Assyrian myth of Istar (or Ishtar or Inanna), in which the goddess of love and war descends into the underworld, which is ruled by her sister. At each of its seven gates, she is instructed to remove a garment or a piece of jewelry, stripping her naked and shorn of her power. d’Indy’s seven variations enact this: the first variation is the most elaborate and the seventh the least, simple the undressed, unadorned theme.

3. “Chair Times” – A History of Seating: How much is there in a chair? A lot, it turns out, watching this video from the Vitra Design Museum, in which a collection of chairs from the 19th century to the present day is assembled, somewhat hodgepodge, in a single room. More than mere places to park your rear, chairs are sculptures, works of art, repositories of history and memory and technology, spots for thought and friendship and conversation, miniature buildings. Some of these chairs have wheels, some have legs, some have stands; some have arms that look like a warm embrace, some have arms that look like they want to punch you; some are made of metal, some of glass, some of wood; some conform to the shape of your ass, some are not shy about their intent to make your tailbone ache; some are like tiny grottos you can crawl into to hide from the world; some are deceptively simple.

   

   Take Thonet’s No. 14 chair, the classic café chair, with the stripped-back elegance of its back formed of two bent wood curves, its woven cane seat, its four gently tapering legs. Its rounded curves make it seem friendly and inviting, its simplicity makes it able to be ubiquitous without drawing too much attention to itself; armless and light, it is eminently stackable, and the holes in its woven seats allow spilled liquids to fall through without leaving any mess or fuss. Handily enough, Vitra makes a poster of its chair collection, in case you wanted a present for the chair enthusiast in your life.

Words of Wisdom

“Rather than take a scary baby step toward our dreams, we rush to the edge of the cliff and then stand there, quaking, saying, ‘I can’t leap. I can’t. I can’t….”

—Julia Cameron, The Artist’s Way

Little by little, I’ve been taking those scary baby steps. I still do find myself quaking at the edge of the cliff on occasion, especially when I read all the great writers I admire so much, but the satisfaction of writing a little everyday, of being disciplined, of that discipline sparking more inspiration than if I’d just sat around twiddling my thumbs, makes me keep putting one foot in front of the other.

Poetry Corner

Oysters

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Our shells clacked on the plates.
My tongue was a filling estuary,
My palate hung with starlight:
As I tasted the salty Pleiades
Orion dipped his foot into the water.

Alive and violated
They lay on their bed of ice:
Bivalves: the split bulb
And philandering sigh of ocean.
Millions of them ripped and shucked and scattered.

We had driven to the coast
Through flowers and limestone
And there we were, toasting friendship,
Laying down a perfect memory
In the cool of thatch and crockery.

Over the Alps, packed deep in hay and snow,
The Romans hauled their oysters south to Rome:
I saw damp panniers disgorge
The frond-lipped, brine-stung
Glut of privilege

And was angry that my trust could not repose
In the clear light, like poetry or freedom
Leaning in from the sea. I ate the day
Deliberately, that its tang
Might quicken me all into verb, pure verb.

—Seamus Heaney

Seamus Heaney is always so good with the sounds of words, with rich clusters of consonants and vowels that echo, with images grounded in the vivid, earthy specificity of their sensuous detail. In this poem, he unites that with a lovely, lush lyricism—for days I haven’t been able to get out my head the line “My palate hung with starlight.”

But the simple, delicious pleasure of the oysters doesn’t last. So familiar with the violent upheavals of late 20th-century Ireland, Heaney can’t help but be attuned to the violence of other contexts: the oyster shells are “alive and violated… split… ripped and shucked and scattered,” and the ocean is a philanderer, a violator, a rapist.

Stanzas of delight and contentment and happiness alternate with stanzas where something more troubling, menacing, or complicated comes along. In the third stanza, Heaney recalls the “perfect memory” of going to the coast, driving past flowers on a beautiful day, the “cool of thatch and crockery” and the warmth of “friendship.” Yet in the next stanza, like an intrusive thought, he can’t help but recall the Romans, those conquerers of old, and how oysters were their “glut of privilege.”

Heaney hates that he keeps doing this (“angry that my trust could not repose”), that good sensory experiences and good memories are interrupted continually by insinuations and histories of violation and conquest. Finally, he decides to be deliberate about it and eats that perfect day “deliberately,” hoping to become “verb, pure verb”—pure sensation, pure feeling, pure presence and joy and aliveness.

Beauty Tip

Grow your own herbs! Earlier this week, I harvested some basil we’d been growing and made pesto, and it tasted so good and so fresh my husband said, “What are we doing with all these empty windowsills? We need to start growing more basil ASAP!”

Lingering Question

If you were a piece of furniture, what would you be? I think I’d be a rocking chair, just because they’re both fun and comfy.

Dear Readers, Happy Friday! I hope you enjoyed this one! Please let me know your thoughts in the comments, like this post if you enjoyed, share with a friend, and don’t forget to subscribe to Soul-Making for more <3

—

Alcaics

A jazzy bud of song is erupting from
the neighbor’s window, blossoming in the air
     and mingling with the bird flock’s folk tunes.
          Sparrow, piano, and spring entangle

in lapses of the afternoon’s hazy hours.
A conversation starts, then it dwindles, stalls,
     picks up again, and traffic threads a
          daze. In this symphony all must offer

some kind of note or tune. It is evident
by how the roaring engines and tinkling keys
     consort into a common chorus,
          music is in everything and glimmers. 

