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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!

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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”

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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

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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

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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

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The Deathless Song of Gatsby

The great mythology of the American Dream has not been captured better before or after Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald laid pen to paper a hundred years ago and dreamed up that sublime, haunting prose romance, one summer and barely 50,000 words long, in which James Gatz of North Dakota, now smoothed, moneyed, polished into “Gatsby,” attempts to recapture his romance with Daisy Buchanan, to disastrous effect. Disastrous only for him, though—that is its tragedy.

Daisy and Tom, guarded by their wealth and their status and their class and the carelessness they can well afford, escape unscathed. Both may have lost their lovers, both may have been shaken up, but life will continue for them the same as ever. They will swan off to summer elsewhere, and the beautiful houses with the beautiful lawns and the beautiful clothes and the beautiful cars and the servants and the footmen and the butlers and the housemaids and the mistresses and the ability to declaim with impunity at the dinner table about “The Rise of the Coloured Empires” and the submerging of “the white race” and “beating them down” will remain, and, whatever the unhappiness in their marriage, they will not leave each other in order to lose all that, toppling down into that class of people, poor things, who actually have to worry about the consequences of their actions.

That is because they have everyone else to mop up the consequences of their actions for them. However great Gatsby grows, he will forever remain this mop. Daisy can accidentally hit her husband’s mistress Myrtle with a car, and Gatsby will take the blame for it, get shot, and collapse into the swimming pool of the mansion that is at once the culmination of his stratospheric ascent and the symbol of his perpetual non-belonging. The best tragedies, the most accurate to life and most tragic tragedies, are always a series of mischances and accidents that are also at one and the same time the inevitable result of the characters of the people involved. This is also what we call fate.

That Tom and Nick and Jordan go off to the city in Gatsby’s “circus wagon,” while Daisy and Gatsby follow in Tom’s coupé, that Gatsby’s car is low on gas and Tom must stop at Wilson’s gas station, whose proprietor, Wilson, is husband of Tom’s mistress Myrtle, that Wilson, surly, jealous, suspicious, intends to take his wife out west, “whether she wants to or not,” while Myrtle peers down from an upstairs window, that it is a hot summer day that distempers everyone, that there is a fight where “tragic arguments” occur and Nick’s 30th birthday is forgotten, that Gatsby and Daisy drive back to Long Island now in Gatsby’s car, and that Gatsby, thinking “it would steady her to drive,” gives a “very nervous” Daisy the wheel, that Myrtle Wilson, remembering the car and Tom in it from earlier, unleashes her store of “tremendous vitality” to run out onto the road, be killed, and set her husband off with a warm gun on a quest for revenge—how could any of it have been prevented, untangled, intercepted? The Fates within us sit and spin, we provide the fiber, and everything unfurls as it must.

All learning is imitation, and a few years ago I conducted an experiment in which I retyped the whole of The Great Gatsby. I was struck most of all by its length—somehow in my mind it had been two or three times longer, having loomed in my imagination with such epic grandeur—and by its absolute concision. Perfection is when nothing need be added, nothing taken away, and as far as it is possible for any human work to achieve perfection, Gatsby was one of those rare, gemlike creations, compressed and luminous and whole, glittering out immaculately the care of its cut and polish. Usually when we get beautiful prose, it luxuriates in itself, spreads out like diaphanous chiffon, evaporates in a kind of formlessness that we forgive because of its beauty. But the beauty of Gatsby is contained, well-ordered, necessary. Words are chosen for their accuracy, for after all, “Beauty is truth, truth beauty.”

Under this Keatsian principle, plot, character, prose beauty, symbol and image—all unite under truth’s banner and, sonnet-like, we get the feeling that Fitzgerald has labored to “weigh the stress / Of every chord” in order to fit the novel with “sandals more interwoven and complete.” It was in Fitzgerald’s 1920s that novelists like Woolf and Joyce were throwing off the corset of plot to stretch out prose’s muscles into poetry, but in Gatsby Fitzgerald knew, like Shakespeare, that plot is poetry, and that events can signify, reverberate, and peal out beyond themselves. Myth is created, codified, and perpetuated by literature, and the American mythos was still missing its bard.

We may not have Zeus and Hera, we may not have selkies and rusalki and fairies, but we have the American Dream, which has not faded or changed much in a hundred years. It is the belief that whatever your background, wherever you came from, whoever you are, in the Land of Opportunity all things are possible. All the accidents of birth and circumstance can be transcended. If you have some genius or brains or personality or beauty and the determination to succeed at all costs, you can gain splendor, wealth, success, and therefore happiness. The Baz Lurhmann adaptation of Gatsby features Lana del Rey’s “National Anthem,” which croons, “Money is the anthem of success.” Daisy’s voice is “full of money,” the green light is green like the glow of the greenback, but it is not exactly money that Gatsby is after, nor Daisy, nor love, nor the parties and the mansions and the achingly beautiful shirts, but something over and above it, something “beyond everything,” large as only myth is large.

Daisy’s maiden name is “Fay,” after all, as in fairy, and Gatsby wants “a promise that the rock of the world was founded securely on a fairy’s wing.” The dream may be delusion, but there is always something innocent, pure, incurably honest in a dreamer. “You’re worth the whole damn bunch put together,” Nick tells Gatsby. Without the dream, this country of pioneers pushing relentlessly west and scrambling over one another and enslaving and killing and hunting and selling and buying and panning for gold and trading on the stock market and erecting mansions and destroying nature and native peoples would be something dirty, sordid, contemptible and wretched. But a dream is always beautiful, a dream gleams, flowers, sustains: “for a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent… face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.”

The dream outlives the dreamer, never mind that the dreamer fails or dies. We are still haunted by this story as Gatsby is by the green light and Daisy’s nightingale voice, as the valley of ashes is by the godlike gaze of Dr. T. J. Eckleburg. “Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird!” The hungry generations await thee eagerly, listening for the cool vintage of your song, ready to fly with you “on the viewless wings of Poesy.”

Mood Board of the Week

(left to right, top to bottom)

1. Old Westbury Gardens in Long Island, New York: In The Great Gatsby, the old money aristocracy, like Tom and Daisy, inhabit Long Island’s (fictional) East Egg, while the nouveau riche like Gatsby must make do with the West Egg. This house, built by John Shaffer Phipps (his father, Henry Phipps, Jr., was friend and neighbor to Andrew Carnegie and co-founded Carnegie Steel) as a wedding present for his fiancée Margarita Grace, was meant to recreate for her the English country house feeling she’d grown used to in her native Britain. It later served as the inspiration for Tom and Daisy’s estate in Baz Lurhmann’s 2013 Gatsby adaptation.

   

2. Wedding portrait of F. Scott Fitzgerald and Zelda Sayre: Zelda was not Fitzgerald’s first love, but she was the girl he married, in 1920. Mirroring Jay Gatsby’s meeting of Daisy, the young Fitzgerald met the teenage Zelda when he was stationed outside of Montgomery, Alabama, while enlisted in the army during WWI. Zelda’s family was wealthy and had a prominent Confederate past, while Fitzgerald’s uniform hid his lack of affluence—though not for long. Zelda refused to marry Fitzgerald unless he could support her; he despaired, prevailed, published his debut, The Beautiful and the Damned, and he and Zelda soon wed. So eager was Fitzgerald to marry her that he had the priest commence the solemnities even before all 10 guests at St. Patrick’s Cathedral had shown up!

3. “La danseuse aux jets d’eau” illustration by George Barbier for Gazette du Bon Ton (1924-25): Art deco, the Flapper, the magazine boom, the still nascent and expensive state of photography—all resulted in the 1920s being the prime of fashion illustration. Magazines made the illustrators, and illustrators made the magazines—one such fruitful match was that between the French Gazette du Bon Ton (1912–1925), founded by Lucien Vogel, and illustrator George Barbier, whose work infused the creations of the great fashion houses with romance, whimsy, poetry and pathos.

4. Mia Farrow as Daisy Buchanan in The Great Gatsby (1974): The 1974 adaptation of The Great Gatsby, starring Robert Redford and Mia Farrow, is a bit lackluster compared to Baz Luhrmann’s 2013 adaptation, starring Leonardo diCaprio and Carey Mulligan, but I just adore this ensemble that Farrow’s Daisy wears at a party: the shimmering pale blue dress with its handkerchief hem, the glittering cap, the long strand of pearls and champagne coupe as accessories.

5. Francis Cugat’s painting for the cover of “The Great Gatsby”: This has to be the most iconic book cover in publishing history. The deep blue, the luminous eyes that send out their disembodied gaze over the whirling colorful carnival of the city, the rosebud lips. The obvious inspiration is “the eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleberg… blue and gigantic,” but the femininity of the features can’t help but remind me of Daisy, a lost phantom of the past, forever haunting Gatsby’s big city aspirations.

   

6. Cover of the February 4, 1922 edition of The Saturday Evening Post: Fitzgerald’s short stories were published in The Saturday Evening Post several times, bringing him to an audience of about two million. The cover features the Flapper, whom I can never think about without remembering Zelda Fitzgerald’s unflappable prose: “the Flapper awoke from her lethargy of sub-deb-ism, bobbed her hair, put on her choicest pair of earrings and a great deal of audacity and rouge, and went into the battle. She flirted because it was fun to flirt… and she refused to be bored chiefly because she wasn’t boring. She was conscious that the things she did were the things she had always wanted to do. Mothers disapproved of their sons taking the Flapper to dances, to teas, to swim, and most of all to heart.”

7. “Where there’s smoke there’s fire” illustration by Russell Patterson (1920): I love the magazine illustrations of the 1920s—their precision, their flair, their freshness, their fashion, their art deco delicacy. Patterson (1893–1977) captured and created the Jazz Age woman through his numerous illustrations for the big magazines of the day, ushering in the era of the Flapper, and I was reminded of this passage in Gatsby where, looking at Jordan Baker, Nick observes: “She was dressed to play golf, and I remember thinking she looked like a good illustration, her chin raised a little jauntily, her hair the colour of an autumn leaf, her face the same brown tint as the fingerless glove on her knee.”

8. “U.S. IS VOTED DRY” headline for The American Issue, January 16, 1919: After decades of campaigning by religious reformers, physicians, and women, the temperance movement swelled to a crescendo in the early 20th century, culminating in the ratification of the 18th amendment in 1919, which prohibited the “manufacture, sale, or transportation of intoxicating liquors.” But the forbidden fruit tastes sweetest, and Prohibition only led to the proliferation of speakeasies and bootlegging, which in turn spurred the rise of organized crime. This is, in fact, how Gatsby got his gold: “He and this Wolfshiem bought up a lot of side-street drug stores here and in Chicago and sold grain alcohol over the counter.”

   

9. Bessie Smith, photographed ca. 1925: The “Empress of the Blues,” Bessie Smith was born in Chattanooga, Tennessee, either 1892 or 1894. By the time she was nine years old, both of her parents had died, leaving Bessie and her six siblings to fend for themselves. Attempting to dig themselves out of poverty, they busked on street corners, and there’s nothing like having to sing for your supper to make you polish those pipes. By 1913, she struck out on her own, building her reputation as she performed in theaters and venues across the South, resulting in a record deal with Columbia Records in 1923. Her powerful contralto, her frank treatment of the everyday realities of poverty, racism, and heartbreak, and her formidable stage presence (at a height of over six feet and a weight of over 200 pounds) soon made her the highest-paid African-American in the music industry. Her career was cut short by her death by car crash in 1937, and though thousands turned out for her wake, it wasn’t until 1970 that this queen of the Jazz Age got a tombstone, courtesy of her former housekeeper Juanita Green and Janis Joplin.

3 Things Gatsby Quotes I’m in Love With This Week:

1. “In his blue gardens men and girls came and went like moths among the whisperings and the champagne and the stars.”

2. “Anyhow, he gives large parties…. And I like large parties. They’re so intimate. At small parties there isn’t any privacy.”—this is Jordan Baker speaking to Nick at Gatsby’s party, being very relatable.

3. “On buffet tables, garnished with glistening hors-d’oeuvre, spiced baked hams crowded against salads of harlequin designs and pastry pigs and turkeys bewitched to a dark gold.”—I just love that description, “turkeys bewitched to a dark gold.”

Words of Wisdom

In 1933, Fitzgerald sent a letter to his eleven-year-old daughter Frances (“Scottie”) while she was away at summer camp, imparting many words of fatherly wisdom. In the letter are two lists of “Things to worry about” and “Things to not worry about.” The questions he poses as “Things to think about” apply whether you’re eleven or eleventy-one, and one wonders if Fitzgerald didn’t intend them for his own use as well.

Things to worry about:

Worry about courage
Worry about cleanliness
Worry about efficiency
Worry about horsemanship...
Things not to worry about:
Don't worry about popular opinion
Don't worry about dolls
Don't worry about the past
Don't worry about the future
Don't worry about growing up
Don't worry about anybody getting ahead of you
Don't worry about triumph
Don't worry about failure unless it comes through your own fault
Don't worry about mosquitoes
Don't worry about flies
Don't worry about insects in general
Don't worry about parents
Don't worry about boys
Don't worry about disappointments
Don't worry about pleasures
Don't worry about satisfactions
Things to think about:
What am I really aiming at?
How good am I really in comparison to my contemporaries in regard to:
(a) Scholarship
(b) Do I really understand about people and am I able to get along with them?
(c) Am I trying to make my body a useful instrument or am I neglecting it?

Poetry Corner

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Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard
     Are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on;
Not to the sensual ear, but, more endear’d,
     Pipe to the spirit ditties of no tone:
Fair youth, beneath the trees, thou canst not leave
     Thy song, nor ever can those trees be bare;
          Bold Lover, never, never canst thou kiss,
Though winning near the goal yet, do not grieve;
     She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss,
          For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair!

—John Keats, from “Ode on a Grecian Urn”

Harold Bloom points out the influence of Keats’ “Eve of St. Agnes” on Fitzgerald, in describes Fitzgerald’s metamorphosis of Romantic poetry into the novel form, and in that same journal writes of how Gatsby is haunted by the Keatsian nightingale.

But Gatsby’s story always reminds me of the “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” and I am sure that “Beauty is truth, truth beauty” is his secret credo. On that urn the figures are perpetually, immortally stuck in their poses and attitudes, the trees are forever lush and green with springtime leaves, the heifer is forever “lowing at the skies,” the fair youth is forever piping his “spirit ditties,” the fair maiden is forever unkissed but just within grasp. Everything is paused in its potentiality, like money in the bank, unspent and therefore able to buy anything and everything.

Ostensibly, Gatsby wants Daisy, he wants the American Dream, he wants money, he wants acceptance into the upper class, he wants beautiful silk shirts, he wants the green light at the end of the dock across the bay, but what he wants above all wants, without being aware of it, is to keep wanting. For Gatsby is a dreamer, and the most painful thing of all for a dreamer is to lose his dreams. For him, the unheard melodies within his head are far sweeter, the unrealized visions far grander, the “still unravish’d” Daisy far more beautiful. But nothing can live up to that, and therefore Gatsby must die, die before he grows old and hoar and gray, die before Prohibition ends and the going gets rough and his criminal entanglements catch up with him, die before he, “bold lover,” wins near the girl and she turns around and rejects him and fades, die before the spring leaves rust and brown, wither and crumple and fall, die before the pipes “leave melodizing” and the heard melodies die out and the song stops. As it is, we remember him “For ever panting, and for ever young,” and the song goes on.

Beauty Tip

Host a 1920s-esque bash and add a Romantic touch from Gatsby—“the beads and chiffon of an evening-dress tangled among dying orchids,” a green light, mysterious looming eyes.

Lingering Question

How far are you willing to go for an “incorruptible dream”?

Dear Readers, I hope you enjoyed this post! If you did, please give this post a like, share with a friend, and subscribe to Soul-Making for more!

If you want a little more reading about The Great Gatsby, I really liked ’s post in The Metropolitan Review about teaching this American classic, as well as ’s reflection on close-reading it!

—

And damned if I look back1

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Tum quoque marmorea caput a cervice revulsum
gurgite cum medio portans (Eagrius Hebrus)
volveret, “Eurydicen” vox ipsa et frigida lingua
“Ah miseram Eurydicen!” anima fugiente vocabat:
“Eurydicen” toto referebant flumine ripae.

—Virgil, Georgics IV2

(quid enim nisi se quereretur amatam?)3

—Ovid, Metamorphoses X

There lived a poet once whose song lulled the lioness to sleep and tamed the terrible tiger, whose song hypnotized the birds out of their nests and distracted the butterfly from her flower, whose song made mountains weep in streams and trees spring up as easily as weeds, whose song charmed the deer to dance and the bears to prance, whose song bid fish to fly in underwater flocks or tread water calmly at his feet, listening to him while he sat on the riverbank and plucked his lyre, for “Orfeo mest of ani thing / Lovede the gle of harping.”4

For his song, fruit ripened, wheat swayed in full-grown ears, and meat practically cooked itself. One day, as he was wandering in the woods, this best of poets met the most beautiful of nymphs. Her name was Eurydice. They married—one of those small, rustic affairs, where everything is made lovelier by its simplicity. All the birds and the beasts, the trees and flowers and stones and streams, reveled in jubilation. The bride and the groom were very happy. Eurydice danced in the woods with her friends. Then came the snake. With one bite on the ankle, she fell down dead. No grief could be greater than Orpheus’s then, no song more sad than his lament. But why not go to the Underworld and sing it there? So he made the long journey, down into that realm of shadows from which few return, and pleaded his case to the lord of the dead. Hades would give him back his wife, but on one condition: he must not look back at her as he led her into the world above.

It should have been easy, but as the interminable path continued and the silence wore on and the minutes dripped like water from stalactites in that dim, dark place, he began to doubt that she was really following him. After all, her ghostly footsteps made no sound, her ghostly hand in his had no feel. He turned around. In an instant, she caught his eye and was gone.

“Regrets are always late, too late!”5 but nevertheless he wept. He himself became a shade, a thing of nothing. The woods that they had walked together, the flowers that he had loved to pick for her, the birdsong that they used to delight in, what meaning had they for him now? So it was a relief, really, when the Maenads tore him up and sent his head and his lyre down the river, where the song continued singing, singing of its own accord, singing out to Eurydice, whom it would soon join, a river flowing back to its source, which finally opened to receive it.6

Somehow this moment from Alexander McQueen’s F/W 2006 collection always seems to me to be the moment when Orpheus looks back at Eurydice and he loses her a second time. And both make me think of Milton’s “Methought I saw my late espoused saint.”

Mood Board of the Week

(left to right, top to bottom)

1. Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, Orpheus Leading Eurydice from the Underworld (1861): I wanted to begin and end the mood board with these two parallel paintings by Corot of Orpheus and Eurydice. In the first, Orpheus leads Eurydice out of the Underworld. They are still in the Underworld—note the ghostly subtleties of the hues, the dreamlike vagueness of the place, the almost shadowy leafiness of the trees, the nebulous huddles of the shades of the dead and their dim, formless reflections. Orpheus holds Eurydice firmly by the wrist, spirit of the dead though she is, leading confidently, his arms strong and muscular, his bearing proud, his head crowned with the laurel wreath that marks him first among poets, his lyre—chief weapon of persuasion—brandished before him like a sword or guiding lantern. Eurydice, meanwhile, is specter-pale and veiled, chaste and bridal.

2. Frederic Leighton, Orpheus and Eurydice (1864): This Eurydice is bolder, with no small persuasive powers of her own. Unlike Orpheus, she needs no lyre—her gaze is all. Orpheus desperately turns away, desperately keeps his eyes closed, desperately holds back the loving, entreating, wifely embrace he so wants to return. Leighton’s painting was the inspiration for Robert Browning’s wonderful short poem “Eurydice to Orpheus,” where Eurydice exhorts, “no past is mine, no future: look at me!”

3. Jean Cocteau’s Orphic Trilogy: Artist, designer, poet, playwright, novelist, and film director Jean Cocteau marshaled his considerable talents towards the making of three films—The Blood of a Poet (1932); Orpheus (1950); Testament of Orpheus (1960)—that use the Orpheus myth as an entry point into a meditation on poetry and the poet. After all, Cocteau referred to novel-writing as poésie de roman, theater as poésie de théâtre, movie-making as poésie cinématographique. Using rich, almost surrealist symbolism, the films serve as dreamy investigations into art, life, death, immortality, the unconscious, and the nature of artistic creation. In the final film, Cocteau himself steps into the frame and plays Orpheus, the eternal poet.

   

4. Cast of three-figured relief depicting Hermes, Eurydice, and Orpheus from Museo Archeologico Nazionale di Napoli: This 18th century cast, made from a Roman marble panel which itself was a copy of a Greek original from the 5th century BC, shows Orpheus, on the right, in the fateful moment of turning back to look at his wife Eurydice. There is great pathos in the mutual gaze of husband and wife here, in the placement of the hands—Eurydice rests a hand on Orpheus’ shoulder, as though clinging to him or reassuring him for his renewed loss of her, a hand he lightly touches with his own in a tender gesture, his lyre in his other hand. Hermes, the messenger god, who guides the souls of the dead to the Underworld, stands behind the couple. His fingers already grasp Eurydice’s wrist, ready to take her back to the realm of ghosts. I love the detail too of Eurydice’s veil, which the relief opens up to us the viewers. Was it Orpheus who pushed aside the veil to see her? Or did she open it herself, wanting equally to look at her husband?

5. Black Orpheus (1959): Marcel Camus set the Orpheus myth in late-1950s Rio, during Carnaval. Breno Mello and Marpessa Dawn make a beautiful couple, Orpheus a singer, guitar-player, and dancer, Eurydice a country girl fleeing the personified figure of Death. The setting of Carnaval is a beautiful chaos of color and song, rhythm and dance. Many Brazilians were disappointed with the film, which they saw as a French, exoticized view of their culture, ignoring the reality of life in a favela. Yet, years after first viewing it, I’m still haunted by the three songs “A Felicidade,” “Manhã de Carnaval,” and “Samba de Orfeu,” which brought bossa nova to a global audience.