—

Observations from a Picnic

A small ant stirs the structure of a leaf
within a world where leaves are trees and blades
of verdant grass supply full shade’s relief,
where grassless patches are cool forest glades.
The wren, the sparrow, and the oriole
sing melodies in gladness for the light
that dreams a golden spell upon the whole
of mid-May’s blooming, chuckling in delight.
One robin struts out of the brush to show,
in pride, his prize of worms that, living, shift,
clutched in his beak, tasting and savoring now
the life that feeds his life, the cruel gift.
And how, up there, does that hawk stay afloat?
He seems to swim and knows the blue by rote. 

—

Gray Rain

Gray rain, small rain, sweet rain of May,
fall on the full hydrangea blooms
that bloom today.

Light rain, clear rain, fresh rain of May,
wash clean the sidewalks for the feet
that pass today.

Kind rain, mild rain, shy rain of May,
bless all the bare, uncovered heads
you see today.

Cool rain, soft rain, pure rain of May,
kiss gently now the brow of him
I miss today.

Let me know which poem was your favorite in the comments! If you enjoyed, please like this post, share with a friend, and subscribe to Soul-Making for more. How has your spring been going so far, dear readers?

What svelte youth in this rose-canopied room nags you,
drenched all through with a sweet, odorous liquid fume,
in this love-grotto, Pyrrha?
Who’s it for that you bind your blonde,

cleanly elegant? And how many times, alas,
will he mourn lack of faith, changeable gods and, un-
tried in love, gawp at cruel waves
lashed by blackening wind gusts,

who now basks in you, crediting your golden glow,
who prays that you will be always available,
always lovable? He does
not feel the false breeze. Sad, those

hoodwinked, dazzled by your glitter. But I myself
(the tablet on the wall points out my vow) have hung
up all my dripping garments,
consecrate to the strong sea god.

—

Today I present to you a translation of Horace’s Odes 1.5! You can find the original Latin here. I tried to follow the original meter (fourth Asclepiadean) as closely as possible—lately I’ve been finding putting Greek and Latin meters in English a fun challenge, and Horace himself adapted Greek meters into Latin for his Odes.

The scene here is one of a graceful boy (gracilis… puer), untutored (insolens, nescius) in the ways of love, enjoying a dalliance with an experienced courtesan, Pyrrha. Because of his inexperience, he cannot help being taken in by Pyrrha, her charm, her glow, her blonde locks, which she conspicuously pins up in one of those elegant, suggestive gestures exactly calculated to charm a teenage boy (somehow what comes to mind is Katharine Hepburn right at the beginning of this scene in The Philadelphia Story).

Our speaker, however, has experience. He knows that the little cavern of love, all hung about with many roses (multa… in rosa), is no lasting bower of bliss, that the faith the youth is so eager to believe in will prove false, that golden glitter of her hair and love is a fool’s gold. The warm sunshine and mild breezes, the glistening smooth surface of the sea, will soon cloud over and darken with storm clouds, the waves be whipped up by a treacherous gale.

There is a lovely parallel between the youth at the beginning drenched and dripping with too much perfume, anointed for his first tryst with Pyrrha, and the speaker at the end of the poem with his clothes drenched and dripping from the shipwreck of love. As the speaker muses over the youth’s future troubles and the sorry fate of his fellow victims, we sense his relief in finally hanging up his hat. His career in love over (at least for now), he can look back on its vicissitudes with a clearer eye. Nevertheless, there is some ambiguity in the god he consecrates his soaked clothes to—is it to Neptune, as sailors, grateful to have survived shipwrecks, do, or is it to Venus, equally “strong,” whose power the poet, even as he warns others about it, attests to in this ode?

Dear Readers, I thought it would be a nice change to post one of my translations. I am thinking about maybe making the Friday Frivolity series an every other week thing now so that I can post other kinds of writing (essays, poems, reviews, translations, etc.) on the alternate Fridays—I think it would be a fun way to experiment and challenge myself as a writer without tiring you out as a reader. Let me know what you think in the comments—either about this or the translation above, or anything else! As always, please like this post if you enjoyed, share with a friend, and subscribe to Soul-Making for more.

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I Love Lilac

In most versions of the story, the pipes of Pan are made of wetland reeds. But what if, fleeing the wild, half-goat god, the wood nymph Syrinx metamorphosed instead into a lilac tree, one of those bushes, blooming in a profusion of small purple flowers, that erupts in gladness every spring? After all, she lends her name to its genus, Syringa, on account of its hollow branches. The wood of a lilac is striped with purple—white rings alternate with watered-down violet, green, and the occasion Tyrian, as startling as Elizabeth Taylor’s supposedly lilac-hued eyes. A lilac pipe, I imagine, would make a sweeter sound than a reed pipe; it would make a shimmering, pale purple music, a music drenched in moonlight and perfumed with a fairy’s breath.

Lilacs made their way through Europe and into North America from Ottoman gardens in the late 16th century. Ogier Ghiselin de Busbecq, ambassador to the Ottoman Empire under the Holy Roman Emperor Ferdinand I, had a passing interest in herbal medicine and in flora and fauna. Perhaps more famous for introducing the tulip and the Angora goat to northern Europe, in 1562 he sent lilac cuttings to Dutch botanist Carolus Clusius. In a letter, he observed that “the Turks are very fond of flowers, and, though they are otherwise anything but extravagant, they do not hesitate to pay several aspres for a fine blossom.” It seemed that many Europeans, too, could not fail to recognize the value of the lilac’s “fine blossom,” and in the following decades the lilac began to take hold, particularly in English and French gardens.

What to do when the world tumbles into tumult and terror, but look to the lilacs? That was what 19th century horticulturalist Victor Lemoine and his wife did at the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War in 1870. Living in the Lorraine region, which lay at France’s border with Germany, Lemoine and his wife found themselves unable to safely leave their beloved nursery, where Lemoine had been breeding new varieties of begonia and fuchsia. From his time in Belgium, Lemoine had a cutting of a rare double lilac—a lilac with eight petals to a flower instead of the usual four. Yet the cutting’s color was a weak, watery blue. Lemoine selected other lilacs whose hues were far more pungent and mixed them with the double lilac, using his decades of experience (and not the studies of Darwin or Mendel, too new to be widespread) to guide him. His wife, Marie-Louise, was a necessary part of the whole operation: her small hands aided her in the delicate task of standing up on a ladder, pollinating the tiny blossoms with tiny tools. As the years passed, their son and grandson joined the operation, which ended up producing around 200 varieties of beautiful, intensely scented blooms in a spectrum of pink, blue, purple, and white. Maybe it was one of these varieties Van Gogh delighted in at the hospital garden in Saint-Rémy, one of these varieties that Manet plucked for his joyous still lifes.

In America, we can thank two of our Founding Fathers, Thomas Jefferson and George Washington, for proliferating the lilac. Both transplanted European flowers and shrubbery into their gardens at Monticello and Mount Vernon respectively; indeed, on March 3, 1785, Washington made a little note about his lilacs in his diary. It was also American poets who best immortalized the lilac in verse. Commemorating a different President, Abraham Lincoln, Walt Whitman penned “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d.” In April 1865, the poet got word of Lincoln’s assassination while he was visiting his mother’s home in Brooklyn. In his shock and grief, he stepped outside to take a breath. Looking around at the dooryard, he saw, as he later recalled, that “there were many lilacs in full bloom. By one of those caprices that enter and give tinge to events without being at all a part of them, I find myself always reminded of the great tragedy of that day by the sight and odor of these blossoms.”

In Whitman’s elegy, the lilac, with its “heart-shaped leaves of rich green” and “many a pointed blossom rising delicate” and “perfume strong,” is a symbol of the spring season in which Lincoln died, a season of so much life and so much death, so much joy in the natural world and yet so much sorrow in the human world, the world both of public affairs and private feelings. The poet breaks “a sprig with its flower” and imagines the procession of the coffin, imagines giving the sprig to the coffin as an offering. But to bring just this one sprig to just this one coffin is not enough: “Blossoms and branches green to coffins all I bring.” For the offering is to death itself, and so the poet comes with “loaded arms… pouring for you / For you and the coffins all of you O death.” Indeed, it is fitting that lilac should be the color permitted in the Victorian era for “half-mourning”—after a prescribed period in which a widow can wear nothing but black, she makes her journey back to the realm of full color by limping through the purgatory of Via Syringa. Yet for Whitman, the lilac ultimately emerges as a symbol of life’s triumph over death. Our last image is not of the plucked lilac sprig or of the armfuls of lilac offered to death but of the lilac “there in the door-yard, blooming, returning with spring.” Spring will come back, the star will rise in the firmament once more, the lilac will spread its heart-shaped leaves, and the song of the hermit thrush will once again join the poet’s.

Triumphant also are Amy Lowell’s Lilacs, which become a symbol of “this my New England. No mourning (or half-mourning) sprigs are these. These lilacs are home to “orange orioles” and “sparrows sitting on spotted legs,” they watch the daily comings and goings of preachers and schoolboys and housewives and cows, they have left their faraway Eastern origins and are quiet and subdued and suburban now, reticent and yet content, spreading their blossoms by the doorways of Maine and New Hampshire, Vermont and Connecticut, breathing in the salt sea air from Cape Cod to Rhode Island, “making poetry out of a bit of moonlight.” In New England, it is not the lilac’s leaves that are heart-shaped, it is our hearts that are the shape of lilac leaves. A New Englander myself, when I walk along the streets of Boston and see lilac bushes in full bloom under the awnings of apartment buildings and on street corners, I cannot help remember the lines

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Lilac in me because I am New England,
Because my roots are in it,
Because my leaves are of it,
Because my flowers are for it,
Because it is my country
And I speak to it of itself
And sing of it with my own voice
Since certainly it is mine.