6. You Ain’t Seen Nothin’ Yet! (Vous n’avez encore rien vu) (2012): In Alain Resnais’s penultimate film, a group of actors gather to put on the play “Eurydice” by the celebrated, recently deceased playwright Antoine d’Anthac. d’Anthac is a fiction, really a character from a play by Jean Anouilh, the actual creator, too, of “Eurydice.” So many layers of adaptation here: a myth within a play within a movie. The film derives much of its poignancy from its meditations on aging, as older actors vie with younger and performers look back on the Eurydices of their own pasts.

7. John William Waterhouse, Nymphs Finding the Head of Orpheus (1900): According to Pausanias, after failing to bring Eurydice back from the Underworld, Orpheus shunned the love of women and turned to men. Angry, the Maenads—female followers of Dionysus—tore him to shreds, and his head floated down the river, still singing, some say, as it went. In Waterhouse’s painting, two nymphs find Orpheus’s lovely head—his still youthful, well-formed face, his long, lush locks, and even his lyre, around which his hair is entangled.

   

8. The Myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, directed by Gia Coppola and produced for Vogue with Gucci (2016): In this high-fashion update of the myth, Orpheus and Eurydice are (Alessandro Michele-era) Gucci-clad, artsy urbanites, Eurydice (Lou Doillon) wearing on her wedding day a glittery pink veil adorned with butterflies and a pink dress snaked with serpents, her wedding ring simply overkill for her already heavily beringed fingers, Orpheus (Marcel Castenmiller) one of those sensitive hipster types, playing in the place of a lyre an electric guitar. Gia Coppola’s dreamy, stylized adaptation preserves the beating heart of the myth while bringing it into the modern world. Central Park stands in for a pastoral setting, the snake is a woman (Vittoria Ceretti) dressed in deadly red, and the Underworld is a nightclub, awash in neon light, with a mysterious ouroboros logo. Orpheus looks back at his wife on a crowded, sunny Manhattan street, she disappears, and the people walk on by, oblivious of his tragedy.

9. Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, Orpheus Lamenting Eurydice (ca. 1861-5): This painting parallels the first painting, also by Corot, in the mood board. Having failed to bring his wife back to the world of the living, Orpheus laments. The world above looks so much like the world below: trees, grass, and river, with Orpheus occupying almost exactly the same spot on the canvas. But here things are reversed: Orpheus himself, haunted by Eurydice’s conspicuous absence, is now a shade standing on the banks of a river, while the others, reading and conversing, are engaged in the warm tasks of living and hardly seem to notice him.

Three Things I’m in Love With This Week

1. Sarah Ruhl, Eurydice (2003): Sarah Ruhl lost her father at the age of 20, and her play Eurydice, which is dedicated to him, makes its most significant relationship not that between husband and wife but between father and daughter—even “[a] wedding is for daughters and fathers…. They stop being married to each other on that day.” Eurydice’s father is also dead, and when she dies, she meets him again. Unable to bear leaving him, she deliberately walks up to Orpheus and calls his name, with the inevitable result that he turns around, looks at her, and she dies all over again and goes back to the Underworld. Having lost my father in the past year, I can relate. I’d give anything to sit in a string room with him as he teaches me how to read.7

   

   

2. Christoph Willibald Gluck, Orfeo ed Euridice (1762): The earliest surviving opera is Jacopo Peri’s Eurydice, but my favorite Orpheus and Eurydice opera is Gluck’s Orfeo ed Euridice. In this version of the myth, Orpheus doesn’t explain to Eurydice the injunction that he can’t look at her as he leads her out of the Underworld. Hurt and confused by this, thinking it a sign of waning love, Eurydice movingly sings her grief to her husband. He can’t help it: he turns around. But Gluck gives us a happy ending, courtesy of Amore, who just wants to see the two lovers reunited.

3. Original Hadestown album by Anaïs Mitchell (2010): Before Anaïs Mitchell’s Hadestown became a big Broadway musical, it was a humbler concept album, for which Mitchell recruited her singer friends, like Justin Vernon (Bon Iver) and Ani DiFranco, to play the parts of Orpheus and Hermes, Persephone and Hades and The Fates. As for Mitchell herself, she was Eurydice. I used to listen to the album again and again as a teenager—and how could I help it? “Way Down Hadestown” is just too catchy:

Words of Wisdom

Failure

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We are much bound to them that do succeed;
     But, in a more pathetic sense, are bound
     To such as fail. They all our loss expound;
They comfort us for work that will not speed,
And life—itself a failure. Ay, his deed,
     Sweetest in story, who the dusk profound
     Of Hades flooded with entrancing sound,
Music’s own tears, was failure. Doth it read
Therefore the worst? Ah no! So much to dare,
     He fronts the regnant Darkness on its throne.—
So much to do; impetuous even there,
     He pours out love’s disconsolate sweet moan—
He wins; but few for that his deed recall;
Its power is in the look which costs him all. 

—Jean Ingelow

Jean Ingelow was a Victorian writer who first became popular for her poems, though she also wrote novels, short stories, and children’s books. One of these children’s books was Mopsa tbe Fairy, which centers around a boy named Jack, who ends up in fairyland and meets the fairy child Mopsa. For the epigraph of the last chapter, Ingelow uses her own sonnet, and it is a poem that cuts right to the heart of the myth in a way that I’ve seen few other works do, only needing fourteen very concise, tightly written lines to do so.

I first discovered this poem in John Hollander’s The Work of Poetry (1997). I had never heard of Ingelow, and indeed Hollander dismisses much of her verse as slight, trifling, typical Victorian fare. But somehow, here, putting on the persona of Jack, Ingelow “could recover a Keatsian power” to produce what Hollander calls “one of the finest short poems of its time” and “one of the major lost poems of the nineteenth century.” For Ingelow here, the Orpheus story counterintuitively comforts us about failure. After all, if Orpheus had been successful, the story would never have been so powerful, would never have been remembered so well over the millennia, would never have spawned so many offspring, would never have resulted in wonderful sonnets such as this.

Poetry Corner

Orpheus

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I swear by Tanaïs, black river from six urns,
And Zeus, who rides upon great chariots as stars burn,
Drawn by the bulls of Rhea and by Nyx’s horses,
And giants of former times, and men of newer sources,
Pluto who devours us, Uranus who makes us be,
I love a woman who is sacred unto me.
The monster with blue hair, Poseidon, hears me out,
And may he grant my wish. I’m the human soul singing out;
I love. The dark immensity is full of clouds,
The heavy rain abounds with leaves in whirling crowds,
And Boreas moves the woods and Zephyr moves the wheat,
And in this way, profoundly, love disturbs our heart-beat.
I’ll love this woman named Eurydice
Always, past all! But if I fail, let heaven curse me,
And let it curse the nascent flower and the wheat-ear’s all.
You there—do not trace magic words upon the wall. 

—Victor Hugo, translated by me8

The 12-syllable alexandrine is to French poetry what iambic pentameter is to English. Here I have kept, as much as I could, the alexandrine, which in English is iambic, and also preserved the rhyme scheme of rhyming couplets. In this poem we see Orpheus not in the role of poet or artist but as devout, devoted husband and lover of Eurydice. In the French, there is a through line from j’atteste to j’adore une femme to j’aime to j’aimerai… toujours. I also like the assonance between je suis l’âme and j’aime, as though loving Eurydice is somehow connected with his being “the human soul singing,” a part of his fundamental identity. If he fails in this love, the “magic words” go, too.

Beauty Tip

Keep your eye on the road—one cannot drive looking continually in the rearview mirror.

Lingering Question

Why do you think Orpheus turned to look back at Eurydice? Was it out of love for her? Because she wanted him to? Because he doubted that she was following?

Dear Readers, this post was very long and involved, probably because I am currently working on a poetry collection inspired by the Orpheus and Eurydice myth, but I hope you enjoyed! If you did, please share this post with a friend, subscribe to Soul-Making, and leave a like. As always, I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments!

Even then, when Oeagrian Hebros rolled the head onwards,
torn from its marble neck, carrying it mid-stream,
the voice alone, the ice-cold tongue, with ebbing breath,
cried out: ‘Eurydice, ah poor Eurydice!’
‘Eurydice’ the riverbanks echoed, all along the stream.

But when, in which of all these lives,
are we finally open and receivers?

Apologies for not being “as punctual as the Bee to the Clover”—yet nevertheless it is here! Dear Readers, I hope you enjoy <3

—

The land where good people go when they die, whether it be called heaven or Elysium, I cannot picture except as a land of perpetual spring. Winter I love for its white stillness, its hushed quiet, the softness of its snows and its barren beauty; summer I love for the languor of sweltering heat, the long, long sun-soaked days, the sudden violent storms, the trips to Cape Cod and the feeling of shaved legs under sundresses and the smell of sunscreen and the sea; autumn I love for the crackle of leaves underfoot and the blaze of color in the branches, the ripening of apples and “mellow fruitfulness”; but it is spring that kindles my heart most of all.

Where does this joy come from? It must have hid latent in the heart, buried under a hard, cold reticence, growing in its own dark soil, fermenting with its secret life. About a week ago I was walking somewhere, and I saw three or four bright purple blooms in the dirt where there’d been nothing just a few days earlier. “Earth laughs in flowers,” says Emerson in “Hamatreya.” Spring is when the old beldam Earth becomes a child again, and she runs through the fields with flowers in the lap of her frock, birds threaded through her hair, and as her hands brush against the trunks of trees they enleaf themselves all over with green. Now at the end of March, the sky is a robin’s egg blue, pure, with only a few white cotton balls of clouds. The sun is content to linger a little longer, and the birds return to their nests and sing.

It is said that spring was created when the maiden goddess Persephone was abducted by Hades, the god of the underworld. The girl was playing in a glade and picking flowers with her companions, the nymphs, when Hades rose up through a chasm in the earth and spirited her away on his golden chariot, plunging down through a pool, through the bottom of the earth, all the way down to Tartarus. Persephone’s mother Demeter, the goddess of the harvest, searched night and day, end to end over the whole earth, for her daughter, but in vain. Finally, she came to the nymph Cyane in Sicily, who showed her Persephone’s ribbon, which had fallen in the pool. Aggrieved, the goddess tore at her hair and her breast, made the crops wither and the fields barren, sent cold frosts and freezing storms to the farmers. She went to Persephone’s father, Zeus, and begged for help. Zeus agreed, but Persephone had already eaten pomegranate seeds, the fruit of the underworld, and whoever eats the fruit of the underworld is bound to that realm. Negotiating between the two immortals, Zeus came to a resolution: for half the year, Persephone would live with her husband; Demeter, grieving during those months, strips the earth into barren fall and winter. For the other half, Persephone would live in the world above with her mother, and gladdened by her daughter’s return, Demeter spreads the earth with the flowers of spring and summer.

During the winter, I think that it’d be fine if the warm weather never returned, if I could just hibernate forever, huddle under the covers forever, only know the world through the window’s narrow frame. But with spring comes a new upswell of energy, a spring, as it were, in the step. I wrote a couplet for a sonnet once that went, “Because the spring inside me rioted, / I knew that life could not be quieted.” Now that the equilibrium between day and night tilts towards day, I want to wear pastels and bake cakes, play the violin again, go on long walks through the fields and woods. The earth will renew itself in gladness; flowers will bloom in my heart.

Mood Board of the Week

(left to right, top to bottom)

1. Stamps posted by thatbitchsimone on Tumblr: These stamps from across the world—Indonesia, Ethiopia, Bolivia—capture flowers across cultures and in all their happy variety.

2. David Ost, Leafing Through Flowers (2000): In Leafing Through Flowers, photographs capture Belgian floral artist Daniel Ost’s strange, unusual, and unconventional flower arrangements, like this one here, where bulbs on long, long, long stems surge upwards against a claustrophobic canopy of leaves, as though still trapped under the ground.

   

3. Vincent van Gogh, The White Orchard (1888): In February 1888, Van Gogh left the busy, tiresome city of Paris for the quiet, peaceful countryside of Arles. In the spring of 1888, he began painting the blossoming orchards he saw, producing fourteen canvases over the course of a month. These paintings are full of movement and life—the trees here, their branches laden with fresh green, almost seem to stir in the wind.

4. Laetitia Casta for YSL Spring/Summer 1999: Couture shows traditionally have their grand finale with a bridal look, and French model Laetitia Casta, being the last muse of fashion designer Yves Saint Laurent, was the bride in his collections from 1998 to 2001. In his Spring 1999 show, Laurent eschewed the usual white, cream, ivory, and alabaster for a riot of pink roses, trimmed with green leaves and completed with a pale pink silk train. She wore a crown of roses, and roses decorated her heels. Think a primeval bride in an Edenic paradise, the goddess Flora, Persephone just before her abduction.

5. David Hockney, from The Arrival of Spring in Woldgate (2011): David Hockney is best known for his paintings of swimming pools, inspired by his time in California, but in the 2000s he went back to the UK and embraced the natural landscape of northern England, especially in this series, The Arrival of Spring in Woldgate. I love it when older artists are unafraid of embracing new technologies, and here Hockney used an iPad to capture the riotous beauty of spring. In an interview by the Van Gogh Museum for an exhibition on the two artists, you can see the pure joy on Hockney’s face when he describes the minute subtleties of nature that come alive when you just take the time to look, and I’m sure Van Gogh would agree with him when he says, “You can’t be bored of nature, can you?”

6. Rosalind Burdett, Interior Design Ideas: Inside an English Home (1988): When it comes to interior design for springtime, how can you beat floral wallpaper, a floral bathtub, a floral tablecloth, and a few bunches of flowers just to really drive the message home?

7. Claude Monet, An Orchard in Spring (1886): A woman sits reading in a flowering orchard; behind her bloom rows of purple flowers. I think Impressionism was made for spring—no style of art seems to capture it so fully, so beautifully, so alive in its movement and stirring and gaiety and vivacity.

8. Sarah Meyohas, Infinite Petals (2023): Artist Sarah Meyohas trained a GAN (Generative Adversarial Network, a precursor to AI) on a dataset of 100,000 actual rose petals. The GAN would then generate new, unique rose petals, endlessly, which were displayed in a video installation. These infinite petals give me a feeling of infinite spring, bringing together nature and technology to create an abundance of beauty.

9. Éric Rohmer, A Tale of Springtime (1990): In this first installment of his loose series Tales of the Four Seasons (characters, plots, settings all change from film to film, though themes provide a through line) Rohmer showcases the beauty of early spring through scenes of Paris and scenes of the countryside: warm pops of colors and florals in characters’ apartments, a fresh vase of tall white blossoms, begging to be sniffed, an orchard in flower like a Van Gogh painting. I’ve written more fully about this movie here.

Three Things I’m In Love With This Week

1. Inside a Storied Artist Residence Nestled within the Historic National Arts Club by Homeworthy: Homeworthy has become one of my favorite YouTube channels, and recently it showcased the National Arts Club, which is located in Gramercy Park in New York City. Inside this storied structure is an apartment, which is currently occupied by its third resident, the portrait painter Michael Shane Neal. Both the clubhouse and the apartment are filled with remarkable artworks, furniture, and decorative objects, and I very nearly let out an audible gasp when the camera panned up to Donald MacDonald’s vast, intricate, beautiful stained glass dome.

   

2. Raspberry Pistachio Cake by teak & thyme: If you’ve been hanging out on the Internet, you may have seen an uptick in recipes featuring pistachios. Before the 1980s, most pistachios sold in the US were imported from Iran and the Middle East. For political reasons, farmers in California were encouraged to grow pistachios, which require vast quantities of water. To shore up the American pistachio industry, pistachios are now being pushed front and center—it seems there are also some theories about a shadowy billionaire couple and a hoarding of water supply. Anyway, nut intrigues aside, I think pistachios are delicious, and I love the pink and green colors of this raspberry pistachio cake, which looks so bright and pretty and perfect for spring. I love how vintage styles of cake decorating are returning, and I love the little bows used to decorate this cake. I used to bake a lot, and now I’m inspired to start baking again and create beautiful sweet treats and confections for my loved ones.

3. A meditation on the spring, Rambler no. 5, April 3, 1750, by Samuel Johnson: In these musings upon the start of springtime, the always erudite Dr. Johnson writes that “[h]e that enlarges his curiosity after the works of nature, demonstrably multiplies the inlets to happiness,” and what better time is there to read nature’s works than spring?

Words of Wisdom

Many people seem to think it foolish, even superstitious, to believe that the world could still change for the better. And it is true that in winter it is sometimes so bitingly cold that one is tempted to say, ‘What do I care if there is a summer; its warmth is no help to me now.’ Yes, evil often seems to surpass good. But then, in spite of us, and without our permission, there comes at last an end to the bitter frosts. One morning the wind turns, and there is a thaw. And so I must still have hope.

—Vincent van Gogh

Van Gogh wrote this letter to his brother Theo in mid-August of 1879, at the age of 26, from the Belgian village of Cuesmes. Van Gogh had come to the Borinage, an area of Belgium centered around coal mining, to work as a missionary. Embracing his religious vocation and the lifestyle of his congregation of poor miners, he slept on straw in a humble hut, had stopped bathing, and had given up most of his clothes and money to the miners, but the vocation would prove fraught with difficulties and disappointments. In this letter, Vincent thanks Theo for a recent visit, which gave him the reassurance that “life is something good and precious which one should value.” He talks about how devastating the effects of loneliness are and how important one’s relationships with others—“Like everyone else, I need friendly or affectionate relationships or intimate companionship, and am not made of stone or iron like a pump or a lamppost.” Living in the Borinage had been trying for Vincent (“the worst time I have ever lived through”), and having already gone through several changes of profession, he despaired at finding a trade. Yet it was in Cuesmes that he was to finally realize his calling as a painter and take up, definitively, the paintbrush and the painter’s palette.

Poetry Corner

After the Winter

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published

Some day, when trees have shed their leaves
     And against the morning’s white
The shivering birds beneath the eaves
     Have sheltered for the night,
We’ll turn our faces southward, love,
     Toward the summer isle
Where bamboos spire the shafted grove
     And wide-mouthed orchids smile.

And we will seek the quiet hill
     Where towers the cotton tree,
And leaps the laughing crystal rill,
     And works the droning bee,
And we will build a cottage there
     Beside an open glade,
With black-ribbed blue-bells blowing near,
     And ferns that never fade.

—Claude McKay

A convicted orchid-lover, I especially love McKay’s image of “wide-mouthed orchids smil[ing].” The image of building a cottage by a glade reminds me so much of Yeats’s “bee-loud glade” from “The Lake Isle of Innisfree,” where the speaker plans to live in “a small cabin… of clay and wattles made.” However, while Yeats’s speaker plans to inhabit his gladeside abode alone, McKay envisions it more as a bower of springtime bliss for himself and his love. Having recently become espoused, I’m persuaded to side with McKay.

Beauty Tip

I saw this lovely idea in a YouTube video by Julyssa Rose—string together fabric flowers (her flowers are vintage, which adds to their romance) with brass wire and hang them up as an easy decoration for spring!

Lingering Question

It has often been remarked that it would be more apt for the New Year to begin in the spring rather than in the winter, for spring is a thing of beginnings. Now that we are nearly a quarter of the way through 2025, I’d like to ask, dear readers—do you feel a sense of hope and newness more around the New Year or more around the start of spring?

Dear Readers, what is spring like in your part of the world, and how are you feeling at the start of this spring? Let me know in the comments, and please like this post & subscribe to Soul-Making if you enjoyed!

—

4 Books I Read in February

The Rainbow

I first read The Rainbow in college, and I was inspired to reread it earlier this month when ars poetica mentioned it in a newsletter as D.H. Lawrence’s “impossibly perfect novel.” If one does not find it “impossibly perfect,” there is no denying that it it is vital, poetic, thrumming and humming with life, alive in every syllable and word. It is a book with blood surging hot and strong through its veins.

The Rainbow begins in the 1840s and ends in 1905, chronicling three generations of the Brangwen family, who live in rural England, near Nottinghamshire, where Lawrence himself grew up in a coal mining town. In the first generation there are Tom Brangwen and Lydia, a Polish widow with a young daughter, Anna. Tom and Lydia marry, but their intimacy, their sharing in one another and understanding of one another, occurs only sporadically, until a revelation springs up between them and allows them to become “doorways” to each other. Then we learn about Anna, her girlhood, the relationship that springs up between her and her cousin Will. Will and Anna marry, but they become locked into conflict almost immediately; their conflict stems from fundamental character differences and cannot be smoothed over easily. But they learn, more or less, to live with one another, and their physical intensity produces children, the first of whom is Ursula.

It is Ursula Brangwen who is the point of arrival of all this forward motion of generations and passion. She has a relationship with Anton Skrebensky, but they are further apart than even Will and Anna: there is destruction here, agony, darkness. Ursula has other other relationships, with women; in spite of her parents’ dissuasion, she seeks out a career as a schoolteacher and, in spite of the uncongeniality of the role, she ekes out her own financial independence.

No writer can touch Lawrence when it comes to desire, the animal passion of sexual love. In The Rainbow he does it without vulgarity or silliness, grafting bodily sensations to heightened emotional experience and the symbolism of elemental images—light and darkness, sea and moonlight—revealing desire in its full spiritual force, an energy that pulses and throbs, mysterious and yet working through human life with its sacred power. But what stood out to me this time were the passages not concerned with desire: Ursula’s experiences at school and the simultaneously repulsive and triumphant experience of disciplining children; the carefully drawn sketches of “glimmering dusk” and “pale drops of flowers.” Then, of course, there is the vision of the rainbow at the end—but for that you will have to read the book.