And then who can forget the opening of “The Waste Land,” which always emerges at the beginning of spring, breaking forth from the soil of my memory to bloom again? It is lilac that emerges, lilac that revolts against the cruelty of the month and the dead land, lilac’s roots that are stirred, lilacs that are the axis of all this memory and desire:

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April is the cruellest month, breeding 
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing 
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.

Lilacs never again appear in Eliot’s poem, and yet I like to think that their silent presence accompanies it, quiet lilacs blooming by the doorway, always ready to offer a sprig of hope, a sprig of love and consolation and friendship to one in need.

Mood Board of the Week

1. Władisław Czachórski, A Lady in a Lilac Dress with Flowers (ca. 1880): Władisław Czachórski (1850–1911) was a Polish painter who worked mainly in the Academic style. His favorite subjects were scenes from Shakespeare, still lifes, and portraits of elegant women in richly rendered interiors. This painting is no exception: I can practically feel the smooth silk of the lady’s fashionable lilac-colored dress, which catches the soft light from an unseen window. She reaches to pluck a pink flower from a towering, monumental vase of them; beneath her arm, more flowers are bunched in a basket, spilling out onto a marble-topped table.

   

2. Amal Clooney in an Atelier Versace gown at the Venice Film Festival in 2017: I love the sleek, chiffon elegance of this lilac gown on Amal Clooney, which looks both classic and contemporary, completed by Old Hollywood hair and makeup and accessorized with, well, George Clooney.

3. Claude Monet, Lilac Bush, Grey Weather (1873): The flower most associated with Monet is the water lily, but he was no less adept at observing the lilac, which grew in the garden of his first home in Argenteuil. He depicts them here in grey weather, in another painting in sunny weather; in both paintings, the human figures lying in the shade of the lilacs seem almost an afterthought: it is the blossoms themselves that take center stage, whether in muted hues or brighter.

4. Picture of lilacs I took this week: In this first week of May, the lilacs were in full bloom, spreading their grace and elegance in thick beautiful clusters of blossoms. Their heart-shaped leaves seemed to be like little love letters from spring.

5. Aleksandr Kryushyn, Still Life with Tea and Lilacs (2020): Ukrainian painter Aleksandr Kryushyn combines elements of impressionism and realism to depict rivers and villages, sunny mornings and spring bouquets. I love the serene garden setting of this painting, where tea things sit on a creamy tablecloth, over which a lilac bush spreads its sweet scent, the two white chairs empty, perhaps, for you and I.

6. The Purple Hotel in Lincolnwood, Illinois, photographed by Chris Bentley: There are two competing accounts of how The Purple Hotel got its purple. Both begin with Hyatt’s desire to open a flagship hotel in the Midwest. Architects Hausner & Mascai were contracted; according to Mascai, the hotel’s wealthy owner, A. N. Pritzker, found the idea of grey bricks decorating the façade of this mid-century modern building a little too dull, and so had them painted this striking shade of lilac. According to another account, the lilac was a mistake—the intended color had been dark blue. Whatever the case, the peculiar purple of the hotel’s exterior was eye-catching… until it eventually became an eyesore. Famed performers like Barry Manilow and Roberta Flack and guests like Michael Jordan gave way to prostitutes and mobsters (Allen Dorfman was murdered in the parking lot in 1983) and to the likes of the Midwest Fetish Fair. In 2007, its health code violations caught up to it; there was a valiant effort to restore it, which failed, and in 2013, the lilac and its mold were finally demolished.

   

7. Vincent van Gogh, Lilac Bush (1889): Van Gogh painted this lilac bush in May during his time in the asylum of Saint-Rémy—on May 8, 1889, van Gogh voluntarily admitted himself to the asylum, months after he had mutilated his ear during a breakdown in December, and his first paintings there took inspiration from the hospital’s garden. Here the inky ultramarine of the sky sets off the light greens and light purples of the bush. All is energy, activity, motion in the quick, short brushstrokes that gather into a May abundance.

8. Zac Posen Spring 2017 Ready-to-Wear: I love the springtime elegance of this lilac shirtdress by Zac Posen, with its knee-length skirt, its tie waist, its neat row of buttons, its wide collar, and its easy, breezy sleevelessness, perfect for an afternoon picnic or tea party. I can see Charlotte York in this dress, strolling down the Manhattan streets.

9. Éduoard Manet, Vase of White Lilacs and Roses (1883): While Van Gogh, Monet, and Kryushyn opted to paint lilacs in their natural, outdoor setting, on vast, flowering bushes, Manet plucked a few stems and brought them indoors, where they repose with a few roses. Manet has another painting, from a year earlier, in which white lilacs perform a solo act, spreading their frothy, frilly limbs beyond the canvas's limited frame, as if they just can’t be contained.

   

Three Things I’m in Love With This Week

1. Cheney Chan’s Fall 2024 “Dream in Bloom” collection: Cheney Chan is a Chinese fashion designer who made his Paris Fashion Week debut in June 2024. His sculptural designs are inspired by nature, especially flowers, and China’s rich history of porcelain-making. The dresses here bloom in 3D, refusing to be flattened, their architectural curves moving fluidly through space.

2. The Arnold Arboretum: Now that the weather is warming up here, my husband and I have been spending our weekends at the Arnold Arboretum, Harvard’s “museum of trees,” where we wandered under cherry blossoms of all sorts and species, wound our way through the Chinese Path, climbed Bussey Hill and Peters Hill, and admired rhododendrons, paperbark maples, the coral embers willow and the rock cotoneaster, and lots and lots of cheerful yellow forsythia. Fittingly, Lilac Sunday is coming up, the one day where you can picnic in this beautiful landscape—while gazing upon the lovely lilacs.

3. “Lilac, the Color of Half Mourning, Doomed Hotels, and Fashionable Feelings” by Katy Kelleher in The Paris Review: In this column, Kelleher dives into lilac as a color, giving a more in-depth version of The Purple Hotel story and tracing lilac through its more contemporary associations in fashion and interior design.

Words of Wisdom

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—O remember
In your narrowing dark hours
That more things move
Than blood in the heart.

—Louise Bogan

A couple of weeks ago, I went to a bookstore with my friend and happened to find a copy of The Blue Estuaries, which collects five collections of Louise Bogan’s poems, as well as her uncollected poems. Born in Maine in 1897, Louise Bogan attended Boston University for a year, dropped out, married, was widowed after two years, married again, and left her husband in the 1920s, moving to New York, where she published her first collection of poems. There she met and mingled with the poets of the day, like William Carlos Williams and Marianne Moore, but her own verse swam against Modernist currents, embracing rhyme, meter, and formalism. After publishing her second collection, she became a poetry editor for The New Yorker, subtly shaping America’s poetic landscape for the next 38 years.

Her own poems often deal with themes of love, betrayal, loneliness, and grief (Bogan suffered bouts of depression, for which she was occasionally hospitalized). However, unlike the confessional poets of the 1960s, Bogan was intensely private, and you can sense a reticence to her poems, under which lingers an intensity of emotion and depth of thought that she disciplines into sparse, careful lyrics. The verses here are from “Night,” one of my favorite poems of hers, where one sentence, spread over three stanzas, breaks off before completion, swinging from precise observation of the natural world to the inner world of “the heart,” exhorting the reader directly.

Poetry Corner

Lilac Sonnet

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Lilac, the fourfold petalled flower, pale—
in the famed dooryard, pale and yet not frail,
unfazed by early mist and April rain,
fragrant and small and clustered there, with curled
slippers of Persian purple, an old-world
Ottoman immigrant in a Boston lane.
Old-fashioned, curiously so, they linger
with matching hats and gloves of lilac finger,
old teatime ladies—sipping, biscuiting,
and swapping gossip in the shade. The towers
of Syringa-sprays, the gentle mauvish showers,
the colored wood, the lovely white moth flitting
on the thick profusion of a blooming bush,
the heart-shaped leaves—it’s true. I love all these.

I wrote this sonnet after I went for a walk and saw several beautiful (and beautiful smelling) lilac bushes. I always feel a little apprehensive about sharing my own poems here, but what can be a better inducement to improve myself as a writer than to know that eyes other than my own will see that writing? The “famed dooryard” is a reference to what must be the most famous poem about lilacs, Walt Whitman’s “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d.” “Syringa” is the taxonomic name for the lilac, but it also reminds me of John Ashbery’s poem of the same name. Ashbery’s poem is about Orpheus and Eurydice, about the limits of song and song’s ability to stellify the poet, but I can’t help it. The lilac makes me break out into sonnet.

Beauty Tip

Press some flowers! Spring is so short, but pressing its pretty blossoms allows the season to linger a little longer.

Lingering Question

What deeper emotions is your anger masking?

Dear Readers, I hope you are enjoy the first days of May! If this post gave you beauty, happiness, or pleasure, please share with a friend, subscribe to Soul-Making, and leave a like. And I always, always love hearing your thoughts in the comments!

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Jellyfish Dreams

In the past I’ve made a praise of corsets, but now I want to embrace the opposite impulse, towards formlessness. Since I was a child, I’ve had a fascination with jellyfish, the strange way their bell-shaped bodies expand and contract, pulsing with a curious energy, transparent, trailing the tendrils and ribbons of their languid arms. How calm they are, how serene. To let the light pass through, to drift, to “float forever in a moon-green pool,” to be washed continually in the salt brine of the sea, to live forever or a single day, to bloom in phosphorescent bulbs in the weird and dark reaches of a sublunar liquid, eating up in the bell of my body innumerable small fish, diatoms, protazoans, little crustaceans, floating white specks of plankton—somehow it all seems so lovely, to let go like that and become as diaphanous as a piece of chiffon. After all, I’ve always found a kind of release in swimming, a suspension of time and space and world.

But on closer examination, there is something about formlessness that actually requires more effort. Form is a given; structures surround us and compel us. Obligations press into us, conventions, hierarchies, all these rigid, ossifying things. The world gets filtered through, then, and we miss so much, simply because we fail to be open. If we allowed ourselves to linger a little more, if we allowed ourselves a kind of transparency, maybe something would come up from the seafloor of ourselves and find itself at last shining in the light of the sun, struck by a golden shard or splinter.