The Sisters: Babe Mortimer Paley, Betsey Roosevelt Whitney, Minnie Astor Fosburgh: the Life and Times of the Fabulous Cushing Sisters by David Grafton

Babe Paley has been a fashion icon of mine for a long time, one of those stylish women whose elegance and good taste seems a product of a bygone era, impossible to recapture or recreate. The Sisters chronicles the life and times of the three “fabulous Cushing sisters,” of which Babe, along with older sisters Betsey and Minnie, comprised. Daughters of famed Harvard neurosurgeon Harvey Cushing and Katharine Crowell Cushing, they grew up in a large, handsome house in Brookline with two brothers. Dr. Cushing spent long hours at the hospital, and so it fell to Kate to make sure that her daughters made the best of their beauty and good breeding. The career she picked out for them was marriage; succeed they must.

And succeed they would: Betsey, the middle sister, became the sisters’ launching pad when at 22 she married James Roosevelt, son of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who would fortuitously go on to become President. Through Betsey’s connections, the eldest sister Minnie met and married Vincent Astor, heir of a $200 million fortune, and then Babe, the youngest, married Standard Oil heir Stanley Mortimer, Jr. This was just round one. Betsey’s marriage with James fell apart; she found and caught a bigger fish in the form of John Hay Whitney. So, too, did Babe’s with Stanley Mortimer; she severed this blue-blooded tie to bind herself to the fabulous wealth of CBS founder Bill Paley. Minnie’s second round, according to such standards, brought her down a rung, but she always had a passion for art, and with painter and art collector James Fosburgh, she was able to become the hostess of one of Manhattan’s best salons.

Reading The Sisters, I related to Minnie’s love of art, was still in awe of Babe’s perfect taste, swanlike grace, and genius for style, but ultimately decided that if I had to be one sister, it would be Betsey. She had the houses and the gardens and the dresses and the Renoirs and the yachts and what the other two did not have and money cannot buy, love and happiness. To love and be loved is gold, all else is gilding.

The Red and the Black by Stendhal

These French novels always seem to ramble through the life of some not quite sympathetic person and end in a place not quite satisfactory. Nevertheless, I enjoyed this novel, mostly because I found it very funny. Our hero is Julien Sorel, the son of a humble sawmill owner. Intelligent, well-read, and ambitious (his hero is Napoleon, unfortunately in post-Napoleonic France), he decides to embark on a religious career in order to climb up the ranks of society, using his party trick of having memorized the Bible—in Latin—as a ticket to the upper echelons.

The first rung of Julien’s social climbing is his position tutoring the children of his small town’s mayor. There he develops a mutual attraction with the mayor’s wife, Madame de Rênal, and slowly, gradually, rather clumsily seduces her. Next, after a brief stint at a seminary in the larger town of Besançon, he is recommended to the aristocratic Marquis de la Mole to become his personal secretary and moves up to the big city of Paris. The upper classes repulse him, and yet he wants to be part of them. He has a strange seduction with the Marquis’s daughter, Mathilde, who, unlike the guileless, natural, provincial Madame de Rênal, is self-conscious, cerebral, and haughty. The worse Julien treats her, the more she falls for him, and the more he reveals his passion for her, the less attractive he becomes in her eyes. Their romance, with its back-and-forths and its contrivances of passion and its dramatic slashing-offs of hair, is hilarious; at the end of their first night together, Mathilde reflects that she had not experienced “the perfect bliss depicted in novels” and wonders to herself, “Could it be that I’m not in love with him after all?”

As a character, Julien is too calculating to be likable and yet not calculating enough to realize his schemes. Like the aristocrats who disgust him, he is a hypocrite. He has learnt the whole Bible by heart and yet without having gained much of its spiritual feeling; he sincerely loves a woman he isn’t faithful to. Yet his story is absorbing, and perhaps the most direct declaration of its authors aims in writing it come when Stendhal tells us,

A novel is a mirror going along a main road. Sometimes it reflects into your eyes the azure of the sky, sometimes the mud of the quagmires on the road. And the man carrying the mirror in the basket on his back gets accused by you of being immoral! His mirror shows the mire, and you accuse the mirror! You’d do better to accuse the road where the quagmire is, and better still the inspector of roads who allows the water to stagnate and the quagmire to form.1

Fables of Identity: Studies in Poetic Mythology by Northrop Frye

This is a book of literary criticism, a collection of essays on writers from Spenser and Shakespeare through to James Joyce and Wallace Stevens. Frye begins with the idea that literary criticism could be, at least partially, a science, but “what is at present missing from literary criticism is a coordinating principle, a central hypothesis which, like the theory of evolution in biology, will see the phenomena it deals with as parts of a whole.” For Frye, this coordinating principle is myth. Whether we are dealing with Homer and the classical world or the Amherst of Emily Dickinson, a series of common archetypes and images underlie the work of all poets, often related to the cycles of nature. Frye’s insights into the individual writers not only demonstrate this theoretical framework in practice but elucidate elements unique to each writer’s particular mythopoetic world, like a guide taking us on a tour through fairyland. As a critic, he’s learned but accessible, thorough without being obscure, and not without touches of humor. I loved the essay on Lord Byron in particular, the way that Frye braids together the poet’s verse, life, and historical context to tell us how this inimitable man “released a mainspring of creative energy in modern culture,” an energy that was called Romantic.

Mood Board of the Week

(left to right, top to bottom)

1. Marjorie Skouras’s 19th-century mansion in Mérida, Mexico, photographed by John Ellis for Architectural Digest: Marjorie Skouras is a decorator and product designer who bought a dilapidated Mexican colonial house with her husband in the Centro Histórico of Mérida, Mexico. Skouras fell in love with its pistachio-green façade and Art Nouveau influence. The renovation was a long, painstaking process, but the final result—complete with Skouras’s own colorful, eclectic touches—brought the home’s previous owners to tears when they visited. Perhaps because of last week’s pink theme, I was instantly drawn to this room, with its pink walls and pink settee, allowing a bottle-green, fish-shaped majolica table and a watermelon-colored lampshade, complete with three seeds, to stand out.

2. Jacob Jongert, cover for Wendingen, Series 5, no. 1 (1923): Wendingen, published from 1918 to 1932, was a Dutch magazine focused on architecture and interior design. It was notable for its striking graphic design and typography. Here I love the simplicity of Jongert’s design— the pared-down flower at the center, the minimal use of color, the negative space—which was based on the stained glass windows of Richard Roland Holst, an artist and designer Jongert worked with and learned much from. Look closely at the flower, and the red design at the center is actually a stylized rendering of the name “Roland Holst.”

3. Catherine Deneuve and Françoise Dorléac in Agnès Varda’s The Young Girls Turn 25 (1993): When her husband, Jacques Demy, was making one of my favorite films, The Young Girls of Rochefort (1967), Agnès Varda was hard at work documenting the process, which later became The Young Girls Turn 25 (1993). For the documentary, made for Rochefort’s 25th anniversary, she combined archival footage and interviews with the film’s actors and residents of Rochefort. The atmosphere on set seems to have been close, friendly, lighthearted, as playful as the film itself. Lifelong romances began during filming. Playing sisters, real-life sisters Catherine Deneuve and Françoise Dorléac were as charming behind camera as they were on camera. Unfortunately, Dorléac would turn 25 and remain 25 forever: at the height of her career, she lost control of her Renault 10, hit a signpost near Nice, burst into flames, and died, leaving Deneuve—and Varda and Demy—to carry on her legacy.

   

4. Janet Laing photographed by Etheldreda Laing in Oxford ca. 1914: Etheldreda Laing and her husband lived in Oxford, where Etheldreda became interested in the nascent technology of photography in the 1890s. She had a darkroom built in their house, and she adopted color early on, in 1907, when the Autochrome process, patented by the Lumière brothers, first became available. One of her favorite subjects was her daughters, and she loved photographing them in the garden, enjoying the sunshine among the flowers, on benches, under parasols, surrounded by lush greenery.

5. Eric Ravilious, Two Woman in a Garden (1933): All of a sudden, a couple of days ago, the temperature rose, the ice on the pond began to thaw, and snow started running in rivulets down the streets and into the dull grass, mixing dirt and slush into a squelching mud. A premonition of spring—early, to be sure, but enough to put me in mind of April tulips and green gardens. In this painting by British painter, illustrator, and engraver Eric Ravilious (1903–1942), two women sit in a lush green garden, quietly enjoying the protective shade of a large tree and the wind through the grass, an umbrella forgotten and quite discarded. The two women are Tirzah Garwood, Ravilious’s wife, also a painter, and Charlotte Bawden, wife of Edward Bawden, also both artists.

6. Dreams (1990): Akira Kurosawa was one of my father’s favorite directors, and we watched and enjoyed so many of his films together. Released in 1990, Dreams was one of Kurosawa’s last movies, and it was one of the last movies my father saw. Here the lyrical, romantic elements of Kurosawa’s filmmaking—as in the scene in Seven Samurai when the young apprentice samurai Katsushiro suddenly finds himself in a wood of white flowers and seems to have lapsed into another world—finally find release from the chains of plot and are free to be simply images, fragments, pieces of a poetic pottery. In one of the film’s eight vignettes, Kurosawa suddenly takes us to France, where we meet Vincent van Gogh, played by—of all people—Martin Scorsese. Here Kurosawa replicates what was thought to be van Gogh’s final painting, Wheatfield with Crows, painted exactly a century earlier, in 1890.

7. Audrey Hepburn at the grocery store with her pet deer, Pippin, in 1958, photographed by Bob Willoughby: In 1958, Audrey Hepburn was making the film Green Mansions, directed by her then-husband Mel Ferrer. In the film, a young woman living in the Venezuelan jungle is followed around by a fawn, and the animal trainer on set recommended Hepburn bond with the fawn by taking her home with her. Hepburn nicknamed the fawn, Pippin, “Ip,” had a custom bathtub built for her, slept with her, and took her to parties and to grocery stores in Beverly Hills. Hepburn was heartbroken when she had to part with Ip at the end of filming; a year later, she had a miscarriage and Ferrer tracked down and took Ip back in as a pet. This, of course, could not help sparking envy in Hepburn’s Yorkshire Terrier, Mr. Famous.

   

8. Leon Berkowitz, Source III (1976): Leon Berkowitz (1911–1987) was an American painter who lived in Washington D.C. after WWII and co-founded the Washington Workshop Center, which gathered together a variety of artists associated with Color Field painting, a style of painting characterized by large, unbroken surfaces of color. Although Berkowitz eschewed the “Color School” label, his paintings are beautiful, dreamy studies in color, where diffusions of various hues and shades melt into one another and seem to emanate an energy of their own. “I am endeavoring to find that blush of light over light and the color within the light; the depths through which we see when we look into and not at color,” Berkowitz said.

9. Toshiro Mifune in Venice: When I think of Kurosawa, thoughts of the inimitable Toshiro Mifune are never far behind.Whether he’s playing a medieval almost-samurai (Seven Samurai), a gruff 19th-century doctor (Red Beard), or a small-time, alcoholic, postwar yakuza (Drunken Angel). Here he is in Venice, drifting along on a gondola, smoking a cigarette, casually being a beacon of light for well-dressed men everywhere.

Three Things I’m in Love With This Week

Substack edition!

For the past couple of months, my reading on Substack has taken a significant dip. But I’ve been trying to rectify that and catch up, since there’s so much good writing and thinking here, so many people creating and studying and learning and teaching, so much sparking of the imagination and intellect. Here are a few Substack reads I’ve enjoyed lately:

1. “The Chungus Era” by Henry Begler: Patricia Lockwood is a writer who has fascinated me; I read her collection of poems Motherland Fatherland Homelandsexuals as a teenager, when it first came out in 2014. Lockwood’s verse is nothing if not original—and yet, was it good? Her poem “Rape Joke” was what first put her on the map; it foreshadowed the #MeToo movement perfectly. Lockwood herself, as Begler notes, was the “poet laureate” of “pre-Musk Twitter.” But now that that movement, now that that era have passed, we can look at Lockwood’s work with clearer eyes, which is exactly what Begler proceeds to do here. After criticizing her criticism, he goes onto evaluate her novel No One Is Talking About This, a novel I started several times but gave up on because the style grated on me. I like reading reviews of novels I’ve passed over; usually they confirm that I was right to have passed over said novel, or at least save me time by combining summary, analysis, opinion, and just a relevant enough sprinkle of actual quotations, all neatly wrapped up with a bow. One benefits more from reading good novels than one benefits from reading criticism of good novels; one benefits more from reading criticism of mediocre novels than one benefits from reading mediocre novels.

2. “New Romanticisms” by Sam Jennings: Sam Jennings begins with the idea of history as a palimpsest: the Romantics knitted together disparate elements from previous eras that resonated with them. Weighed down by all this history, weighed down by all this art and culture, it’s harder for us to do the same, but the only other option is drifting into the brainless laziness of AI and social media, allowing our culture to dissipate and our literature to become increasingly irrelevant. For Jennings, everything is in fact literature because everything can be read—“all things are imaginatively reducible to literature… you yourself will have to read something, and read it deeply, or you’ll never understand your place in the world.” What we need now is to move away from technology and embrace thought, memory, work, the “endless play and unfettered imagination” that art consists of.

3. Emily Spinach’s translation of Sir Orfeo: Spinach says that Sir Orfeo is the Middle English text that she recommends most to people, and after reading it I can see why. It was an especially wonderful discovery for me because of the poetry collection I’ve been working on based on the Orpheus and Eurydice myth. No matter how many times the story is retold, whether through Gluck’s 18th-century opera, Marcel Camus’s 1950s Brazilian Carnival film, or Anaïs Mitchell’s 2010 folk album, it never fails to move me, retaining its ancient poignance while adapting to a startling variety of contexts. Here Orpheus (“Orfeo”) and Eurydice (“Lady Heurodis”) are a medieval king and queen, and instead of being bitten by a snake and ending up in the Underworld, Eurydice is visited in sleep by a strange fairy king, tears at her face until it bleeds, and is spirited away into fairyland. Spinach’s translation makes the poem direct (“Well then—it was the start of May”), immediate (“When he played, the melody of his voice / built a better world….”), and sometimes funny (“but that city is called Winchester now / (it’s definitely Winchester).)” It’s readable, fascinating, and very entertaining.

   

Words of Wisdom

“You cannot live life according to a pattern. You can only prepare yourself for the unexpected by a long and continuous state of wonder.”

— Anaïs Nin, Journals of Anaïs Nin, 1927-1931

The past half-year or so for me has consisted of nothing but the unexpected. So I have decided to accept this “long and continuous state of wonder” in the hopes that these shocks, good or bad, may be taken in stride. Wonder, after all, is a happy state, a state of relinquishing oneself to something larger, greater, more mysterious, a state of accepting the things we do not understand.

Poetry Corner

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published

“With that I saw two Swannes of goodly hewe,
Come softly swimming downe along the Lee;
Two fairer Birds I yet did neuer see:
The snow which doth the top of Pindus strew,
Did neuer whiter shew,
Nor Joue himselfe when he a Swan would be
For loue of Leda, whiter did appeare:
Yet Leda was they say as white as he,
Yet not so white as these, nor nothing neare;
So purely white they were,
That euen the gentle streame, the which them bare
Seem’d foule to them, and bad his billows spare
To wet their silken feathers, least they might
Soyle their fayre plumes with water not so fayre,
And marre their beauties bright,
That shone as heauens light,
Against their Brydale day, which was not long:
     Sweete Themmes runne softly, till I end my Song.”

—Edmund Spenser, from “Prothalamion”

Frye’s chapter on Spenser’s Faerie Queene and the sight of two swans on a pond the other day reminded me of one of my favorite Spenser poems, “Prothalamion.” Written for the double marriage of sisters Elizabeth and Katherine Somerset to Sir Henry Guildford and William Petre, 2nd Baron Petre respectively, “Prothalamion” must be one of the sweetest and happiest poems in the English language. Indeed, there is a point near the end of the poem where, describing a “stately place” on the banks of the Thames, the speaker laments the dissipation of a lord’s favor he had once known; however, he is determined not to let the joyful occasion be marred by anything less joyful—“But Ah, here fits not well / Olde woes but ioyes to tell.”

One of these “ioyes” is the sight of two swans gliding down the river. Their feathers are so white they out-white the snow of Mt. Pindus, so white they surpass the god Jove himself when he turned into a swan to woo Leda, the result of which union was Helen of Troy, so white the poet is afraid the river’s waters will “Soyle their fayre plumes” and stain them. Finally, this bright white becomes an image of “heauens light” itself, presiding over the “Brydale day” and imbuing it with bridal blessings.

Beauty Tip

A real beauty tip this time: my husband has convinced me to start using olive oil on my face instead of moisturizer; this week, after weeks if not months of skepticism, I finally acquiesced, and all of the little patches I was told were eczema disappeared.

Lingering Question

What are some of the earliest harbingers of spring in your part of the world?

Dear Readers, I hope you enjoyed this post! Leave a like, share with a friend, and as always, please let me know your thoughts in the comments—I always look forward to hearing from you!

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Think Pink!

The background image of my email inbox, an image of sea, sky, and horizon, shifts and changes with the time of day. Right now, sundown, it’s colored an intense pink that goes purplish at the edges, orangish towards the horizon. It’s unnatural and beautiful, startling in its distance from the calm, blue serenity of midday.

I've always loved this sunset-pink; a couple of days ago, taking a walk through the woods after a fresh snowfall, everything white and still and silent, I looked up through the dark web of branches and saw the clouds in the distance, tinged “rosy-fingered.” It is a peculiar salmon color the dusk takes on in the winter; there is a coldness to its heated hue, a kind of reticence within it that all things take on in these months of January and February. Yet pink rising against so much colorlessness is still cheering, still vitalizing, more a source of excitement than it would be in the summer, where it would lose itself among verdant grass and multicolored flowers and strong, blue-flowing rivers.

When pink occurs in nature, it comes mostly in the form of flowers: the pale pink of roses and peonies, the subdued serenity of April tulips, the brighter pom-poms of hydrangeas, the almost monstrous audacity of pink lilies and pink orchids. Pink creatures look foreign to us: think of a flock of flamingoes, perching on those skinny poles Nature gave them for legs, preening themselves, visitors from another planet. Then there is the pink of palms, the pink of the mouth’s inside, of tongue and taste, of our secret, inner places.

During the Renaissance, painters dabbled in pink, but it wasn’t until 18th-century France that pink really took off. It was a unisex hue but it was a hue of the wealthy, an exclusive hue. It dyed silks and ornamented clocks. Madame de Pompadour, mistress of the king, loved it, and so the Sèvres porcelain company turned out exquisite pieces in what they dubbed “Pompadour pink.” Associated with skin, pink has been an erotic color; in its more saturated, voluptuous tones, pink became an exotic color. “Pink is the navy blue of India,” Diana Vreeland once remarked.

Masculine and feminine—at first, considered as a lighter shade of red, pink was properly manly. In the 1950s, blue became the boy color, pink the girl. Arbitrary as this may be, somehow pink does seem peculiarly feminine: it has both a lightness and a warmth, a sweetness, a frivolousness. Against all the cynicism of my logical mind, a profusion of pink thrills the little girl in my heart.

Red is too strong, too bold, too heady, too bloodlike. Carnal, vital, forceful, energetic. Pink is red subdued, sweetened, coaxed to a gentler temper. Pink is the freshness of spring, the softness of the back of a flower petal still wet with dew. Red is blood but pink is flesh, a healthful flush, a spreading blush. A slow spread of pink reveals what the heart feels, inadvertently, almost against one’s will. Pink betrays—but so adorably, so sweetly, so innocently, it can’t help but be forgiven.

Mood Board of the Week

(left to right, top to bottom)

1. Cuno Amiet, Self-Portrait in Rose (1907): Cuno Amiet is a Swiss painter who grew interested in the use of pure color in painting in the 1890s. Although about 50 of his most significant paintings were wiped out in a fire in 1931, his remaining archive of over 4,000 more than makes up for it. Of those 4,000, a fourth are self-portraits, and my favorite is this one, where Amiet, manly beard and all, thoroughly embraces this most feminine hue. He seems almost to be caught in a shower of cherry blossom petals, a storm of sweetness.

2. Pink Chanel suit of Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy, worn in 1963: On November 22, 1963, the President and the First Lady arrived in Dallas, Texas, the First Lady wearing a “watermelon pink” or “raspberry pink” suit of lightweight bouclé, trimmed with navy and set off by gold buttons. Before the trip, JFK had asked Jackie what she’d planned to wear. He gave her some advice: “There are going to be all these rich, Republican women at that lunch… wearing mink coats and diamond bracelets. And you’ve got to look as marvelous as any of them. Be simple—show these Texans what good taste really is.” And Jackie showed them, accessorizing the suit simply with white gloves and a matching pink pillbox hat. She continued to wear the suit, bloodstained and spattered with gore, in spite of people asking her if she wanted to change, even when VP Lyndon Johnson was sworn in as the next President, after her husband had been shot. “Somehow that was one of the most poignant sights,” said Lady Bird Johnson, “that immaculate woman, exquisitely dressed, and caked in blood.” Uncleaned, it remains in a windowless room in the National Archives where the air is changed six times an hour.

   

3. Pink silk gown, ca. 1775, from the Metropolitan Museum of Art: The robe à la française, also known by the decidedly less flattering name of the sack-back gown, began its life at the beginning of the 18th century as little more than a shapeless, dumpy garb. However, this seemingly humble dress had grand ambitions and in less than seven decades made a swift social climb to become the second-most formal style of ladies’ dress.