Now that I consider them more closely, it seems that jellyfish might be sea-ghosts and that perhaps when we are dead our souls become like this. Floating and amorphous, pulsating with light and motion and yet adrift, soft and yet able to paralyze—might this be the natural state of the soul as it drifts through the great darkness of that other world? Are we like this even now, when we sit down with ourselves—amorphous beings sailing through an infinite void, trailing rags of glory?

Let us not lose our languidness; even if we are trapped in form, let us exchange that form a hundred times over, modify it, chip little pieces off of it bit by bit. When I longed for the strictures of the corset, it was because I had the energy to resist my real nature, which is, in the final analysis, something more akin to the reflection of a moonbeam on a sliver of water. Let us melt and change, then, and shift and be endlessly Protean. I grow weary of the world, and I have spent too long trying to fish myself out of the tidepool of dreams. Why should I not accede, why should I not allow myself to drift there and be carried, little by little, into the vaster deeps of the sea? Something will lull me asleep there, slippery and lubricious and utterly without edges.

Mood Board of the Week

(left to right, top to bottom)

1. Mariko Kusumoto, “Seabed” (2023): Mariko Kusumoto creates work in fiber and metal, and her seascapes are shimmering, gauzy collections of multicolored coral. In an interview, she stated, “A playful, happy atmosphere pervades my work. I always like to leave some space for the viewer’s imagination: I hope the viewer experiences discovery, surprise, and wonder through my work.”

2. “Sea Urchin Tutu” by Catherine Latson from The Garment Series (2012-16): Sculptor Catherine Latson is interested in “the macro- and microstructures of living organisms,” and in her Garments series, she uses the materials of the natural world to fabricate couture-esque gowns of marigold, wedding dresses of tapioca root, corsets of birch bark, all singularly strange and arresting and beautiful. This little sea urchin number uses sea urchin shells layered onto an old Victorian bodice, tutu’d by layers of frothy tulle. Its marine inspiration and organic off-white remind me of Alexander McQueen’s oyster dress.

3. Cephalopods illustrations by Jean-Baptiste Vérany (1851): In 1822, Jean-Baptiste Vérany (1800–1865) abandoned his career plan of taking over his father’s pharmacy, instead choosing to assist zoologist Franco Bonelli. Over the following decades, he would develop a specialty in cephalopods, discovering new species and producing intensely detailed illustrations of these strange molluscan creatures. A few weeks ago, I went to see the Blaschka glass flowers at Harvard, and it turns out that the Blaschkas’ sketches for their models of cephalopods were highly inspired by Vérany’s drawings.

4. The Shell House in Isla Mujeres, Mexico: If you’ve ever wanted to live in a conch shell, the Shell House currently operates as an Airbnb known to locals as Casa Caracol. The legend goes that one day, as they were both out at sea fishing, a fisherman of the nearby Isla Holbox got into a dispute with a fisherman of Isla Mujeres. The fisherman from Isla Holbox boasted that he had the biggest fish in the world. Well, countered the fisherman from Isla Mujeres, I have the biggest seashell in the world. Apparently, the shell contained enough conch meat to feed everyone on the island, so they all made ceviche and everyone was happy. The real story behind Casa Caracol is less fanciful—but no less fascinating. In 1967, architect Eduardo Ocampo came to Isla Mujeres to work on a hotel and settled there with his wife. Frequently visited by his brother Octavio, a painter, Eduardo wanted to build him an art studio and took inspiration from the many seashells that clustered along the island’s shoreline. Construction began in 2001 and took three years to complete. Eduardo often needed to build many aspects of the home by himself, as certain elements, like the conch’s spiral peak, were difficult for the workers to even envision. Every wall of the house is rounded, and shell-encrusted mirrors and Octavio’s paintings of mermaids bring a touch of color to the pristine white interiors.

5. Sara Ziff in Alexander McQueen S/S 2003 by John Scarisbrick for Vogue Russia, April 2003, “Vivid Colours of Spring”: For his Spring 2003 collection, McQueen took inspiration from an earlier era of seafaring, concocting a narrative of shipwrecks and pirates and oysters, conquistadors losing themselves in the rainbow bewilderment of an Amazonian rainforest. Here, the way that blue and red chiffon of the dress comes up in gauzy layers puts me in mind of a jellyfish or the transparent, ruffled fin of a fish.

6. Wu Tsang, Of Whales at the ICA Boston (2024): Wu Tsang (1982–) was inspired by Melville’s Moby Dick to create a trilogy of films and video installations, of which Of Whales is the second part. Tsang created the video on the Unity gaming platform, employing XR (extended reality) technology in order to capture a whale’s experience of sounding the ocean depths. Ribbons of light break apart, stir, quiver; jellyfish bob and float; a whale’s tail makes its way through pinpricks of light. Lying there on the beanbag chairs in front of that vast oceanscape screen, I could lose myself easily, drift off to the rhythms of the sea. Of Whales was particularly apt at the ICA, which is located by the Boston Harbor—New England in the 19th century was a prime whaling hub, and the Pequod in Moby Dick, after all, departs from Nantucket.

7. Vasily Kandinsky, Capricious Forms (1937): I once had to do a report on Kandinsky for 8th grade English class—we all chose an artist to research, and I landed on Kandinsky, happy to while away time in the library flipping through large reproductions of his colorful rhapsodies of shape and form. Capricious Forms comes from his final period as an artist, in which he synthesized the different elements of his earlier periods. Here, aside from the perfect rounded orbs of the circles and the few squares and rectangles that recede into the background, the shapes are asymmetrical, strange, motile, and fluid. They resemble scientific drawings—tissue seen under a microscope, the teeming and capricious world of biology, something living and growing and always in play.

8. Reflective paint mural in I-95 underpass on Columbia Avenue in Philadelphia’s Fishtown neighborhood: Fishtown deserved an appropriately fishy mural, but who would have predicted one this beautiful, swarming with a school of gleaming, silver fish? It seems to make you want to question reality for a brief moment, to wonder if you’re in some aquatic dream, to pinch yourself and ask, Am I in an underpass? Or am I underwater?

   

9. Ercole Barovier, Woman With Shrimp, 1930s: It was on Murano, the little glassmaking island off of Venice, that Ercole Barovier was born in 1889, it was on Murano that Ercole Barovier died in 1974, and it was on Murano that he learned, refined, and practiced the craft that defined the island’s primary export. Why is this shrimp-colored woman carrying an oversized, transparent specimen of that crustacean on her back, holding its creepy shrimpy arms in her two hands like a schoolgirl clutching the straps of her backpack—or as though girl and shrimp are inseparable besties? Perhaps they are—and who am I to judge?

3 Things I’m in Love With This Week

1. The home of former British Vogue fashion director Lucinda Chambers: Chambers’ proclivity for bold prints, zany patterns, and eclectic items seemingly slapdashed together (but always with a method to the madness) is not limited to the demesne of fashion. It translates—thrillingly, beautifully—to the world of interiors, where rooms are painted bright yellow and bright red, floral fabrics wrestle with stripes, and a motley collection of plates adorn a wall above the bathtub, just in case you needed to eat while soaking. I also love her Easter tablescape, which seems like it would give you a headache but comes together in a way that is bizarrely, humorously harmonious.

2. “Unboxing REAL shipwrecked treasure and ancient archeological jewellery” video by the Victoria and Albert Museum: A 17th-century Peruvian solid gold chalice, a contemporary coral, gold, and pearl work grafted onto sand-encrusted Tudor glass, a pair of gold Roman Empire serpent armlets, a carnelian and blue enameled comb worn by Empress Josephine—curator Sophie Morris reveals the secrets of these shipwrecked treasures (and more!), carefully piecing together each item’s history and context. Dead men tell no tales, but objects never die.

3. Review of the restaurant 66 by A.A. Gill for Vanity Fair, seen in Graydon Carter’s When the Going was Good: Like every other young writer, I was shockèd by the sheer numbers in Bryan Burrough’s review of former Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter’s memoir: a writer for VF during the Carter era, at his peak Burroughs was paid $498,141 to produce a measly three articles a year, usually around 10,000 words each. In other words, oh boy was the going good. Expensed breakfasts, catered dinners at one’s home, town cars, interest-free loans to buy new homes, an “eyebrow lady” on standby—one thinks of the perks of today’s Big Tech workers, all those little nerds with their on-site masseuses, ski trips, and raspberry yogurt-covered pretzels.1 Follow the advertising, as they say.

   

   Anyway, Burrough’s article spurred me to read Carter’s memoir, which was, on the whole, lackluster, dull, skimmable, and—dare I say it?—Canadian. What drives Carter’s ethos as a magazine editor? What pushed him to strive to reach the top of that ladder? What valuable life advice does he have that isn’t trite or cliché? And—barring all that—what really juicy celebrity gossip? The most riveting part of the book for me was when he quoted an excerpt from one of A.A. Gill’s restaurant reviews (and perhaps that is the secret, that a good editor knows how to spot the good writers and give them the spotlight). Gill is a great writer. Literary history may not remember the dailies, the weeklies, the monthlies the way we remember Ulysses or “The Waste Land.” But when magazine writing hits, it hits. Where in fiction can we find something to match the savagery, the sadistic pleasure of the bad review? Where else are we to find gems like: “The lighting is nighty-night nursery dim, as if keeping it crepuscular will stop you from noticing that it looks like every crêperie in Berlin, and that the babe in the corner isn’t Claudia Schiffer but a Serb television producer on steroids” and “How clever are shrimp-and-foie-gras dumplings with grapefruit dipping sauce? What if we called them fishy liver-filled condoms. They were properly vile, with a savor that lingered like a lovelorn drunk and tasted as if your mouth had been used as the swab bin in an animal hospital”?

Words of Wisdom

The ability to feel mixed emotions is a sign of maturity. If people can blend contradictory emotions together, such as happiness with guilt, or anger with love, it shows that they can encompass life’s emotional complexity. Experienced together, opposing feelings tame each other. Once people develop the ability to feel different emotions at the same time, the world ripens into something richer and deeper. Instead of having a single, intense, one-dimensional emotional reaction, they can experience several different feelings that reflect the nuances of the situation, However, the reactions of emotionally immature people tend to be black-and-white, with no gray areas. This rules out ambivalence, dilemmas, and other emotionally complicated experiences.