   

4. Pink dress by William Travilla, worn by Marilyn Monroe in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953): Clothes maketh the (wo)man, and this hot pink number was the stellification of one of Hollywood’s most entrancing icons, killing off (at least onscreen) dear old Norma Jean and erecting in her place the scintillating sex symbol Marilyn Monroe. In this movie, Monroe’s comedic genius shines at its brightest, set off by the equal comedic genius of Jane Russell. Travilla, who would go on to design Monroe’s costumes for several more of her films, had first created a showgirl costume for the song, a glitzy mass of diamonds grafted onto a fishnet bodystocking. However, word got out that Monroe had posed nude for a calendar in 1949. Wanting to waft away this whiff of scandal, Travilla was instructed last-minute to design a new, more modest costume. The result was this shocking pink dress, strapless, made of peau d’ange (“angel skin”) silk, fitted with a matching pink belt, a large pink bow at the back, and long, pink gloves to set off diamond bracelets. As for the original showgirl dress, it went to Jane Russell, who, throwing off a mink coat, shook and shimmied and jangled its jewels before a scandalized courtroom in a scene that never fails to make me chortle.

5. Emile Vloors, A Choral Dance (1912): Emile Vloors (1871-1952) was a Belgian painter and sculptor whose works evince a quiet romanticism. I love the dreamy shades of pink in this painting, where the pink of seemingly endless blossoms merges with the pink of airy fabric. I’m reminded of the Homeric epithet for the dawn, rhododactylos, “rosy-fingered.”

6. Mean Girls (2004): Who can resist quoting, who can resist rejoicing at, who can resist acquiescing to that immortal adage, first voiced by Amanda Seyfried in the role of Karen Smith, “On Wednesdays we wear pink”? How much wisdom is contained in those five words! Only wear pink on Wednesdays, no matter that you have to borrow a men’s shirt about five sizes too big for you, and the Plastics just might let you sit with them.

   

7. Jeongmee Yoon, “Seowoo” from The Pink and Blue Project (2005): Photographer Jeongmee Yoon embarked upon The Pink and Blue Project for her master’s thesis. She was inspired by her five-year-old daughter, Seowoo, who fixated on the color pink, only wanting to wear pink clothes and play with pink toys. Seowoo is pictured here with her precious pink possessions organized methodically around her, laid out in a seemingly endless array of slippers, books, dolls, plastic knickknacks, necklaces, pencils, and Hello Kitties. Seowoo herself is hardly larger than the Hello Kitties; wearing pink pants, a shirt with pink sleeves, and a bright pink headband, she sits squished, in the corner, propped up on a pink pillow: the collector collected.

   

   Noticing that many girls of Seowoo’s age, both in the U.S. and South Korea, shared a similar obsession with pink, and that this paralleled many boys’ obsession with blue, Yoon began to ask parents if she could photograph the collections of their children. The resulting compositions raise questions about gender, culture, childhood, consumerism, and what our collections mean to us.

8. Lisbon, Portugal, photographed by Gueorgui Pinkhassov in 1998: I love this pink building, and I think more buildings should be pink. Is it a coincidence that the photographer’s name is Pinkhassov? I dream of pink houses; I long for skyscrapers fuchsia, salmon, rose.

9. The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964): One of my favorite movies, Jacques Demy’s musical about two young lovers in the small maritime city of Cherbourg, is a perfect, riotous, unbelievably gorgeous study in color. Color film was made just to dance across Demy’s screen, to sing as the music of Michel Legrand soars and swells. In this shot, Catherine Deneuve wears a pink sweater and a pink bow in her hair, a shade subtler than the pink wallpaper behind her, emphasizing her youth and girlishness, while her mother, reflected in the mirror next to her, wears a deeper, more womanly red.

Three Things I’m in Love With This Week

1. Stuart Semple, work #16897, The World’s Pinkest Pink (2016): In 2014, British-Indian artist Anish Kapoor, perhaps best known for Chicago’s Cloud Gate (better known as “The Bean”) infamously bought the exclusive rights to the pigment Vantablack, the world’s blackest black, so black that it can absorb up to 99.965% of the visible light around it, in 2014. This earned him the ire of many, including fellow British artist Stuart Semple. In 2016, Semple decided to create “the world’s pinkest pink,” a pink so pink it should be sold with protective glasses. Semple made this pink available to everyone except Anish Kapoor—exactly the kind of petty rivalry that makes the contemporary art world, if not spiritually enlightening, intellectually enriching, or technically enterprising, at least fun to watch from the sidelines. When you go to purchase Semple’s pink, you are required to affirm that “you are not Anish Kapoor, you are in no way affiliated to Anish Kapoor, you are not purchasing this item on behalf of Anish Kapoor or an associate of Anish Kapoor. To the best of your knowledge, information and belief, this paint will not make its way into the hands of Anish Kapoor.” But it turns out that pink is not the new black, and that Semple is still hankering after the ever-elusive Vantablack. In June 2024, Stuart Semple legally changed his name to Anish Kapoor. Will he finally get the world’s blackest black? Shall “Anish Kapoor” at last acquire Vantablack, thus barring himself, perhaps forever, from Semple pink? I eagerly await the answer.

2. Shocking perfume by Schiaparelli: Surrealist fashion designer Elsa Schiaparelli was inspired by her mentor, Paul Poiret, to begin incorporating scent offerings into her brand, enhancing the allure of her couture creations and fashioning a woman who would be thoroughly, shockingly Schiaparelli. Released in 1937, Shocking was a homage to the intensely vivid, eye-popping hue of rose Schiaparelli dubbed “Shocking Pink.” Writing in her autobiography, she remembers how she came up with the perfume’s name: “The colour flashed in front of my eyes. Bright, impossible, imprudent, becoming, life-giving, like all the light and the birds and the fish in the world put together, a colour of China and Peru but not of the West—a shocking colour, pure and undiluted.” The scent itself, created by Jean Carles, described by Vogue as “insinuating, warm, bold, persevering,” was a heady blend of jasmine, leather, and civet. It filled a flacon shaped like a dressmaker’s dummy, modeled after Mae West’s measurements, and garnished with multicolored flowers, a measuring tape around its neck signed “Schiaparelli.”

   

3. The mystery of pink diamonds: It was “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend” that Marilyn Monroe sang while wearing the hot-pink number described above, and if it didn’t ruin the ring of the thing, it would be an even truer assertion to state that “Pink Diamonds Are a Girl’s Bestest Friend.” Pink diamonds were first discovered in India, but over 90% of them actually come from the Argyle Mine in Australia, of which they constitute only 1% of the mine’s output (most are the rather less striking brown diamond). Scholars and scientists continue to debate why exactly the pink diamond is pink. Everyone agrees that the peculiar rosy tinge is due to a deformation in the stone’s crystal structure. But was this caused by seismic shock? Pressure? Radiation exposure? Those questions don’t need to be answered, however, by the purchasers of such diamonds—in 2017, the Pink Star diamond set the auction record for diamonds when it was sold for $71 million.

   

Words of Wisdom

“I hadn’t gone twenty yards when I heard my name and Gatsby stepped from between two bushes into the path. I must have felt pretty weird by that time, because I could think of nothing except the luminosity of his pink suit under the moon.”

—F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

The Great Gatsby is a perfect book in my mind: short but complete, poetic but concise, lyrical but tightly plotted, its characters larger than life but all too human. That phrase, “the luminosity of his pink suit under the moon,” is so funny to me—I can just imagine Nick standing there, unable to get the image of Gatsby’s luminous, moonlight-dappled pink suit out of his mind after the shock of Myrtle Wilson’s death: in such moments, it’s often the little absurd details one tends, stupidly, to notice. Earlier on in the evening, Tom, Daisy’s husband and Gatsby’s rival for her love, exclaims about Gatsby, “An Oxford man! …Like hell he is! He wears a pink suit.” The pink suit marks out Gatsby as not one of “them,” not part of the blue-blooded circles in which Tom and Daisy move, inaccessible and remote and, no matter how much wealth Gatsby acquires, hopelessly out of reach. Later, when Nick remembers his goodbye to Gatsby and the last words he said to him, he remarks on how Gatsby’s “gorgeous pink rag of a suit made a bright spot of color against the white steps….” The pink suit differentiates Gatsby from Tom and Daisy but, in Nick’s mind, positively, an outward representation of the idealism, the romantic notions, the dreamer’s heart that undergird Gatsby’s chase of cold, corrupt cash.

Poetry Corner

Against Pink

Pink is an unhappy hue, not soothing like cerulean, nor calming like lavender or gray. It is the color of fingernails shorn away, blood dripping from the waxen quick. It is the color of a sunburned arm. The color of harm that lingers on cut shins for days. Pink is not the shade of buttercups or daisies. It is the color of poisonous brugmansia blooms, of poppies that bring on sleep. Pink saturates the face in anger. It is the cast left on a cutting board by a hunk of uncooked meat. Pink, too, is the bittersweet shade of passion subdued, passion that has slipped from burgundy to rose. It is only a tincture of desire and so carries the least conviction. It is the tint that drifts away unnoticed in the night. Be frightened of pink. Do not think it the innocent color of dresses or barrettes, the blush of areolas, strawberry snow cones, or grenadine martinis. Try, for once, to see it rightly. It is frightening. It is the hue of a person’s insides, the color of a womb. That room where life arises. That room where babies are made. Where arms, legs, and heads are created. Eyes, blood, and tiny teeth.

—Dara Yen Elerath

I don’t agree with Elerath—for me, pink is always a happy hue, and its sight never fails to bring a touch of brightness to my day, which is what makes this poem so arresting right from its beginning. Elerath uncouples pink’s associations with innocence, girlishness, peppy femininity. For her, pink is the color of pain, of passion gone cold, of flesh and all “the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to.” Pink is a color that somehow seems more artificial than its fellow tints and tinctures, but it’s actually the most natural of colors, the color of our own, squirming insides, of our mortality and our bestial baseness. Elerath’s inclusion of “tiny teeth” is interesting because babies don’t, in fact, exit “that room where life arises” armed with miniature fangs. However, we all come out of the womb with the potential to harm and be harmed—it is our inevitable inheritance, a condition of our being in the world, and why shouldn’t that be symbolized, after all, by fleshy, writhing, wet, smooth, tender pink?

Beauty Tip

Embrace the power of pink and add a pop of this hue to a typically dull outfit or area of your home. Or buy a gorgeous, beautiful bouquet of pink flowers!

Lingering Question

If you were a color, what color would you be?

Dear Readers, Happy Valentine’s Day!! I hope you enjoyed this Valentine’s edition—last week’s was also Valentine’s-related, I guess, but I just couldn’t resist! As always, if you enjoyed, like this post, share with a friend, and it always makes me happy to hear your opinions in the comments!

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A Love Letter to the Love Letter

I love to write love letters, and I love to read love letters. One should have passionate love affairs for the sole purpose of writing love letters. Indeed, what is the point of having a lover, if not as a recipient for the bottled-up billets-doux, the millions of unsent missives that perch on the branches of one’s heart, their wings aching to take off into that rarefied atmosphere where everything is bathed in an aroma of roses and the clouds are always tinged with a blush of pink? One has all of this pent-up emotion, one has all of this passion, one has all this desperate fire inside of oneself, one wants to write, sing, shout, dance upon an empty stage, but like the speaker of Shelley’s “Question,” who plucks imaginary flowers from an imaginary garden in an imaginary Spring that he might present it—“Oh! to whom?”

The love letter is a Janus-faced thing: on the one hand, it signifies authenticity, earnestness, purity, veracity, the soul laid bare, pouring itself in an outflow of passion and emotion, hardly able to contain itself. The handwritten letter especially documents the speed of hand and thought (“This living hand, now warm and capable”), the paroxysms of the heart as it is caught up in now this stream of feeling, now that one, for handwriting is as peculiar to a person as his or her face, as intimate as a kiss. Within the secret folds of the letter, one can say things to the beloved one would blush and stammer to say face-to-face; one can truly be oneself behind this unassuming mask of paper. And yet on the other hand it is a mask: a creation, a fabrication, a fiction. A love letter can be artificial, formulaic, trite—it can borrow from the standard lover’s stock of words and phrases, simply a reformulation of so many secondhand sentiments, gleaned unconsciously from books and movies and plays and poems. Coming from the mind, a product of the intellect, it can flatter its way into affections, strategize its way past the defenses of the heart, battering down, word by word, the ramparts and barricades, a finely-tuned weapon of amorous battle.

In the Ars Amatoria, Ovid instructs women in the art of writing letters on wax tablets. He tells them to avoid waxing poetic, however: “Make him fear and hope together, every time you write, / let hope seem more certain and fear grow less. / Write elegantly, girls, but in neutral ordinary words, / an everyday sort of style pleases.” So, too, does Richard Steele warn men from following the example of “Colonel Constant”; instead, they should model themselves after “John Careless.” While both men write from the front lines of war, Constant makes promises of his “Place” in the lady’s “Esteem,” implores her to keep him in her memory, tells her of his “Tears.” Careless, on the other hand, makes light of the dangers of battle and light of his passion for the lady. “The pleasant Man she will desire for her own Sake; but the languishing Lover has nothing to hope from but her pity” is the sage conclusion Steele draws. Nevertheless, my own heart goes out to the languishing Lover. Silly he may be, ridiculous he may be, but that he bleeds onto the page is only a sign of a heart that is able to be pierced—that is to say, a heart that feels.

Mood Board of the Week

(left to right, top to bottom)

1. Jan Vermeer, The Love Letter (1669-70): This painting depicts a woman holding a cittern in one hand (a stringed instrument similar to a 12-string guitar), a letter in the other, as she looks towards her maid who stands behind her. The theme of maid and mistress was common in Dutch genre painting of the time, and here the shared glance between the two, the maid wearing an almost wry smile, the mistress looking up to her as if for guidance, upends the traditional social hierarchy, showing a close emotional connection. The way that the two figures are placed at a distance from the viewer, tucked into a dark interior, with a wall and a curtain in the foreground, creates a sense of intimacy—we feel that we are peering into an intensely private scene. The broom and the fact that the lady has her slippers off contain sexual undertones, while music-making traditionally symbolized love.

   

2. Alfred Joseph Frueh, Letter to Giuliette Fanciulli, 1913: American caricaturist and cartoonist Alfred Joseph Frueh met his wife Giuliette Fanciulli while traveling abroad between 1910 and 1914. In 1913, when she was still just his fiancée, he wrote her this love letter that expands out to form a miniature art gallery in order to prepare her for the “GALLERY MARATHON” that she would experience in Paris. At the front entrance of this little paper gallery is a sign that reads, “—NOTICE—LEAVE YOUR HATS AND UM-BRELLAS AT HOME—I AIN’T GOT TIME TO CHECK THEM.”

   

3. Masayuki Takahashi, Love Letter (1989): Fujino is a small town that serves as a popular day trip from Tokyo, and in 1989, Masayuki Takahashi created a giant love letter, 17 meters high and 26 meters wide, sealed with a perfect red heart, and planted it into the lush mountains, where it looks like it’s being held by two green hands. Over time, the piece started to decay and disintegrate, but Takahashi noted that the Fujino community, which is home to several art galleries and studios, has grown to care more about the environment and the area: “When my artwork needs maintenance, people notice and volunteer their time to help me repair.”1

4. Artist unidentified, Love Token for Sarah Newlin, Pennsylvania, 1799: I love this adorable letter, which is currently in the collection of the American Folk Art Museum. Valentines made their appearance in America when Pennsylvania Germans in the mid-18th century brought over the tradition of sending love tokens to lovers and friends. Handmade Valentines of the time often featured decorative borders, lacelike cutwork, and drawings of hearts, flowers, lovebirds, lover’s knots, and labyrinths, symbols of the letters’ own intricacy. Puzzle purses—letters that were ornately decorated and then folded, almost origami-like, so that unfolding the different parts would reveal new pieces of the message one by one—became popular (and I am secretly hoping they will once again become popular). The envelope for this letter reads, very sweetly, “My Dear this heart / That you behold, / Will break when you / These leaves unfold, / So my poor heart / With love’s sick pain, / Sore wounded is / And breaks in twain.”

5. Jean-Honoré Fragonard, “Love Letters” from The Progress of Love (1770-2): French Rococo painter Jean-Honoré Fragonard was commissioned to paint The Progress of Love by Madame du Barry, mistress of Louis XV, for the pavilion of her château in Louveciennes. Its four canvases tell a love story from “The Pursuit” to “The Meeting” to “The Lover Crowned” to this painting, “Love Letters.” Unusually for paintings depicting a love letter, in which the letter often signifies the absence of the lover, the two lovers are together here, and very happily so. The scene, set in a sunny, lush landscape, surrounded by a profusion of flowers, a cocker spaniel at their feet, a cupid exulting beneath a statue of a goddess, creates an air of tranquility, contentment, and domesticity. But in spite of the beauty of the paintings, Fragonard’s Rococo style was being pushed out of favor by the new Neoclassicism, and du Barry rejected the series. Fragonard took them to his godfather’s villa in Grasse; they were later purchased by J. Pierpont Morgan, then upon his death by Henry Clay Frick, and they remain in the Frick Collection today.

6. Love letter pastries posted by voguely on Tumblr: The love letter emoji is probably my favorite emoji, and these pastries bring them to scrumptious-looking life. I found some recipes for making similar love letter pastries here, here, and here.

7. “Love letters only” mailbox on Whidbey Island, Washington: Where else do love letters go but their very own special pale pink mailbox that reads “love letters only”?

8. Letter from Frida Kahlo to Diego Rivera: Mexican painters Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera married in 1929, despite their age difference (Rivera was 21 years older than Kahlo) and size difference (Kahlo’s mother remarked that it was a “marriage between an elephant and a dove”). The marriage was a tumultuous one, marked by numerous affairs on both sides, and yet the bond, passion, and artistic affinity between the two painters could not be denied. I love how Frida writes in various colors of ink and sometimes includes little drawings in her letters, and I love the colorfulness of her writing itself, so full of vivid, poetic, bursting imagery: “…storm in the blood that comes in through the mouth—convulsion, omen, laughter, and sheer teeth needles of pearl, for some gift on a seventh of July, I ask for it, I get it, I sing, sang, I’ll sing from now on our magic—love.”

   

9. Jean-Honoré Fragonard, The Love Letter (early 1770s): Unlike Fragonard’s “Love Letters” above, this painting only depicts one of a couple, a woman, who instead of looking at the note sent with her bouquet of flowers or the papers on the desk looks directly at the viewer, coyly, as does the adorable little dog that sits behind her. The rich golden tones reflect off the folds of her silk dress, and the blush-pink of her cheeks, the ribbon of her cap, and her flowers adds a romantic sweetness.

   

Three Things I’m in Love With This Week Favorite Love Letters

1. The Letters of Abelard and Heloise: The love story between Peter Abelard and Heloise d’Argenteuil is one of my favorites in history, not least because of its tragic nature and because I always have a soft spot for forbidden love. One of the foremost philosophers in 12th-century France, Abelard came to Paris in 1100, where he studied at the cathedral school of Notre Dame. After quarreling with his teacher and proving himself able to defeat him in philosophical arguments, Abelard set up his own school, then eventually went onto become master of the cathedral school of Notre Dame in 1115. There, Heloise’s uncle and guardian Fulbert was a canon, and the young Heloise (traditionally held to be between fifteen and seventeen years old at the time) was already widely known for her scholarship and learning: she had become highly literate in Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, thanks to her tutelage under nuns in the convent of Argenteuil, and wrote her own poems and plays. Fulbert made a deal with Abelard: in exchange for tutoring Heloise, the celebrity philosopher could stay at their home rent-free. Drawn to each other intellectually, student and teacher began a secret relationship, which could remain secret no longer once Heloise became pregnant. Enraged at discovering the relationship, Fulbert demanded they separate, but Abelard placated him by asking permission to marry Heloise, who agreed only on the condition that the marriage stay a secret, as celibacy was becoming the norm among the higher orders of the church. Heloise gave birth to a boy, whom they named Astrolabe after the astronomical instrument and left with Abelard’s sister. However, Fulbert began speaking openly about the marriage, causing tension with Heloise; Abelard had her moved to the Argenteuil convent to escape this unhappy home, and believing that Abelard had cast her off, Fulbert took revenge, sending men in the dead of night to castrate Abelard. Abelard became a monk, Heloise a nun, and from then on they could communicate only through letters.

   

   In these letters, we see Abelard pained by his fate though resigned to it, trying to keep the conversation focused on theological topics, and Heloise caught between her profane passion for Abelard and her new, sacred duty towards God. In her first letter to him, there is a profusion of addresses, indicating this confusion—“To her lord, or rather father; to her husband, or rather brother; from his handmaid, or rather daughter; from his wife, or rather sister: to Abelard, from Heloise”—but in his reply, Abelard simply addresses her, “To Heloise, his dearly beloved sister in Christ, from Abelard her brother in Him,” as if clinging stringently to their new religious roles after the trauma of castration. Heloise perhaps speaks for all lovers who have put their passion into the art of letter-writing when she implores to Abelard, “While I am denied your presence, give me at least through your words—of which you have enough and to spare—some sweet semblance of yourself.”2

2. Wentworth’s love letter to Anne in Jane Austen’s Persuasion: Persuasion tells the story of Anne Elliot and Captain Frederick Wentworth, who were engaged eight years ago, when Anne was nineteen. Due to family members’ disapproval of Wentworth because of his lack of fortune and status, she broke off the engagement, to her regret—and Wentworth’s, too, it transpires. In those eight years, Wentworth has become wealthy and attained rank, while Anne, 27 now, inches ever closer to eternal spinsterdom. Circumstances bring them together once more, but Anne cannot tell whether Wentworth still has feelings for her, nor can Wentworth Anne, until he overhears her arguing that women are more constant in love than men. Unable to state his feelings for her in a room full of people, he instead pens her this letter, which contains the swoonworthy statement, “You pierce my soul. I am half agony, half hope.”

   

3. John Keats to Fanny Brawne, October 13, 1819: When I think of love letters, I always remember this love letter written by my favorite poet John Keats to his fiancée Fanny Brawne, about a year and a half before his death in February 1821 at the age of 25. I always remember it because of its extended metaphor of Keats’s love for Fanny as his religion and the feverishness with which he describes it: “I have been astonished that Men could die Martyrs for religion—I have shudder’d at it—I shudder no more—I could be martyr’d for my Religion—Love is my religion—I could die for that—I could die for you. My Creed is Love and you are its only tenet.”

   

Words of Wisdom

“I have nothing to tell you, save that it is to you that I tell this nothing.”

— Roland Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse

Roland Barthes’ A Lover’s Discourse is broken up into various “figures” around the theme of romantic love, organized in alphabetical order. One of these figures is lettre, the letter, the love letter, which for so long has been an essential element in the amorous drama. Barthes refers, as he so often does in this book, to Goethe’s epistolatory novel The Sorrows of Young Werther: Werther is tragically, unrequitedly in love with Charlotte, his friend’s wife. Whatever he writes in his letters to her, whatever the various subjects and the surface words, his “musical theme” is the same: “I am thinking of you.” Contrary to the advice given by the Marquise de Merteuil in another epistolatory novel, Pierre Choderlos de Laclos’s Les Liaisons dangereuses, a love letter is not a tool, not a tactic, not an item of strategy in a game plan of seduction; it is a simple outflow of the heart, pure expression, “a relation, not a correspondence,” bringing together lover and beloved through their mutual thinking of each other by means of the letter, one by writing, the other by reading. This “thinking of you” is a way of making the beloved recur, bringing their presence to a sort of dreamlike life. I believe this is why writing a love letter can be so difficult for some—as far as a piece of writing goes, it does not require much imagination, for it does not say anything much more than, “I love you, I think of you.” And yet, what a delight—what a challenge—to vary that theme!

Poetry Corner

A Love Letter (To Li Zi’an)

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published

Eating ice, chewing bark, wishes unfulfilled;
Jin River, Hu Pass—only in my dreams.
Although I’d split the mirror, I fear the magpie’s flight;
although I’d play the qin, I resent the flying geese.
By the well, paulownia leaves sing of autumn rain;
beneath the window, silver lamps are darkened by dawn breeze.
Where in all the world may one ask after a letter?
My lines are cast all day, but the green river remains empty.

—Yu Xuanji (translated by Leonard Ng)

Yu Xuanji was a Chinese poetess who lived roughly from around 840 to 868. She grew up in Chang’an, the Tang capital, and at the age of sixteen was purchased by and became concubine to the censor Li Yi (Li Zi’an), who later abandoned her when she was nineteen due to jealousy from his wife. First wandering the mountains, she later found a home in a Daoist convent, a place where women had the chance to cultivate learning in literature and the arts and engage in a spiritual and intellectual community. However, at the age of 28, according to a rather sensationalistic account, she was decapitated for allegedly strangling a maid or Daoist novice named Luqiao.

As for her poetry, of which almost 50 poems remain, it is marked by a striking variety and vividness and shows an inner intensity of emotion, a keen eye for observing the natural world, and often a playfulness that belies her many hardships. Several of her poems are letters, and this one is poignant in that it reflects on what was probably her most significant relationship, which ended in an abandonment that must have affected her deeply. “Eating ice” (something I used to do when I was iron deficient—a longing for blood) and “chewing bark” were tropes commonly used to describe the behavior of widows, symbols of their great devotion to their husbands and the great extent of their sorrow after bereavement. The third line alludes to the story of a husband and wife who split a mirror when they parted, each keeping half as a sign of fidelity toward the other. However, when the wife had an affair, her half of the mirror turned into a magpie that flew off and informed the husband of the affair—Yu fears her own relationship meeting the same unfaithful end.

The fourth line references a 3rd century poem about the Emperor Shun, whose hands strum the qin (guqin) and whose eyes “send off returning geese.” The fifth and sixth lines, so richly detailed in their imagery, help create a picture of a woman awaiting a reply from her lover, staying up late into the dawn, listening to the melancholy rustle of rain and leaves. That the paulownia leaves “sing” is interesting also because paulownia wood is frequently used in China for the soundboards of string instruments, such as the qin mentioned earlier in the poem. But pine as Yu will, her letter receives no answer—she does not even know where to go to seek for it. As Barthes writes, the unanswered love letter turns the recipient into an “other,” a stranger, someone imaginary, a construction of the writer’s mind, a character who begins to overlap less and less with the actual beloved. Fish in medieval China were thought to bring letters, but however much Yu casts her lines, nothing bites, the river is empty.3

Beauty Tip

Write a heartfelt, handwritten letter to someone you love—try to dig deep into what is unique about your relationship with this person and what they mean to you, and feel free to decorate/aestheticize it and be creative with its form!

Lingering Question

Do you find modern forms of communicating (texting, calling, etc.) less romantic than letter-writing?

Dear readers, I thought it would be nice to do something sort of Valentine’s Day themed since that venerable holiday is coming up. In fact, my very first “real” post here was a Valentine’s-themed essay. If you enjoyed, please like this post, share with a friend, and write me a tiny love letter share your thoughts in the comments!

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Cool Heart

No more hysterics, no more melodrama. No more loudness, no more screaming. No more thunder, no more bursts. No more fits, no more paroxysms. No more emotions veering from extreme to extreme, from peak to peak, from high to low, going up and down, ricocheting, leaping, vaunting, plunging, erupting. Now one longs for a cool hand, a hushed voice, stillness, a little breeze stirring the curtain with its gentle breath. Now evening comes over the garden, and the flowers bend their heads, and the mice scurry back to their holes to be cozy, and the grass murmurs a little over the ground, and the fountain slows to a trickle. There is no need for fortissimos any more, just a simple rustle of melody, a shimmer on the surface, “a spell of rest, and quiet breath, and cool / heart.”

Art depends on cymbal-crashes of emotion, can’t live without them. Otherwise we would be terribly bored, we would find no point in dwelling in that other world, that created world which is not our own, and we would take the artist up for fraud. But life cannot always be lived at such a fever-pitch, and I think our most productive hours are spent—our best work is created—in an air of serenity and peace, in an attitude of reflection, stillness, fertile silence. Let silence not be death but life—let there be silence that means the quiet hum of thought, a hushed awe in the face of sublime art or nature. Let silence be the space between action and reaction, between our lowest and our highest selves, between what is automatic and what is intentional. Silence means carefulness, control, precision—the hand of the artist hovering above the paper, drawing something in the mind first, before the tip of the pencil makes a mark on the page and either mars it or sets it off on a course of greatness.

Writing itself is more an act of listening than of talking. Talking is always surfaces, but listening is the bedrock of conversation. Listening goes deep into the root of things, reaches that darkness where the seed sprouts and the friendly worm trudges, where life exists in its pulsing, throbbing, humming verve, and an uncertain chaos yields to a form that is continually in the process of defining itself. Where do the words come from? My surface self, my talking self is so banal—it has no wit, no ability to piece things together, no lightning flashes, but my writing self coaxes phrases and sentences seemingly out of thin air, out of some dim recess or cellar or attic of my brain, out of some primeval sludge of consciousness that must be shared by us all and, I suspect, links us to God.

I don’t want to skate on surfaces, I want to pierce through, fall, sink ever downwards to the center of the earth, letting the water cover me, rush past my ears as I descend slowly, slowly, the way a stone descends to the riverbed. There is always a deeper knowledge, a more profound truth. Who knows how far down the center goes, how many layers one has to cross to arrive there? Is it possible to make our silences all the more silent, all the more soundless, all the more hushed and reverential, and yet more ripe with meaning, more blooming and more fecund, more alive than—all of this?

Let the world go to hell, I say, but I must always have my peace and quiet.

Mood Board of the Week

Mood Board of the Week

(left to right, top to bottom)

1. Justine Kurland, The Family (2002): I remember coming across Justine Kurland’s photographs of teenage girls on Tumblr when I myself was a teenage girl and identifying with these images of disaffected youth, idle adolescence. At the age of 15, Kurland ran away from home to an aunt in Manhattan, and she writes that she “employed the trope of the teenage runaway as a shortcut to freeing [teenage girls] from the cage of their suburban bedrooms and bringing them into a world of their own making.” In the ’90s and early 2000s, she went on road trips across the US, finding girls who would collaborate with her in order to create these “girl pictures.” Here Kurland captures an idyllic, almost Edenic scene, where the the water is so clear you can see through to the stones of the riverbed, and summer light hazes in the abundant green.

2. American bison by S. Wilson, from Wild, Wild World of Animals: Wild Herds (1977): The American bison, also called the buffalo, is the largest terrestrial animal in North America and once roamed over most of the interior U.S. Today, wild bison are only found in national parks or reserves. Although this picture comes from a book about herds, I like how this bison stands serenely by itself, in a plain of waving grasses, against a big, big sky. I wonder what he or she is thinking about.

3. Tyler Mitchell, Riverside Scene (2021): Tyler Mitchell (1995—) got his big break at the age of 23 when he shot Beyoncé for the cover of Vogue, but I think the real poetry of his images comes out in his Southern Landscape series, for which he went back to his home state of Georgia, reclaiming places where black people were historically enslaved, subjugated, redlined, or excluded as a utopia in which they are instead visualized as “free, expressive, effortless, and sensitive.”1 Riverside Scene echoes Georges Seurat’s A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte (1884-6) in its depiction of people sitting on the banks of a river, enjoying the loveliness of a beautiful day, and it also reminds me a little of Julie Dash’s 1991 Daughters of the Dust.

   

4. Max Nonnenbruch, Evening by the Lake (1901): A German painter part of the Munich School, which was known for its naturalistic depictions of landscapes, portraits, genre scenes, and still lifes, Max Nonnenbruch (1857–1922) often painted beautiful young women in a neoclassical style, surrounding them with complex symbolism. I love the serenity of this one in particular, its calm, cool colors and its air of stillness and hush.

5. Paul Stankard, Cactus flower paperweight (1985): In his books on his creative journey, Paul Stankard (1943—) describes how his dyslexia contributed to his struggles in school and his being labeled a “slow learner.” Nevertheless, he applied himself diligently to learn the art of glass-blowing, first beginning as a scientific glassblower to create lab equipment. After seeing the famous Blaschka glass flowers at Harvard, he was inspired to make paperweights based on flowers and plants.

6. Nils-Udo: Art in Nature (2002): Nils-Udo (1937–) is a German artist who moved away from painting in the 1960s in order to embrace nature itself as a canvas and sticks, petals, branches, and leaves as his “painting” materials. His art heightens our awareness of the beauty and harmony of nature, investigating time, the impermanence of art, and the relationship between humans and our natural environment.

   

7. Photograph of Vietnam by Hà Thành: What I love about this photograph are the different layers of color in the sky, from yellow to pink to blue with clouds, setting these terraced hills against a dreamlike backdrop.

8. Celebrity Homes II, edited by Paige Rense (1981): This veranda comes from The Cedars, the home of actor George Hamilton, in Mississippi. Built on a plantation, the house was expanded when the first owner’s bride-to-be told him, “I cannot marry you unless you give me a house with more style.” Hamilton, with the help of Hollywood set designer friends, worked on restoring the house, attempting to capture the style of period while modernizing where necessary (e.g. adding air conditioning). The restoration was not without its hindrances, as Hamilton describes: “The verandas run the width of the house, and everyone loves to sit outside. In fact, several days ago I was sitting outside thinking that the house was all finished—when a sudden splash of honey came down, and I realized the bees had bored into the rafters again. But that’s part of living in the South.”

9. Claude Monet, Morning on the Seine, near Giverny (1897): I love how Monet will painting the same subject over and over again, on different days and during different times of day, in order to capture subtle variations of light and color and mood. Monet had moved to the village of Giverny in 1883 and lived there for over 40 years, until his death. In the summers of 1896 and 1897, he would wake up early, around 3:30, and wait for the sunrise. Often starting on a bateau-atelier, or boat-studio, he would finish the paintings on land, capturing the place where the Epte met the Seine in a series of about 20 paintings.

3 Things I’m in Love With This Week

1. Daniel Deronda by George Eliot: Everyone is reading Middlemarch apparently, but I’m about halfway through this other absolute doorstop of a novel by George Eliot, and it is wonderful. Eliot is so sharp and so good at creating and capturing characters. Gwendolen Harleth, a self-involved, attractive, spoiled woman in her early 20s, whom we first meet at a roulette table in a serpentine dress, is one of these characters, and probably the most compelling—not just in the world of Daniel Deronda but of the library of literary heroines that live in my brain.

   

2. Eva Oertli and Beat Huber, The Hand (2004): This sculpture of a hand in Glaurus, Switzerland, sometimes called The Caring Hand, surrounds a tree, creating the impression that the tree is growing out of the hand, that the hand is creating the tree. “With our sculpture we do not want to set a monument to the gardening profession, but rather point out that we, as a great human race, are responsible for our living space,” the sculptors said.

   

3. Lace Fences: Anne Eunson is a lace knitter who decided to knit her own fence, using twine, as well as modified curtain rods as knitting needles. Living in Shetland, Scotland, she drew on that place’s rich tradition of knitwear and knitting, and she actually sells the pattern for her fence here, just in case you ever wanted to knit your own! A group of Dutch designers called De Makers Van has also created lace fences, uniting the hostile, tough, industrial chain-link fence with the artistic, delicate, handcrafted tradition of knitting to lend urban spaces a unique beauty.

Words of Wisdom

I hear stories about directors who scream at actors, or they trick them somehow to get a performance. And there are some people who try to run the whole business on fear. But I think this is such a joke—it’s pathetic and stupid at the same time.

When people are in fear, they don’t want to go to work. So many people today have that feeling. Then the fear starts turning into hate, and they begin to hate going to work. Then the hate can turn into anger and people can become angry at their boss and their work.

If I ran my set with fear, I would get 1 percent, not 100 percent, of what I get. And there would be no fun in going down the road together. And it should be fun. In work and in life, we’re all supposed to get along. We’re supposed to have so much fun, like puppy dogs with our tails wagging. it’s supposed to be great living; it’s supposed to be fantastic.

— David Lynch, Catching the Big Fish

David Lynch died on January 15th, and up till that point I had only seen Blue Velvet (1986) and bits and pieces of Twin Peaks. In the past week, however, I watched Mulholland Drive (2001), which at first I was confused by and then—after watching a 20-minute video about it on YouTube—loved and was moved by (many such cases). In Catching the Big Fish, Lynch writes about creativity, the artistic process, making movies, and his experiences with meditation. Here he talks about the importance of creating an environment of calmness, joy, love, and fun, and how that allows people to work better and to live better—because it is “supposed to be great living.”

Poetry Corner

The Work of Happiness

—May Sarton

I always mix up May Sarton (1912–95) with May Swenson (1913–1989), and though on the whole I prefer Swenson, I love this poem by Sarton, which describes happiness as the work of “the peace of hours,” a product of “inwardness,” where life slows down and even “the walls are kind.” As I grow older, I find myself less and less associating happiness with a riotous firework display of joy and more and more with quiet contentment, stillness, gentle tenderness.

Beauty Tip

Add something to your living space that brings you a sense of peace and serenity whenever you look at it.

Lingering Question

Do you find that you’re more productive when you have peace and quiet, or are you the sort of person who likes to always have a little something in the background?

Dear Readers, how have your Januaries been? I hope you enjoyed this post—please like it and share with a friend if you did, subscribe to Soul-Making for more, and let me know your thoughts in the comments, as I always look forward to hearing from you. Have a wonderful weekend!

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Useful Application of Literature

My favorite performance of Hamlet’s “What a piece of work is a man!” soliloquy comes not from any stage adaptation, not from any film version, not from Laurence Olivier in 1948 or Kenneth Branagh in 1996 or Ethan Hawke in 2000, but from a movie in which two down-on-their-luck, alcoholic, shivering actors in the late 1960s drift off to the country, where they argue with one another, avoid a gay uncle, demand booze in no uncertain terms, and menace a local café (not in that order), before speeding inebriatedly off to London, getting pulled over and arrested, returning to their flat to pass a joint among friends, and receiving a notice, after failing to pay rent, of eviction. Then Withnail and I part ways, “I,” the younger, slightly more successful of the two heading off towards a future less bleak, we presume, than the inclement weather, Withnail stuck in the dour downpour, the full force of his acting talent and skill and dreams and aspirations thrown literally to the wolves, as he recites Hamlet’s soliloquy to that lupine audience shut up behind the bars of a zoo, to the weather, to himself.

Somehow this performance in Withnail and I (1987), divorced from all context of the play, seems to more wholly inhabit Hamlet’s spirit than any performance of the play itself. This man, desolate, wasted by drink, having squandered his talents and lost his youth, drenched in the rain, talking to himself but almost with the desperate hope of being heard, out-Hamlets Hamlet. It is his own spirit that proclaims that “this majestical roof, fretted with golden fire: why, it appeareth no other thing to me, than a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours,” that “Man delights not me; no, nor Woman neither.” He plays no role, he simply is the Prince of Denmark, and we see that this is the point, after all, of that singular character who is too large to be contained by his own play, whose wit eclipses everyone else’s—that his words become your words, that his words become the language of your soul and of your inmost being, that they give form and order to that rude and shapeless chaos of emotion more accurately than anything you could have thought of yourself, allowing you the relief, then, of language: yourself reflected back to yourself, whole, distinct, able to be taken between thumb and forefinger.

As of a submerged body in a pond whose breath bubbles up to the surface every now and again, the words of the poet should rise up to the surface of the mind, unbidden, yet arriving just when needed, grasping the feeling and the situation like a pinch. They should have this metempsychotic ability, able to float from one soul to the next, from one situation to another, reincarnating in many bodies. Perhaps this is the true test of the great writer: do the words come to you almost like your own thought, like inspiration or genius or memory, what you would wish to think or say were your thinking or speech raised to the highest possible level? I think of Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, in which Shakespeare’s words, “Fear no more the heat o’ the sun / Nor the furious winter’s rages” ring continually through Clarissa Dalloway’s mind and day like an incantation, carrying, yes, its original funeral context and the taint of death, but gathering also into itself “Hatchards’ shop window,” “white dawn in the country,” “the shock of Lady Bruton asking Richard to lunch without her.”

It is time now to admit that I often suspect myself of being a bad reader. Oh, I read vastly and deeply, I highlight and I take notes, I look things up I don’t know or words I don’t recognize, I write down quotations that stand out to me, I reflect and ponder and turn about characters and symbols in my hand like a pebble. But for all that my memory is a sieve; plots, except for their most basic outlines, disappear, characters’ names grow fuzzy. I think I have forgotten, that in the vast void of memory all of it has been swept away and scattered to the wind. Oh well, I muse a little sadly to myself, the momentary pleasure in the instance of reading must have been enough, it is too greedy to ask for anything more. After all, reading is a pleasure, a luxury, a gift.

Then, suddenly, at a party or on a street corner or in the throes of some desperate feeling, like a melody heard years ago—walking down a dark lane somewhere, in Rome or Reykjavik—a phrase comes, faintly at first, then more distinctly. It unravels itself like a thread. There is a flash, a revelation, a ring of the bell. You remember—you remember yourself. For you, too, are Hamlet, having of late, but wherefore you know not, lost all your mirth; you are Jane Eyre, with your morsel of bread snatched from your lips, and your drop of living water dashed from your cup; you are Clarissa Dalloway, stiffening on the kerb, waiting for Durtnall’s van to pass, and you are going to buy the flowers yourself.

Mood Board of the Week

(left to right, top to bottom)

1. Anne-Sophie Tschiegg, Germinations: Tschiegg is a French artist working in Strasbourg whose work uses vivid colors and textures to render portraits, landscapes, and organic forms like flowers. Here I love the mutedness of the background, which allows these green seedlings to stand forth, a fitting symbol for the New Year.

2. Sol LeWitt, Double Negative Pyramid (1997): This highly geometrical structure is located in a sculpture park in Lithuania, where its location at the edge of water allows its beautifully symmetrical form to be reflected, and where the water’s own reflections can dance upon the concrete. LeWitt (1928–2007), an American artist, used to create written plans for his art, which he would then hand off to assistants to actually execute. “The system is the work of art; the visual work of art is the proof of the system,” he once said in an interview.

   

3. Lorenzo Quinn, Support (2017): When I visited Venice in the summer of 2017, floating by in a water bus on the Grand Canal, I had no idea that these hands had been installed only recently for the Venice Biennale—they looked so much a part of the cityscape already, as though they had always been holding up the Ca’ Sagredo. According to Quinn, they represent the threat of rising water levels to The Floating City, serving as a physical marker of climate change, as well as a symbol of how human hands have the power to both hurt and help, destroy and repair, sink and support.

4. Abdur Rahman Chughtai (1894–1975), Hiraman Tota: Pakistani painter Abdur Rahman Chughtai synthesized the Mughal miniature with Art Nouveau from the West, taking inspiration from Islamic calligraphy and art traditions to render subjects from Hindu mythology and Persian folklore. This painting, probably his most famous, depicts the 13th-14th century Rajput queen Padmavati, who was known for her talking parrot Hiraman, seen here on her shoulder, camouflaging into her garment, which itself seems to blend with the lush green leaves in the background. Her legend has been told and retold in various accounts over the centuries—typically, the parrot’s role is to spread the rumor of Padmavati’s beauty to the Rajput ruler Ratan Sen, who is thus inspired to overcome great obstacles in order to win her hand in marriage.

   

5. 1971 advertisement for Toni’s Innocent Color, published in Cosmopolitan: Advertising doesn’t have to cheapen art—art can elevate advertising, as this modern Venus illustrates. I love the tagline: “Not since 1485 has there been color so rich, so radiant.” The copy lets you know that Toni’s special formula works with light to create “Brilliant color that lets you give Botticelli’s Venus some real competition.” What girl would say no to that?