—Lindsay C. Gibson, Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents

Poetry Corner

This post was inspired by four poems:

• “A Jellyfish” by Marianne Moore

• “The Fish” by Marianne Moore

• “Aquatic Nocturne” by Sylvia Plath

• “Water’s Lubricious Edges” by Coral Bracho, translated by Forrest Gander

Marianne Moore wrote an early version of “The Jellyfish” in 20 very short lines, then later revised it into eight longer lines, cutting out the ending and highlighting the rhymes between the second and fourth lines (“charm” / “arm”) and the sixth and eighth lines (“meant” / “intent”). Pairs of opposites (“Visible, invisible,” “it opens / and it closes”) embody the jellyfish’s “fluctuating charm,” the elusive rhythms of its shape-shifting. The precise language of “amber-tinctured amethyst” is echoed in a later poem of hers, and one of my favorite poems, “The Fish,” where an “ink-/bespattered jelly fish” is only one creature among many: “crabs like green / lilies,” “submarine / toadstools,” “crow-blue mussel-shells,” “barnacles.” Moore approaches her subject with scientific precision and detachment, a precision brought out by the rigors of her form (1 syllable, then 3, then 9, then 6, then 8, in an AABBC rhyme scheme)—a highly, visibly artificial form whose fluctuating line lengths compel Moore to cleave the word “ac- / cident” by a line break and rhyme “ac-” with “lack,” making us hyper-alert to language, to its arbitrariness out of which we nevertheless make meaning. The poem then moves from precise imagery of the sea and its creatures to an ecological interest in the human-caused “marks of abuse” present on the cliffside. Nothing can erase these marks; the sea cannot “revive / its youth.” Nevertheless, it’s alive, it teems with the life that occupies the first five stanzas, and thus “grows old in it”—as do we all, carrying such marks of time and yet “defiant.”

Sylvia Plath’s “Aquatic Nocturne,” all free verse and lowercase and barely punctuated, captures something of the same precision of imagery, though almost with the eye of the dreamer rather than the scientist. Liquid L sounds abound—“dilute light,” “tilting silver,” “flicker gilt”—giving us a feeling of being underwater, in a strange sublunar world where strange creatures glimmer and gleam, “shrewd” and “elusive,” “lithe” and “agile.” “Water’s Lubricious Edges,” a poem I only discovered about a month ago or so, evokes a similar feeling but combines it with an eroticism—“paps of pleasure,” “lascivious luminescence”—and hypnotizing repetition that breaks and flows and rejoins as water itself does.

Beauty Tip

Make a gratitude tree! I came across this idea in a video by Audrey of French Countryside Diary: with her wicker basket-equipped bicycle, she journeys into the springtime beauty of her surrounding French countryside and culls a few pretty branches that spring has adorned with little green leaves and nascent blossoms. At home she arranges them artfully in a(nother, larger) wicker basket, writes out a few things she’s grateful for on little white tags, and festoons the branches with the tags and bits of hanging ribbon. The idea is for visitors passing through the house to write up their own tags, adding to the goodwill and generosity that are the nutritive soil in which this “tree” thrives.

Lingering Question

Would you rather have a shrimp backpack, a sea urchin tutu, or a seashell house? I would personally live in the seashell house… I wonder if it’d make the sound of the sea, if you’d hear a gentle murmur of waves at all times, the soft fall and swell, sometimes roaring to a mighty crash.

Dear Readers, it is spring here and the flowers are blooming and everything is beautiful. I hope you have a lovely, lovely weekend—even better if it involves pastry of some kind. Yesterday I baked a mixed berry galette. Anyway, as always, let me know what you think in the comments, like this post if you appreciate the puns, and share with a friend! <3

The moon’s a golf ball in the sky
or some Cyclopean great eye.

The moon’s a spinning wheel of cheese—
Stilton or Roquefort, if you please. 

How well night wears her moonocle!
With a look that’s quite iroonical!

She squints and squints, as though she read
the Sunday funnies before bed. 

Or could it be great literature?
To wrack the brain with fiteratures? 

Perhaps she’s a pearlescent spoon
or some sad child’s misplaced balloon.

She glows and glows, a jellyfish,
or, sparkling clean, a china dish.

And now she dwindles to a nail
clipped off, or some bright fish’s scale.

A silver boat, that bobs and floats
to overhear our anecdotes.

Ah, here she stops at our port of call—
step in, and bring the alcohol!

Dear Readers, since the last couple of Friday Frivolity posts were rather long and involved, I wanted to give you something more lighthearted and—dare I say it—actually frivolous. I hope no one will get annoyed by the preponderance of puns in this poem—I read too much Ogden Nash as a child. As always, let me know what you think in the comments, like this post if you appreciate the puns, and share with a friend <3

In case you missed it, here are the past two Fridays’ posts, on the centennial of The Great Gatsby and the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice and the way it’s been remixed and reinterpreted in art, literature, film, and fashion throughout the centuries.