6. Syndromes and a Century (2006): Directed by Thai filmmaker Apichatpong Weerasethakul, this movie, divided into two halves, 40 years apart, concerns the lives of two young doctors, the first a female doctor working in a rural hospital, the second a male doctor working in an urban hospital. Weerasethakul was inspired by his parents, both physicians, but expanded the film’s scope to let in the stories of other characters. I love it for its exploration of memory and its deep and moving serenity.

   

7. Leg Garden at Ramoji Film City in Hyderabad, India: Ramoji Film City is a movie-themed amusement park, and I was certainly amused by these legs, as though the rest of the sculpture is stuck under the grass, enjoying the dirt. Actually, it is only a few feet away, much smaller in scale, reclining on its arms, gazing at its mammoth lower limbs in serene contemplation.

   

8. Centre for Useless Splendour: I saw this sign on Tumblr, looked it up, and it turns out the Centre for Useless Splendour is a real place, an “unofficial research hub operating within the Contemporary Art Research Centre (CARC) at Kingston University” in London. Apparently it was conceived of by Professor Elizabeth Price in order to grapple with the role of artists as researchers in a university context. Its four rooms explore the various ways in which art encounters the world: according to Dean Kenning, “the social (Foyer), the technological (Machine Room), the epistemological (Hall of Records), and the material (Lumber Room).”1 I think “Centre for Useless Splendour” is an accurate way of describing my brain, to be honest.

9. Paul Nash, London: Winter Scene, No. 2 (1940): British artist and surrealist painter Paul Nash (1889–1946) was known for his landscapes and his modernist depictions of WWI and WWII. The snowy bareness of this winter scene, with its composition of the gates in the foreground and the dark, winding tracks of cars leading mysteriously to a copse of trees in the distance, makes me hope for more snowy wintery days and seems a fitting addition to my winter post.

Three Things I’m in Love With This Week

3 Interesting Chairs!

1. Golden Gaudi Chair by Vico Magistretti from Okay Art: I love anything illuminated, manuscript-like, with gold leaf, and this chair is no different. The Gaudi Chair was designed by Italian architect and designer Vico Magistretti (1920–2006) in the 1970s, using a pressure mold of polyester resin reinforced with fiberglass in order to construct the chair as a single piece. The gold leaf brings out its gentle curves and the simplicity of its design. “Like contemporary sculpture. Enduring. Functional,” reads an ad from Bloomingdale’s, and I can’t help but agree.

   

2. Baradelo Chair by Setsuo Kitaoka, 1988: Setsuo Kitaoka (1946–) is a Japanese interior designer who established Kitaoka Design Office in 1977. He has designed stores for fashion designer Yohji Yamamoto and for Kenzo. This chair caught my eye not just because of the pink color but because of the way the seat waterfalls down to the floor, as well as how its triangular shape contrasts with the semicircle of the back/arms of the chair, yet fitting together in a way that feels harmonious and streamlined. Not very comfortable-looking, to be sure—perhaps some chairs are made to be looked at rather than sat in.

   

3. Wood Chair by Marc Newson, made by Cappellini in Milan, 1988: Marc Newson (1963–) is an Australian designer whose clients have included Hermès, Nike, and Apple, where he’s a Designer for Special Projects. This chair was commissioned for the exhibition “The House of Fiction: Domestic Blueprints in Wood” by the Crafts Council of New South Wales and is made of Canadian rock maple and Australian coachwood. As Newson had little experience working with wood up to that point, he borrowed techniques from boatbuilding, using steam in order to bend slatted strips of wood into a shape resembling the Greek letter α. I found Newson’s design philosophy interesting for the way he doesn’t make any pretensions toward artistic immortality, any grandiose statements. When asked what designers should strive for, in comparison to architects and fine artists, he replied, “The point of design for me is to provide choice, to solve problems, and to raise the bar of what is available to consumers. The best thing about design is that you can take it or leave it.”

Words of Wisdom

I feel there is nothing more truly artistic than to love people.

—Vincent Van Gogh

Someone recently intimated to me that, were all the art of the world to disappear, everything would be fine because we’d just revert to our conversation with other people. I’ve often had this suspicion myself, but I don’t know that it’s true. On the other hand, there is something about making art and feeling for one’s fellow creatures that goes hand in hand, even if the art in question doesn’t explicitly feature or have to do with people. Maybe it’s a certain warmth and empathy. After all, the best art touches the soul, and one can’t do that without a love for people.

Poetry Corner

To the Film Industry in Crisis

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Not you, lean quarterlies and swarthy periodicals
with your studious incursions toward the pomposity of ants,
nor you, experimental theatre in which Emotive Fruition
is wedding Poetic Insight perpetually, nor you,
promenading Grand Opera, obvious as an ear (though you
are close to my heart), but you, Motion Picture Industry,
it’s you I love!

In times of crisis, we must all decide again and again whom we love.
And give credit where it’s due: not to my starched nurse, who taught me
how to be bad and not bad rather than good (and has lately availed
herself of this information), not to the Catholic Church
which is at best an oversolemn introduction to cosmic entertainment,
not to the American Legion, which hates everybody, but to you,
glorious Silver Screen, tragic Technicolor, amorous Cinemascope,
stretching Vistavision and startling Stereophonic Sound, with all
your heavenly dimensions and reverberations and iconoclasms! To
Richard Barthelmess as the “tol’able” boy barefoot and in pants,
Jeanette MacDonald of the flaming hair and lips and long, long neck,
Sue Carroll as she sits for eternity on the damaged fender of a car
and smiles, Ginger Rogers with her pageboy bob like a sausage
on her shuffling shoulders, peach-melba-voiced Fred Astaire of the feet,
Eric von Stroheim, the seducer of mountain-climbers’ gasping spouses,
the Tarzans, each and every one of you (I cannot bring myself to prefer
Johnny Weissmuller to Lex Barker, I cannot!), Mae West in a furry sled,
her bordello radiance and bland remarks, Rudolph Valentino of the moon,
its crushing passions, and moonlike, too, the gentle Norma Shearer,
Miriam Hopkins dropping her champagne glass off Joel McCrea’s yacht,
and crying into the dappled sea, Clark Gable rescuing Gene Tierney
from Russia and Allan Jones rescuing Kitty Carlisle from Harpo Marx,
Cornel Wilde coughing blood on the piano keys while Merle Oberon berates,
Marilyn Monroe in her little spike heels reeling through Niagara Falls,
Joseph Cotten puzzling and Orson Welles puzzled and Dolores del Rio
eating orchids for lunch and breaking mirrors, Gloria Swanson reclining,
and Jean Harlow reclining and wiggling, and Alice Faye reclining
and wiggling and singing, Myrna Loy being calm and wise, William Powell
in his stunning urbanity, Elizabeth Taylor blossoming, yes, to you
and to all you others, the great, the near-great, the featured, the extras
who pass quickly and return in dreams saying your one or two lines, 
my love!
Long may you illumine space with your marvellous appearances, delays
and enunciations, and may the money of the world glitteringly cover you
as you rest after a long day under the kleig lights with your faces
in packs for our edifications, the way the clouds come often at night
but the heavens operate on the star system. It is a divine precedent
you perpetuate! Roll on, reels of celluloid, as the great earth rolls on!

—Frank O’Hara

I used to live in LA for a couple of years as a very small child, and though all I remembered from back then was the offensive and unscrupulous sun, I revised my opinion of that sprawling city a few years ago when I went to visit an old friend and experienced the beauty of its nature and neighborhoods and the Getty Museum, which I loved, thankfully spared by the horrific wildfires which have caused so much destruction. Coincidentally, somehow or another, little by little, my YouTube algorithm this week has filled up with clips of Old Hollywood stars, who have something about them that actors and actresses these days, quite frankly, can’t match up to. The wildfires made me think of American culture—lots of people say America doesn’t have culture, but I say we do, and Hollywood is so distinctively, so uniquely and wholly a part of it, so American in a way the more European East Coast (at least here in Boston) doesn’t seem to be, even if we are considered more “Cultured.” So I will leave you with this headlong, joyful, exuberant tribute of Frank O’Hara’s and hope that the smoke will clear up and leave the heavens over California to operate its star system in peace soon enough.

Beauty Tip

Try a fruit or vegetable you’ve never tried before!

Lingering Question

What kind of chair would you be if had to be a chair? I think I would be an old, perhaps overstuffed, floral-patterned rocking chair.

Dear Readers, I hope you enjoyed this one! As always, let me know your thoughts in the comments, give this post a like if you enjoyed, and subscribe to Soul-Making for more reflections on chairs and Hamlet.

—

Tell Me, Muse, About a ___ Man

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As you set out for Ithaka
hope your road is a long one,
full of adventure, full of discovery.

—C. P. Cavafy, “Ithaka”

I like how the whole of an Ancient Greek epic can be encapsulated by a single Ancient Greek word. For the Iliad it is μῆνῐς (menis), “rage, wrath”; for the Odyssey it is πολύτροπος (polytropos). Polytropos is a word that is wily by nature, as wily as the man it describes, forever slipping out of our attempts to grasp it, like a fish. Literally meaning “of many turns,” from poly (“many”) and tropos (“turn, way”), it describes Homer’s epic itself, our hero’s journey back home to Ithaca after the Trojan War, as the god Poseidon harries him and his companions across the seas and to seagirt islands, into the beautiful arms of sea nymphs who promise men immortality and witches who turn men into pigs, beneath the seductive sway of Lotus-Eaters and Sirens, into encounters with winds and wind-gods, Lestrygonians and Scylla and Charybdis, into gobbling up the flock of a Cyclops and the oxen of the Sun, until, windswept and weathered by wandering, Odysseus reaches his own dear doorstep, slays the suitors eating him out of house and home, and reunites with his son, his father, his old nursemaid, his wife, and his dog, who dies instantly after an ecstatic recognition of his master.

Most stories are about “there and back again,” as in Tolkien’s The Hobbit, or There and Back Again. You start at home, safe and cozy and snug, when something impels you to leave—work, or friends, or an empty fridge, or the glimmer of true love, or an old oath you made that now binds you to fight in a decade-long war, or boredom, or wanderlust, pure and simple. Once away from home, you have your little adventure, and then you begin to hunger for home again—it was so cozy, after all, and where else can you get a warm meal and a hot bath in exactly the way you like, and all your favorite things are there, and there’s something so familiar about it, so particularly yours, and perhaps—best of all—someone waits there for you, contemplates your return, is thinking of you even now, weaving and unweaving dreams of greeting you with eager eyes and warm, open arms.

Wandering without this Ithacan promise of home would be no fun at all. You would feel cast out upon the world, alone, cold, frightened, forever in exile. Then adventure would become adversity, travel a travail. But being at home forever with nowhere and no means to wander, the customary fate of women until rather recently, is also no good. I think of Penelope, sitting there at her loom hour after hour, day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year. Wasn’t she bored? Didn’t she long for adventure of her own or to see the wide world, to know many people and many places, to “stop at Phoenician trading stations” and “to buy fine things, mother of pearl and coral, amber and ebony, sensual perfume of every kind”?1

Then again, she had her tapestry, a kind of screen on which she could project any image her crafty imagination could thread together. Calypso with her powers of concealment, Circe with her spells, the Sirens with their song are all artists, as much as the male bards who strum their epics at banquets, but I think the poet finds a kindred spirit most of all in Penelope. As she weaves her mind wanders. It goes out to her husband, and then out further, to distant shores and ports, to cities and to gods, to a horizon where sea and sky blur into one, where a ship reaches the utmost boundary of the world and disappears and the sun glitters on the water, beckoning.

Mood Board of the Week

(left to right, top to bottom)

1. Ulysses’ Gaze (1995): Greek filmmaker Theo Angelopoulos takes his unlikely Odysseus, A (Harvey Keitel), a Greek filmmaker not unlike Angelopoulos himself, on a journey across the Balkans to find reels of film shot by the Manaki brothers, very real Balkan pioneers of cinema—these film reels might contain the first fragments of film ever shot in the Balkans, predating The Weavers (1905), which, depicting the Manakis’ 114-year-old grandmother weaving, represent a kind of Penelope for A. / In an interview, Angelopoulos admits that he didn’t like Homer much at first—required reading for Greek schoolchildren—but later came to see the epics’ outsized influence on Greek culture. In this odyssey, A journeys through various countries using various modes of transportation: a taxi, a train, a barge carrying a giant statue of Lenin, a row boat. His is a journey that mingles artistic and historical aspirations with mythology, memory, and politics. “I will tell you about the journey all the night long. And in all the nights to come. Between one embrace and the next. Between lovers’ calls. A whole human adventure. The story that never ends.”

   

2. John William Waterhouse, Ulysses and the Sirens (1891): In the Odyssey, as Odysseus’ ship sails past the Sirens, whose enchantingly beautiful song lures sailors to their watery death, he has his crew stop their ears with wax, as advised by the witch Circe. Circe tells Odysseus that if he really wants, he himself can listen to the Sirens’ song: all he has to do is have his men bind him to the mast of his ship. In this painting with Waterhouse, we see exactly that, as the Sirens—not the mermaidic creatures we might expect, but winged, bird-like figures— flock around. Waterhouse may have been inspired by this 5th-century BC Greek vase in the British museum, which paints a strikingly similar scene of a mast-bound Odysseus pelted by bird-women.

3. Naked (1993): Mike Leigh’s film is a grungy portrait of a man, Johnny (David Thewliss), a dissatisfied and disillusioned intellectual, wandering the streets of London, who is naked of possessions and naked of identity. Like Odysseus, he tells people, “I am nobody,” and like Odysseus, is content to weave webs of ambiguity around everyone else, as though words are his only garment for sheltering his all-too-naked heart. There’s a funny scene where he goes to a girl’s place and sees a copy of the Odyssey on her bookshelf. He holds it to the camera. “Do you get it now? Do you know this? I bet you do. You’ve most likely done it at school. You just can’t remember. You know, like, uh, Achilles’ heel, the wooden horse, Helen of Troy. You know them?” “Yeah,” replies the girl. “Yeah,” says Johnny, “Well, that’s all it is. Good stuff.” Which is basically me with my Classics degree.

4. Romare Bearden, Circe (1977): I featured the 20th-century American artist and collagist Romare Bearden in my post on the Iliad. About 30 years after his drawings and watercolors of the Iliad, he visited the Odyssey in the 1970s, creating a series of 20 collages that draw on African art and contemporary African-American culture, inviting viewers to inhabit Homer’s epic in a way that is fresh, vivid, dynamic, colorful, and exhilarating.

   

5. Contempt (1963): Contempt (Le Mépris), directed by Jean-Luc Godard, is one of my favorite movies, and one that I’ve written a little bit about here. Godard loves meta-commentary on cinema itself, and here it takes the form of a film-within-a-film directed by legendary director Fritz Lang (starring as himself), who is adapting Homer’s Odyssey for the big screen. Lang must contend with brash American producer Jerry Prokosch, who hires Paul, a young French playwright, to work on the script. Paul is the Odysseus to Brigitte Bardot’s Penelope, Camille, who grows ever more scornful of her husband for reasons that remain obscure to him (though, I suspect, have to do with his “selling out”). Contempt is a film about translation and its failures: failure to translate ancient epic into modern cinema, failure to translate artistic visions between a French man, an American man, and a German man, in spite of the assistance of an Italian woman, and failure to translate feelings into words, love into something lasting and true and real. Nevertheless, it may be enough that, once in a while, something passes the barrier, something communicates, something, however violently, is understood, which is what we call “art.”

6. Frederic Leighton, Nausicaa (1878): Odysseus encounters Nausicaa, a young princess, when he is shipwrecked on the island of Scheria. She and her handmaidens have gone to wash clothes and begin playing their innocent, girlish games, when Odysseus emerges naked from the underbrush, scaring the handmaidens. Nausicaa, however, takes a liking to the hero, giving him clothes and olive oil. Odysseus bathes in a stream, anoints and dresses himself, and with a little help from Athena is made to look just a smidge handsomer, such that Nausicaa tells her friends, “Would that such a man as he might be called my husband.”2 I love the simple and sweet way Leighton depicts her here, her garments not ostentatious or princess-y but becoming of her youth, a wistful, faraway look in her eyes that reminds me of Gertie MacDowell, Joyce’s Nausicaa analogue in Ulysses, who spends half a chapter dreaming of romance.

   

7. O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000): Joel and Ethan Coen set their Odyssey in Mississippi in 1937, following three convicts who escape a chain gang to go on a serious of misadventures through cotton fields, freight trains, and KKK rallies. Come for young George Clooney, stay for the folk music you can’t help but tap your foot to.

8. J. M. W. Turner, Ulysses Deriding Polyphemus (1829): Odysseus and his shipmates, tossed and turned on the sea while sailing home from the Trojan War, find themselves on a small island. Hungry and hearing the bleating of goats from a nearby, larger island, Odysseus selects his 12 bravest companions and comes to the cave of Polyphemus. The giant, one-eyed shepherd is absent, and Odysseus and his men, finding vast quantities of cheese, begin to eat. Unfortunately, Polyphemus comes home, discovers them, and makes a supper out of four of Odysseus’ men. He sleeps and in the morning goes off to graze his flocks, leaving Odysseus time to come up with a plan. He sharpens an olive-wood cudgel, gets the Cyclops drunk on wine from his ship, and when Polyphemus asks him for his name, tells him it is “Nobody.” When Polyphemus is fast asleep at last, Odysseus and his men ram the cudgel into his one eye. Polyphemus cries out in pain, asking his fellow Cyclopes for help, but they laugh at him when he tells them he has been attacked by “Nobody.” Odysseus and his men escape, hanging upside down under the belly of sheep, and when Odysseus is safe on his ship again, he taunts the Cyclops, who throws a rock at him. Odysseus, in spite of his men’s reproaches, can’t help but taunt Polyphemus yet again, finally giving him his name: “say that the one who blinded you was Odysseus the city-sacker.”3 Polyphemus groans and says that this had been prophesied to him; he invokes his father, Poseidon, to make sure that Odysseus does not come home, or if he does, it is only after much misery, and only to find mischief reigning in his home.

   Here, Turner’s seascape turns the Cyclops into the “shaggy peak in a mountain-range” he resembles. I love the water spirits at the foot of the ship, as well as the vague forms of horses pulling the chariot of the rising sun.

9. Ai Weiwei, Odyssey (2017): That war creates exiles is something that has not changed between Homer’s time and ours. Chinese artist Ai Weiwei (1957-) took inspiration from his own project, Human Flow (2017), a documentary on the refugee crisis for which he traveled to 40 refugee camps, as well as the style of Ancient Greek pottery, in order to create this epic frieze, where modern tanks lurks among ancient ruins.

   

3 Things I’m in Love With This Week

1. Omeros by Derek Walcott: Derek Walcott (1930-2017) transformed the Odyssey into his own epic poem, relocating it to his own island of St. Lucia. His protagonist Achille’s journey is a kind of katabasis, a journey to the underworld that echoes Odysseus’s own, as it takes him through his ancestors’ and the Caribbean’s past of slavery and colonialism, jumping between the Caribbean, Africa, Europe, and the U.S. “All of the Antilles, every island, is an effort of memory; every mind, every racial biography culminating in amnesia and fog” says Walcott in his Nobel Lecture. “Pieces of sunlight through the fog and sudden rainbows, arcs-en-ciel. That is the effort, the labour of the Antillean imagination, rebuilding its gods from bamboo frames, phrase by phrase.” Walcott’s “labour of the Antillean imagination” is an epic one, and beautiful.

2. The Odyssey: A Modern Sequel by Nikos Kazantzakis: Greek poet Nikos Kazantzakis (1883-1957) picks up where Homer leaves off, chronicling the adventures of Odysseus after he returns home, terrorizes everyone with his changed, warlike nature, and sets sail again. Like Homer’s Odyssey, Kazantzakis’ epic sequel is divided into 24 parts, consisting of 33,333 lines total. Odysseus’ journey is equally a spiritual one, underlaid by a harsh, Nietzschean philosophy that takes our hero some very strange places and links him up with some very strange figures: Helen of Sparta and stand-ins for Buddha, Don Quixote, and Jesus are encountered as he travels from Ithaca to Crete to Egypt to the ends of the earth—to Antarctica itself.

3. The story of Acis, Galatea, and Polyphemus in Book XIII of Ovid’s Metamorphoses: Galatea is a sea nymph who recounts her troubles in love to Scylla, of Scylla and Charybdis fame. The nymph explains that she was in love with a mortal, Acis, but was endlessly pursued by the Cyclops Polyphemus, whom Odysseus famously tricked in Book IX of the Odyssey. Seeing Galatea, Polyphemus finally feels quid sit amor, what love is. He begins to comb his “bristling hair with a rake,” he cuts his “shaggy beard with a reaping hook,” he looks at his ferocious expression in the mirror of a lake and tries to recompose it into something friendlier. His bloodthirst wanes, ships can now pass safely at last. A seer comes to him and tells him that Odysseus will take his single eye from him. The Cyclops laughs off the warning—“O, most foolish of seers, you are wrong, another, a girl, has already taken it.” Then, with a panpipe made of a hundred reeds, he begins to serenade Galatea in flowery language: “Galatea, whiter than the snowy privet petals, / taller than slim alder, more flowery than the meadows, / friskier than a tender kid, more radiant than crystal….”4 He tries to impress her with the size of his flock, he promises her twin bear cubs to play with, he defends his hirsuteness and his one eye, he pledges Neptune as a father-in-law. Polyphemus the lover is hilarious—and hopeless.

   

Words of Wisdom

Think you’re escaping and run into yourself. Longest way round is the shortest way home.

—James Joyce, Ulysses

In Ulysses, Joyce took the journey of Odysseus and brought it into 20th-century Dublin, making his modern Odysseus the wonderful everyman Leopold Bloom, a Jewish adman who wanders about town over the course of a single day, June 16, 1904. His old hero Stephen Dedalus stars as Telemachus, Odysseus’s son in search of a father, while Bloom’s wife, Molly, plays Penelope, a very earthy, sexual Penelope who lacks much of the cunning—and the faithfulness—of Homer’s original.

Joyce was first introduced to the Odyssey as a child through Charles Lamb’s The Adventures of Ulysses, a shortened retelling of the epic intended for children. Atop the Odyssey framework, Joyce layers Shakespeare, Dante, Christianity, Irish politics and history, medieval philosophers like St. Thomas Aquinas, references to contemporary culture, and much, much more. In Frank Budgen’s recollections of his conversations with Joyce about the writing of Ulysses, he asked him one day how the book was going:5

I enquired about Ulysses. Was it progressing?

“I have been working hard on it all day,” said Joyce.

“Does that mean that you have written a great deal?” I said.

“Two sentences,” said Joyce.

Indeed, the polytropic nature of the book has for over a hundred years sent scholars on their own odysseys through Joyce’s text. But approach Ulysses as a novel, not as a code to crack of hieroglyphics to decipher, and you will find that it is not only immensely rewarding but also great fun. Journeying through these seas and islands and streets of words, we find that we “run into [ourselves],” and we are all the better for it.

Poetry Corner

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			Come, my friends,
’Tis not too late to seek a newer world.
Push off, and sitting well in order smite
The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds
To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths
Of all the western stars, until I die.
It may be that the gulfs will wash us down:
It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles,
And see the great Achilles, whom we knew.
Tho’ much is taken, much abides; and tho’
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

—from “Ulysses” by Alfred, Lord Tennyson

In “Ulysses,” Tennyson has Homer’s hero speak to us many years after his homecoming. He is an old man now, “[m]atch’d with an aged wife,” and, contrary to what we might think after reading Homer’s epic, that Odysseus would have been glad, after ten years of war and another ten of wandering, to finally come back to the comforts of home and hearth, wife and son and native land, he hungers for adventure, misses it, feels unsatisfied in his role as “idle king” who “mete[s] and dole[s] / Unequal laws unto a savage race.” Like Dante’s Ulysses in the Inferno, whose “desire… to be experienced of the world”6 cannot be overcome by his affection for his loved ones, Tennyson’s Ulysses is not drawn by the force of home but is impelled by the greater power of new experience, knowledge, “To follow knowledge like a sinking star, / Beyond the utmost bound of human thought.”

This is an Odysseus who has traveled through many lands and met many peoples and now feels stultified by his narrow life at home in Ithaca. Boredom and ennui have set in. Tennyson wrote “Ulysses” after the death of his friend Arthur Henry Hallam, who also inspired his sustained elegy In Memoriam AHH; Hallam and Tennyson met as students at Cambridge and became very close, traveling the continent together, Hallam becoming engaged to Tennyson’s sister. “Ulysses” reflects some of that meaninglessness we find in life in the wake of grief, that feeling of missing something, looking for something. Tennyson’s Ulysses is a man who is searching for something without knowing quite what he’s searching for. He acknowledges that, in his eternal quest, the goalpost is always moving—“all experience is an arch wherethro’ / Gleams that untravell’d world whose margin fades / For ever and forever when I move.” Yet he prefers it this way, for seeking, exploring, wandering, odysseying mean life itself.

Beauty Tip

Set out on a mini-odyssey. Leave your home and take a walk or a car ride without any particular destination in mind, just wandering where your curiosity leads you. Then head back when you start to long for home again.

Lingering Question

What is one of the most unexpected places life’s journey has taken you, and how did that shape you as a person?

Dear Readers, there’s been so much discourse lately about the Odyssey after Christopher Nolan announced that he would adapt Homer’s epic into a film and then people started hating on Emily Wilson’s translation (which I think is great!). I’ve been wanting to write a follow-up to my Iliad post for a while, so it was as good an opportunity as any.

I hope you enjoyed—please like this post if you did, subscribe to Soul-Making to get more posts like this every Friday, plus additional essays, poems, etc., and let me know your thoughts in the comments!

—

Janus, Roman God of Beginnings

Janus, who lends his name to the month of January, is a peculiar god, and a peculiarly Roman god. He has no precedent among the Greeks. His origins are wreathed in shadow. His name derives from a root meaning “to go” or “to pass” and lends itself to the word ianua, “doorway.” The god of beginnings, endings, gates, arches, duality, choices, and transitions, his most recognizable feature is his two heads, both facing in opposite directions, one looking that way, one this way. Looking here and looking there, the faces can take in everything but themselves—and each other.

Ovid invokes two-faced Janus at the beginning of his Fasti, a six-book poem that passes through the festivals and rites of the first six months of the Roman calendar, written about half a decade after Julius Caesar reformed the old calendar of 355 days into the Julian calendar of 365 days. Janus himself appears before the terrified poet and tells him that he was once called Chaos, in an era where the four elements—air, fire, water, and earth—were mushed together into one heap. When everything was given form and order, Janus “took on the appearance and noble limbs of a god,” but his front and back stayed identical to one another—a remnant of his once chaotic state. “Whatever you see: sky, sea, clouds, earth, / All things are begun and ended by my hand,” says Janus. Next to the Horae, the Hours, he sits at Heaven’s Gates, and the king of the gods, Jupiter himself, “comes and goes at [Janus’s] discretion.”

He later gives an additional explanation for his twinsome form. Because every doorway has two sides, “[o]ne facing the crowds, and the other the Lares,” the gods of the household, Janus needs to watch both the comings and the goings. That he is bifrons, two-headed, makes him efficient, “lest [he] lose time twisting [his] neck around.” As Anne Carson says wisely in the title of her essay on sleep, “every exit is an entrance.” The keeper of exits and entrances, Janus takes on another major role: he makes sure that the door is unbarred when he chooses to send forth peace into the world, and he “hold[s] war in check” through the maintenance of “rigid barriers.”

The poet then wants to know “why the new-year begins with cold, / When it would be better started in the spring?” Indeed, spring, with its new growth, new greenery, new flowers, new fresh feeling, buds and blossoms everywhere, seems to be the perfect candidate for the start of a new year. But the god replies that it is in midwinter that we see “the first of the new sun, last of the old,” as the day, having plummeted to its nadir near the end of December, begins to lengthen once more. That satisfied, the poet asks about the traditions associated with the god. Why must Janus first be given wine and incense before one prays to any other god? Because Janus, standing watch at the gods’ threshold, controls access to them. Why do people give each other good wishes on the kalends, the first of every month? Because, Janus replies, “Omens attend upon beginnings.” Why the gifts of dates and dried figs, honey and money, at the beginning of the year? So that the year might have a sweet flavor as it begins, and so that “the course of the year might be sweet as its start”—money, of course, being its own sweet.1

However, Janus, god of duality, begins to contradict himself. The poet asks him about his temple: when Rome is at war, the temple doors stand open, and when Rome is at peace, the temple doors are shut securely. The doors are open during war, Janus explains, so that the army can return to Rome, and they are closed during peacetime so that peace will not escape Rome. This seems to directly contrast with what the god had said before, that he opens the door for peace and closes the door against war. “Two-faced,” in our era, is what we call a liar. But truth, too, can have two faces. A door may be open to show that the army is not at home, that blood is being shed on distant shores, and yet Peace, too, may be abroad, trailing on the heels of War, repairing the damage and healing the wounds. A door may closed in order to keep Peace at home, and yet it may also bar the outbreak of War—Peace reigning, War restrained and in chains.

In this strange transition time between Christmas and New Year, between the year that is passing and the year that is coming, we look in two opposite directions at once, and our disparate views do not cancel each other out: they join up into a whole and complete picture. Thresholds are powerful places. I think of another mythology: the story of the Hindu Lord Narasimha. Through a boon, a demon king, Hiranyakashipu, could not be killed inside or outside, during the day or at night, on the ground or in the sky, by human or animal, or by any weapon. He wreaked his havoc with impunity, persecuting the worship of Vishnu, becoming enraged when his son expressed staunch devotion to Vishnu. So mad was he that he struck a pillar with his mace, demanding that the god appear. Vishnu did indeed appear—in the form of Narasimha (half-man, half-lion), at twilight (not day, not yet night), on the threshold (neither inside nor outside), hoisting Hiranyakashipu into his lap (neither ground nor sky) and tearing him apart with his claws (not, in the strict sense, a weapon).

I would ask you to reflect on what demons or demon kings you are facing and how, in this liminal space between waving goodbye to the old year and welcoming the new, you might find it in yourself to slay them, or at least stay them. Take strength from what you’ve been through, and find power in all you hope or imagine to achieve. The god of doorways presides over your passing, and both his faces are smiling upon you.

Mood Board of the Week for 2025

(left to right, top to bottom)

In the spirit of both looking backwards in order to look forwards, I’ve decided to take inspiration from previous Friday Frivolities to think about the mood or spirit I want to capture in the New Year.

1. Tippi Hedren as Marnie Edgar in Marnie (1964): On Christmas night, I rewatched Alfred Hitchcock’s Marnie (1964) with my mother, and I included it here because it reminded me of my list of 9 Unhinged Women in Film Who Shaped Me. Marnie certainly starts off as unhinged—she’s a serial thief—but becomes far more sympathetic as the story goes on. One thing my mother and I loved about her was how put-together and poised and well-dressed and elegant she was, even while committing crimes, and her careful, precise way of speaking. I love how women of that era were so neat and proper, with their gloves and hats and the way they matched their nails to their lips. However, Marnie is also highly intelligent, a spirited horsewoman, and in scenes with her co-star Sean Connery, she can give back as good as she gets. In 2025, I’d like to channel a bit of Marnie’s put-together-ness, elegance, and mysteriousness.

2. One of my old websites: In this post, I included screenshots of some of the old websites I made as a teenager. As a teenager, I used to spend countless hours creating graphics, coding, designing, and, of course, writing. I basically lived on the Internet—but it wasn’t in a brainrot, social media-addicted way. For me, the Internet was a place of endless creativity, and I was always making things. I never had that much anxiety around creating—it was just play. As I got older, I became more inhibited; I worried that I could never match up to Keats or Woolf or whoever, instead of just diving in and making. Now Substack has recaptured some of that playful feeling for me, and I want to continue creating and experimenting without anxiety or inhibitions—just for its own sake, for the fun and joy of it.

3. Heidi Leitzke, “Arch” from Moonlit series (2015): Heidi Leitzke’s Islands (of the mind) series made an appearance in my meditation about living on the moon. I really enjoyed writing that post for the free reign that I could give to my imagination and for its sense of wonder and whimsy. Maybe 2025 is an arch I can walk through to find more wonder and whimsy—just like Leitzke’s arch here.

   

4. “HOUSE TOUR I A Pennsylvania Farm with Rolling Hills and a Historic Home” by Homeworthy: In July I wrote about my ideal house, the “Onion House.” Thinking about the idea of “home” again, I take inspiration from Ruth McKeaney’s Hillside Farm and one of my favorite house tours, the video by Homeworthy in which McKeaney not only gives a tour of her house but explains her philosophy behind home and family. The home is beautiful, of course, and its interiors are so creatively designed, but what makes it special is that everything is a reflection of the close relationships McKeaney has with the people in her life, from the herb garden planted for her by her husband to the paintings given to her by artist friends to the big barn she uses to gather friends and family and create an atmosphere of warmth and welcome.

5. Marc Quinn, Labrador Sound Thaw (2009): In my very first Friday Frivolity, I featured one of Marc Quinn’s enormous orchid sculptures, which sparked the inspiration for the next issue, where I wrote about the strangeness and beauty of orchids and theorized the “Orchid Woman”: “She exudes exuberance; she has a shimmer on her skin; she reaches for the stars and puts them in her hair.” In this orchid painting by Quinn, I love the almost blindingly bold colors, the shock of pink and yellow and red, which perfectly captures the Orchid Woman’s boldness and vitality. Here’s to embracing our own strange beauty in 2025.

6. Henri Matisse, Tea (1919): The tea post is my most popular post, and I slipped this painting in right at the bottom, almost as an afterthought. Looking at it with more consideration, it exemplifies the sense of peace and quiet I want to find in the New Year—taking the time to sip tea, connect with a friend, and enjoy nature, hopefully in a garden as beautiful as this.

   

7. Diorissimo by René Gruau: Fashion illustrator René Gruau was featured in August, and here I love this drawing he made for the Dior perfume Diorissimo. I love the wide, wide smile this woman has and the way she’s literally blooming. Let’s all open ourselves up to our own flower-like flourishing in the coming year.

8. Charles Petillon, Point de Vue: Back in September, in a post on balloons, I wrote, “I would like to recover a sense of lightness, of buoyancy.” In this photograph by Charles Petillon, who’s done so many photographs of clusters of white balloons in strange places, I love the inclusion of the ladder. The balloons seem to represent the lofty dreams one often indulges in at the start of a new year, the ladder the steps one needs to climb in order to get there. As you can see, the steps are arduous but not unlimited—the climb may be steep, but then, think how beautiful the view!

9. C. Z. Guest and her son Alexander at the Villa Artemis in Palm Beach, ca. 1955, photographed by Slim Aarons: Slim Aarons made an appearance in the first Friday Frivolity, and C. Z. Guest in the one about swans. Aarons photographed socialites and celebrities as they jet-setted and swanned around, while Guest was a fashion icon who defined the simple unfussiness of American style. Born in Boston to WASP-y “Boston Brahmins,” she turned her brother’s nickname “Sissy” to the very cool, very mysterious initials “C. Z.” After boarding school, she briefly dated actor Victor Mature, was presented as a debutante, appeared in the Ziegfield Follies, went to Hollywood, and was painted nude by Diego Rivera. She married a polo player who was distantly related to Winston Churchill, and her wedding took place at Ernest Hemingway’s home, where Hemingway was best man. In her later life, she designed a collection of cashmere sweaters and, after taking an interest in horticulture, came out with a scented bug repellent. Now, none of the above is on my 2025 goals list. But I do want to embrace a spirit of adventure and have fun trying different and new things. And maybe be stylish while I’m at it.

   

3 Things I’m in Love With This Week I Want To Do in 2025

1. Romanticize my life: I used to think that this idea of romanticizing one’s life was something endemic to social media—plate your food prettily, wear a nice outfit, put an elaborate bouquet of flowers on your nightstand so you can create a fake, idealized version of your life for others to consume. But you can romanticize your life without an audience, without pressure, without optimizing for perfection, simply to bring joy and beauty into your everyday life and embrace the joy and beauty that already lie latent, waiting for somebody to notice them. I’m going to be more intentional about adding beauty to my life in small ways: wearing a ribbon in my hair just because, taking a bubble bath on a random Tuesday evening, giving my mother little violin recitals so I can really force myself to learn and memorize a piece thoroughly, bringing my film camera with me when I go to new places because I like being able to go through the physical photos later and the surprise of seeing the developed results.

   

2. Put myself out there: In 2025 I really want to not hold myself back from taking risks, interacting with more people, and doing things I’m afraid of even if it might mean failure or rejection. In particular, I want to try submitting my writing for publication—something I’ve always wanted to do but have only done very sporadically so far—and try to make more connections where I live, since most of my close friends are geographically remote.

3. Remember my father’s advice: Although my father is no longer physically with me, I’d like to bring something of him forward into the New Year. Some of the most valuable things I have of him are the few emails he sent me when I was about 12 or 13 and he was traveling for work. They include some very good, very loving fatherly advice. In one email, he wrote, “You should not be distracted, and you should focus on your goals, which you set yourself. With a little practice of self-discipline, you will be very successful in the future.” In another, he (very well-deservedly) lectured me on my poor sleep schedule: “It is not good to stay awake very late…. Find out a better way to do your work in a shorter time and in a better and smarter way…. Learn to eat well and sleep well…. Make some time to practice music.” I think I’m going to set myself a reminder to read his advice every morning so that I can always start my day with it and have it as my guiding light.

Words of Wisdom

Leap, and the net will appear.

—John Burroughs

I included this quotation in my very first newsletter, and it’s one that I return to now as we arrive on the threshold of a new year “fresh, with no mistakes in it yet,” as Anne Shirley says of tomorrow.2 In general, I am the kind of person who not only looks before I leap but looks instead of leaping. It’s easy to stand on the shore continually dipping a toe into the water, but it often transpires that when one simply plunges in, after the initial shock and the first bone-rattling shivers and the “Why, God why?”, one finds that one’s body adjusts quite nicely, and one is soon able to splash and play and swim and frolic very happily. When you dare to take the plunge, you find that the universe very often conspires with you. All the little helpful elves and sprites come out of the woodwork and begin to work their fairy magic when they see that you are serious about fulfilling your promises to yourself.

Poetry Corner

Sonnet IV

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New yeare forth looking out of Ianus gate,
     Doth seem to promise hope of new delight:
     and bidding th’old Adieu, his passed date
     bids all old thoughts to die in dumpish spright.
And calling forth out of sad Winters night,
     fresh loue, that long hath slept in cheerlesse bower:
     wils him awake, and soone about him dight
     his wanton wings and darts of deadly power.
For lusty spring now in his timely howre,
     is ready to come forth him to receiue:
     and warnes the Earth with diuers colord flowre.
     to decke hir selfe, and her faire mantle weaue.
Then you faire flowre, in whom fresh youth doth raine,
     prepare your selfe new loue to entertaine.

—Edmund Spenser, Amoretti

The English poet Edmund Spenser (1552-1599) is best known for The Faerie Queene, but I always loved his sonnet cycle Amoretti, which draws on his courtship of Elizabeth Boyle. As a sonneteer, he was overshadowed by Shakespeare and Sidney, his contemporaries, but I love the simpler sweetness of Amoretti. Spenser’s rhyme scheme—ABAB BCBC CDCD EE—differs from the more well-known Petrarchan and Shakespearean, creating a more complicated interweaving between lines. In that way, it embodies the idea of Janus: the middle two stanzas look backwards to their predecessors by repeating a rhyme from them, while also looking forwards by introducing a new rhyme.

In this sonnet, the speaker muses on the New Year that looks “out of Ianus gate.” It promises “hope of new delight,” and the speaker hopes that the “old thoughts” of the old year will begone in “dumpish” spirit. The New Year comes out of “sad Winters night” and projects forward into “lusty spring”; with the New Year, a “fresh love” comes out of “cheerlesse” winter, prepares, like Cupid, “his wanton wings and darts of deadly power,” and is ready to be received by the blossoming Earth, who bedecks herself for him, as the speaker imagines his beloved will do for him. These images of winter and spring may echo the May-December nature of Spenser and Boyle’s relationship: Spenser was about two decades older than Boyle. In the final couplet, the speaker exhorts the beloved directly, addressing her as “faire flowre.” Spenser’s exhortation must have worked on Boyle, because she married him, and Amoretti was published soon after their wedding in 1594. Now, we may not all have beloveds to woo in the New Year, but “new love” can take on a broader meaning, and a spirit of “new delight” is something we can all be invigorated by.

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JANUS
’Tis well an old age is out,
And time to begin a new.

—John Dryden, “The Secular Masque”

John Dryden (1631-1700), England’s first official Poet Laureate, was a playwright who defined the Restoration era, a literary critic whose incisiveness, range, and quality of prose made him “the father of English criticism,” and a translator whose translation of The Aeneid into heroic couplets is still unmatched for elegance and readability.

In “The Secular Masque,” he stages a miniature drama in which the god Janus, the titan Chronos, and the personification of satire Momus come together to reflect on the old age and usher in the new. Chronos, the personification of time, drops the “great globe on his back” because he can’t bear for another year “the load of human-kind.” Momus urges Janus and Chronos, “’Tis better to laugh than to cry” at the “crimes” and “bad times” of the world, and they decide to see a show of the changes that have transpired in the past age. First comes Diana, goddess of the hunt, personifying the “prime” of the age, “free from rage, and free from crime.” Next arrives Mars, god of war, causing peace and plenty to flee. Finally, it is Venus’s turn, who seems to repair the damages of Mars but whose “lovers were all untrue.” They decide that it’s a good thing the past age is finished, and as a merry chorus welcome the beginning of a new age.

Beauty Tip

As the New Year begins, add something new to your daily life—decorate your home with a new object, wear a new item of clothing, cook a new recipe, sign up for a class where you learn a new skill, switch up your usual workout or your usual breakfast or the route you take to a usual place.

Lingering Question

If you had to pick one word that you hope will define 2025 for you, what would it be?

I hope you’ve all been having a wonderful holiday season, and I hope that 2025 brings you so much joy and beauty and peace and comfort and all your heart desires. What my heart desires is a like if you enjoyed this post, and I always, always love to hear from you in the comments!

—

Bleak Beauty

Last night I was looking at old photographs of my father as I often do these dark winter nights. Soon after he had passed, I scanned all of my parents’ old film photographs and saved them in my computer. Upon this latest perusal, there were three photos that stood out to me in particular, all of them of my father in the winter. My parents had come to Boston in the late ’80s, and these pictures, taken in the ’80s and ’90s, evoke a certain nostalgia. In all of them, my father has a mustache, a facial accessory he got rid of soon after I was born, and a gray hat I’ve never seen in the flesh. There is the vintage film grain, the old cars, something ghostly about the light that sharpens a web of winter branches. But the most nostalgic thing about these photographs is the amount of snow: enough snow for footprints to be trodden into, effaced, and trodden into again, enough snow that one has to carve a path for oneself in it, snow that one’s foot and ankle would surely sink into, enough snow to make a signpost barely visible and weigh down innumerable branches, forcing them to bend and stoop and groan with their cold burden, snow to blind and blanket the world, to make it a blank thing, so many inches and feet and miles of snow, soft as fine lambswool.

If snow evokes this nostalgia for me, it is because winter, at least here in New England, is not what it once was. It has lost vim and vigor; its force has thawed. We used to have real nor’easters when I was a child, snowfall—in November, certainly by December—was typical, expected, nothing to be questioned, and my father and I would sled regularly every winter, donning our snowpants. Now the snowpants sit useless in the closet, and Christmas is inevitably “green,” i.e. dull gray, and the most one can hope for is a bit of rain that falls insipidly, depressingly, unsure of itself, that it really belongs here in this interval between its two proper haunts, fall and spring.

Is snow to become a period piece? Will it be a mark of bygone eras and times past, as sure as typewriters, bell-bottoms, and transistor radios? Will it be nothing more than a mere curiosity to future generations—“Look, that’s snow, how funny, people used to have to live with that back then”? Will having to shovel one’s driveway and salt the roads become an amusing detail of an ended epoch, as one hears of Ancient Romans washing their clothing in urine?

Winter has so many haters and detractors that, when I make observations on its gradual disappearance to friends, they seem either unbothered or actually happy. Everyone wants to be a summer hot girl, a spring fling queen, or a cozy autumnal witch. But what about the frost fairies, the icicle princesses, the blustery blizzard boys? Even those who claim to love winter often turn out to be fake winter-lovers: what they really love is Christmas and the holiday season, and when the presents have been unwrapped and the red and green goes away and the lights are put back into their boxes again, they sink into January blues and do not, after all, relish the cold.

Maybe I’m biased because I was born in the middle of a blizzard. Indeed, when I think of my “identity,” I see myself as neither Indian nor American but a simple New Englander. In fact, I am literally allergic to hot temperatures and dry climates; the last time I went to India, I developed heat rash. So maybe that’s why, last night, after seeing those pictures of my dad, I made a little prayer as I nodded off to sleep: Boreas, North Wind, come back from the Bahamas or California or wherever it is you are vacationing and blow your chill breath upon us again—you have a job to do, or have you forgotten?

He must have heard my calls, because when I woke up this morning and opened the blinds, I saw that—contravening the forecast earlier in the week—it was snowing, that half the yard had disappeared under a patchwork erasure, that the branches and the evergreens were edged with white. The snow was sticking, too; by midday it had acquired, like a boy going through puberty, inches and girth. It feathered the trunks of trees and the last stubborn autumn leaves. Everything held that fresh magical miraculous feeling of snowfall. Nobody was out on the road; everything was silent and hushed, as though the world slept.

I decided to go for a walk. Though nobody had shoveled yet, I had enough faith in my sturdy winter boots to brave the hills and dips without slipping. I felt warm and cozy in my winter coat, bundled up against the chilly air. The cold nipped at my ungloved fingertips, but there was something satisfying in that cold burning, something alive. The fairy-flecks fell on my face like cool kisses. I had taken my film camera with me; perhaps, in a few decades, the snowy photographs I took would be looked at by my children or grandchildren, as I had looked at my father’s. Hopefully, by then, winter will not have turned into a curiosity.

But if I am still alive, and winter no longer exists, I will take my old self to Antarctica, armed with Bernadette Mayer’s poem “The Way to Keep Going in Antarctica.” I will live out the last years of my existence on an ice floe, drifting in an ice-cold sea, and surrender myself entirely to the cold.

Mood Board of the Week

(left to right, top to bottom)

1. Edward Willis Redfield, Woodland Brook (ca. 1914): Edward Willis Redfield (1869–1965) was an American landscape painter who actually specialized in winter landscapes. He worked in a largely Impressionist style, and the mood he evokes in his winter paintings is one of quiet contemplation, solitude, and stillness, reminding me of “the woods and frozen lake / The darkest evening of the year” of Robert Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.” Looking at them, one feels that winter, in its austere simplicity, needs no colors or flowers or dazzling sunlight—that the snow has not melted and the trees are not bare, that the air is gray and the light subdued, is as it should be.

2. Metropolitan (1990) theatrical poster illustration by Pierre Le Tan: Whit Stillman’s Metropolitan is an underrated classic, my favorite Christmas movie, and basically Gossip Girl in a top hat and monocle. Stillman, a Jane Austen enthusiast, takes inspiration from that sly portraitist of social manners and mores, to chronicle the debutante season of young Upper East Siders and the one (1) representative of the middle-class they allow, temporarily, into their clan. It’s a talking movie, and a hilarious one, where discussions of Fourier and Veblen are gently teased apart to ironize their speakers’ often endearing flaws.

3. Buffalo ’66 (1998): Any romance that starts with a kidnapping and a forced playacting of husband-and-wife in front of one’s parents is sure to be a success. Or maybe it only works when that husband and wife are played by a surly Vincent Gallo and a delightfully charming, tap-dancing, blue-eyeshadowed, vulnerable Christina Ricci. My soft spot for unconventional romances aside, I love the dreamlike warmth with which a cold upstate New York winter is depicted, the barren trees and sunless skies and drab snow-streaked grass, along with the hometown haunts—bowling alleys and worn-down motels—that offer its escape. Also, Shakespeare was wrong. The food of love is not music. It is, as Vincent Gallo’s character finds out, a large hot chocolate and a heart cookie.

4. Peter Brook, JANUARY Pennine Valley (1976–7): Peter Brook (1927–2009) was an English painter known for his rural landscapes, and he often painted the Pennines, a “spine” of uplands running through Northern England. From 1976 to 1977, he made a series of lithographs, The Months of the Year, that capture the changing of the seasons. I like the flatness and starkness of his work, especially his winter landscapes—they seem so similar to the Pieter Bruegel landscape here that Brook could have been Bruegel’s contemporary.

   

5. John Galliano Fall 2009 Ready-to-Wear runway show: Designing the Fall 2009 collection for his own brand, John Galliano took inspiration from Russian folklore and fairytales. On the runway, a magical Northern Lights-colored tunnel, snow falling softly within it, brings to life furs, veils, and filmy silks, all given the final fairytale touch with ornate silver jewelry and Pat McGrath’s frosty, snow queen makeup.

6. Pieter Bruegel the Elder, The Hunters in the Snow (1565): Probably the most famous winter painting of all winter paintings, The Hunters in the Snow evokes the somberness of the season in its limited palette of gray-blue, gray-white, reddish-brown, and black, and yet it is a winter that teems with activity: the hunters returned with their spoils (not much, just a small fox), their pack of dogs behind them, surveying a scene of ice-skaters, sledders, stick-carriers, and hockey-players, as a crow wheels overhead and figures stoke a fire. At dimensions of about 4 x 5 ft, it is well worth taking the time to contemplate in detail.

7. Lucy and Mr. Tumnus from The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, illustrated by Pauline Baynes: The Chronicles of Narnia were some of my favorite books as a child, and I always loved Lucy Pevensie’s friendship with Mr. Tumnus, the first character she meets upon entering Narnia. Indeed, C. S. Lewis himself said that the very first spark of inspiration for the series was the image of a faun in a snowy wood, holding an umbrella, a parcel tucked under his arm, just as we first encounter Tumnus in the wardrobe. Narnia, as you may remember, is trapped in an eternal winter without Christmas. What could make eternal winter cozier than tea with a faun? And what could be a more charming accompaniment to Lewis’s tales of fauns and girls, wardrobes and witches than Pauline Baynes’s lovely, lively illustrations?

   

8. Caspar David Friedrich, The Sea of Ice (1823-4): Caspar David Friedrich, that bastion of German Romanticism, often used landscapes to convey emotional and spiritual meanings—they were mindscapes or moodscapes, showing nature as alive and forceful and teeming with feeling. Here the harsh, jagged shapes of ice jut out violently, radically into the middle of the frame, overshadowing, to the right, a poor shipwreck, nearly eaten up by ice. Friedrich was inspired by William Edward Parry’s 1819-20 expedition to the North Pole, and his studies of ice floes on the river Elbe well prepared him for this massive undertaking of nature’s wintery sublimity.

   

9. Marketa Lazarová (1967): If there is one winter movie to beat all winter movies, it is surely the Czech masterpiece Marketa Lazarová, directed by František Vláčil, based on the novel by Vladislav Vančura. It is a movie you may have to watch twice to grasp—clear unfolding of plot is shunted for other virtues: dreamlike cinematography, emotional heightening, psychological realism, a sense of the violent struggle between pagan and Christian, an enveloping, immersive recreation of the 13th century. Here winter is not the cozy backdrop for tinseled Christmases and candlelit evenings, it is a harsh, unforgiving winter, bitter in its barrenness, a winter of hard, glittering frosts, endless, unmelting snow, bleak, black trees, bloodthirsty wolves, the struggle for survival laid bare, and yet it is beautiful, a haunting, austere beauty heightened by Zdenek Liška’s soundtrack of ethereal plainchant and ghostly marimba.

3 Things I’m in Love With This Week

1. “Winter” by Jamie Scott: Five years of shooting across New York State and Montreal, Canada are condensed into three and a half beautiful minutes in which time lapses of winter are set to a mesmerizing, whirling score by composer Jim Perkins. We see frost feathering over a fall leaf, bleaching it of color, drops of water hardening into icicles, preserving branches in a cold resin, streams slowing down to an icy sludge, evergreen branches drooping with the weight of snow, snow filling up the spaces between stones and blades of grass, blanketing landscapes in white: so much power in one singular, tiny, never-to-be-repeated crystal of ice.

2. “Ice Huts” and “Ice Villages” by Richard Johnson: Between 2007 and 2019, photographer Richard Johnson, who passed away in 2021, documented the thousands of hand-built structures that converge around lakes in Canada in December and January, when people come in droves to ice fish. Mark Kingwell calls the ice huts “portraits of [their] owners,” and indeed these tiny dwellings are astounding in their diversity: some metal, some wooden; some carefully crafted, some cobbled together; some neon-yellow, some so colorless they blend into the winter landscape; all worth looking at and lingering over.

3. “Der Leiermann” from Schubert’s Winterreise: Austrian composer Franz Schubert wrote his song cycle Winterreise (Winter Journey) in 1827, setting 24 poems by Wilhelm Müller to music. In the poem cycle, Müller draws on the Romantic trope of the lone wanderer, driven by failure in love to seek self-knowledge. In the last, “Der Leiermann” (“The Hurdy-Gurdy Player”), the speaker encounters an old man, a village hurdy-gurdy player, with fingers too numb from the cold to even really play his instrument and whom no one pays the slightest attention. But the speaker notices him, and asks him, “Shall I go with you? Will you turn your hurdy-gurdy to my songs?”1

Words of Wisdom

It is said that life is inhospitable to those who reject it.

—Vladislav Vančura, Marketa Lazarová (translated by Carleton Bulkin)

After watching Marketa Lazarová, I was so tempted to read the book, and, given how experimental the movie is in terms of its storytelling and structure, I was surprised to see how much actually matched up between the book and the movie. Like the movie, but in a different way, the book feels original and revelatory, even nearly a century after its publication, with its medieval setting and the almost romantic, fairytale-esque voice of its narrator, who frequently breaks the fourth wall, sometimes in very funny ways. Carleton Bulkin’s translation is engagingly readable, and I highly recommend it if you’re looking for a good book to curl up with on a cold winter night.

Poetry Corner

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I can wring out a true song about myself,
tell of my journeys, how I in days of toil
often suffered times of hardship,
have endured bitter breast-care,
tried out in a ship’s keel many dwellings of sorrow,
the terrible roiling of waves. There the oppressive night-watch
often seized me at the prow of the ship
when it dashes along cliffs. Pinched by cold
were my feet, fettered by frost
with cold chains, where the cares sighed
hot around my heart. Hunger within rent
the mind of the sea-weary one. That man doesn’t know—
he for whom it goes so prosperously on land—
how I, wretched, on the ice-cold sea
inhabited winter in the paths of exile,
bereft of kinsfolk,
be-hung with icicles; hail flew in showers.
There I heard nothing but the resounding sea,
the ice-cold wave. At times a swan’s song
I took for my entertainment, the gannet’s cry,
and the sound of the curlew for the laughter of men, 
a seagull singing for mead-drinking.
There, storms beat the rocky cliff, where the tern answered them,
icy-feathered. Very often the eagle cried at it,
wet-feathered. No protecting kinsman
can comfort a desolate spirit.
Therefore he little believes—he who has experienced
the pleasure of life in cities,
proud and merry with wine—how I am weary often.
On the ocean-path, I had to remain.
The night-shadow darkened, it snowed from the north,
frost bound the earth, hail fell on the ground,
coldest of grains.

—from “The Seafarer,” Old English poem, my translation

There are so many beautiful winter poems scattered across the wide arc of literature, but my mind always goes to the first part of “The Seafarer,” which survives in the 10th-century Exeter Book. In the book, the titular seafarer describes his bitter hardships on the sea, where he endures the “cold chains” of frost and is rent by the pangs of hunger. Worse are the psychological toils, the “bitter breast-care” (literally bitre breostceare) of living apart from one’s kinsmen. The seafarer only knows the “dwellings of sorrow” (cearselda) that are the tossing and turning of waves—the ironic use of cearselda, from seld, a word typically used for sturdy dwellings on dry land, underscores the difference. Twice the seafarer notes the vast disparity between himself and the man prosperous on land, the man “who has experienced / the pleasure of life in cities” and does not have to take the calls of birds as poor substitutes for laughter, socializing, and merry-making.

However, as the poem continues onwards from here, the speaker asserts the adventure and derring-do of seafaring, the power of his own wanderlust, that longing which impels him to undertake these difficult journeys and brave far-off stretches of sea. Seafaring becomes a metaphor for the human condition itself: landlubbers as we might be, we can all say, as in the Carmina Burana, “Feror ego veluti / sine nauta navis,” “I am carried along like / a ship without a sailor” by the winds of fate. Nevertheless, the seafarer muses, there are still things we can strive for before we meet our end, and there are things (money, etc.) that pale before the direness of death and the splendor of God. The last section of the poem becomes almost self-helpy in tone, the speaker turning from descriptive to didactic to devotional, and yet it always moves me. You can read the full poem, side-by-side with the original Old English, here, and hear a bit of what the Old English sounded like, along with a deeper analysis, here.

If you’d like more Old English poetry, I translated a fun riddle in this post about a month ago:

Beauty Tip

Reach out to somebody who might be feeling a bit lonely this holiday season—you never know what it might mean to them.

Lingering Question

What can you get rid of—a habit, an object, a piece of clothing, a nonconstructive thought—before the year ends?

Hi all, I hope you enjoyed this one! If you did, please like this post and share with a friend, and I’d love you hear your thoughts on all things winter in the comments! What’s winter like in your part of the world?

Also, here’s a post I wrote on snow almost a year ago that means a lot to me now that my father is gone. I guess you can tell I have something of an obsession with snow:

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I Need to Lie Back to Front With Someone Who Adores Me

“The word is the picture of things” is an epigram attributed to the Greek poet Simonides of Ceos, who also once said, “Painting is silent poetry, and poetry is painting that speaks.” In our own society, it is a commonplace that “a picture is worth a thousand words,” and indeed we are dominated by pictures. Images come at us every which way. There is no escape from them. Writing in 1985, Italo Calvino observes that “Nowadays we are bombarded by so many images that we can no longer distinguish direct experience from what we’ve seen for a few seconds on television.”1 Television? Ah, how innocent one was back then!

Once upon a time, our imaginations mostly consisted of images we ourselves had witnessed, times we had lived through ourselves, places we had walked in ourselves, people we had seen with our own eyes, and maybe a small smattering of what we could fashion, vague and hazy, from someone else’s descriptions, someone’s travelogues or histories, someone’s made-up stories, someone’s perhaps very lifelike paintings, but still never totally concrete, never fully embodied, never vivid and real. Now “the flood of ready-made images” that daily swamps our imagination is unavoidable; we all contribute to it, and we are all victim to it. We move in a kaleidoscope of dreams. Between “the word is the picture of things” and “a picture is worth a thousand words,” we are more inclined to agree with the latter.

And yet a word contains worlds, can bring to life pictures that never were and never can be, draws behind it a dragnet of associations, abstractions, philosophies, feelings. Seeking to escape the total domination of the image, artists like Jasper Johns and Cy Twombly began to insert letters and words and phrases into their paintings, and then words became art in and of themselves, flexing their typographical muscles, shedding the old rags of image to stand alone: logos unbound. They shouted things about power and ideology like political slogans, wormed their way into our psychology like ads and billboards, and united those unlikeliest of pals, poetry and capitalism, in consumer products like T-shirts and condoms. Projecting phrases onto buildings, embossing them onto jeans, these voiceless objects were made to speak, and what they spoke was like something from their own inner soul or mind.

Writing about Twombly, Roland Barthes distinguishes between “the message, which wants to produce information, the sign, which wants to produce an intellection, and the gesture, which produces all the rest (the ‘surplus’), without necessarily wanting to produce something.” Poetry always exists in “the gesture,” which is what the best word art becomes: something more than information or intellection, something that communicates something beyond itself without knowing what that something is, without intending one specific effect, one confined action, one linear point from A to B, like advertisement or propaganda. “The vague is alive,” says Barthes.2

I am most interested in word art that expresses something diaristic, something vulnerable, something private, a confession or a love note. You read, and you are spoken to, you become the beloved writ large, the “you” of all poems, the forever referent of all thought; you read, and you speak, you become the lover, the eternal subject, the vertical pronoun that towers as a skyscraper does. How embarrassing it is to have one’s innermost thoughts scribbled across the wall of the world! And at the same time there is a pleasure in it, a kind of release. I do want someone to see me, not my image or my outer, visible casing but my invisible desires, my silent longings, all those yearnings I squirm to say aloud. I want them to be known, shouted from the rooftops, and for everyone to hear, and agree, and nod, and feel my feeling with me. “I NEED TO LIE BACK TO FRONT WITH SOMEONE WHO ADORES ME,” says one of Jenny Holzer’s projections. And by God, Reader, I really do.

Mood Board of the Week

(left to right, top to bottom)

1. Jenny Holzer x Helmut Lang, 2000: American artist Jenny Holzer and Austrian fashion designer Helmut Lang first collaborated on Lang’s fragrance brand in 1996, then continued to collaborate until Lang’s retirement from fashion in 2005. To mark the launch of Lang’s first fragrance in 2000, they created these ads that rejected models, colors, images, logos, pictures of the perfume itself, instead relying on the black-and-white impact of Holzer’s text. Only the last line, “I smell you on my skin,” really gives you a hint—the merest whiff, if you will.

2. Robert Barry, Something That Needs Something Else To Survive (2011): “Nothing seems to me the most potent thing in the world,” American artist Robert Barry (1936–) once said. Part of the original Conceptual group, his art deals with the invisible, the unknown, the imperceivable, raising questions about the physical limitations of the art object and its relationship to space and time. The text here is thus spare and minimalistic, ambiguous, an open question. “Something that needs something else to survive.” Is that not precisely the condition of being in the world?

   

3. Tracey Emin, I listen to the Ocean and all I hear is you (2011): I love the neon wall art of British artist Tracey Emin (1963–). Her art—words, drawings, messy beds, and all—often deals with themes of intimacy, love, sex, the body, trauma, and womanhood. I like how Emin uses her own handwriting, giving the text the sense of a diary entry or personal note, the soul’s little voice battling against darkness.

4. silkenweinberg on Tumblr: I saw this floating around Tumblr like a disembodied prophecy. “My desires are god’s promises.” It could be a wish, a hope, an assertion, a defiant declaration. All of these texts express desire in one way or another, but what is a desire, where does it come from, who puts it in you, if not something we might call God?

5. Cy Twombly, Wilder Shores of Love (1985): I featured American painter Cy Twombly’s work a little bit in my Iliad post with his Fifty Days at Iliam—I’ve always loved his dynamism, speed, chaos, color, vibrancy, and I’ve always been fascinated by the use of words and phrases in his paintings. “You can imagine what those scribbles and what those words mean, and make them speak to you and translate to yourself,” filmmaker John Waters once said of Twombly. To me “Wilder Shores of Love” translates to tenderness, newness, exploration, excitement, that peculiar onrush of falling in love. The canvas seems too small to contain the text, which hurtles out of frame, searching, indeed, for a wilder shore.

   

6. Jenny Holzer, Projections, photographed by Attilio Maranzano (2001): Holzer’s work centers around word art and public spaces, often involving large-scale installations like billboards and projections onto buildings. This projection (I need to lie back to front with someone who adores me) was done in Berlin, and the combination of white text and blue dark blue backdrop makes it haunting, melancholy, otherworldly. Look a little closer, and you’ll notice a small cross: the building projected onto is a church, St. Matthew’s Church, built in the 1840s. The projection yokes together sacred and secular, old and new, public and private, with the force of a screamed secret, a megaphoned confession.

7. Tommy Coleman, seeing you blush (2011): Tommy Coleman describes himself as an “interdisciplinary artist and educator,” and his work often investigates intimacy, anxiety, and the boundaries between public and private. I like how the blush-pink of this print echoes its words and how the words are barely visible, almost like a whisper, yearning, intimate, too shy to be seen, the opposite of Holzer’s bold uppercase or Twombly’s bloodred scrawl.

8. Comme des Garçons Poem Shirt designed by Junya Watanabe in 2002: In 2001, Junya Watanabe designed his debut menswear collection for Comme des Garçons, which included shirts, jackets, jeans, and other garments with poems printed on them in all capital letters, often vulnerable love poems. I included a few of these in my essay on lovecore, the Internet aesthetic centered around love, romance, sentiment, and Valentine’s-esque imagery, and I love how they combine masculine silhouettes with intensely personal expressions of feeling.

9. Louise Bourgeois, Untitled, no. 10 of 12, from The Trauma of Abandonment (2001): I included some of Louise Bourgeois’s text art in a previous Friday post; there, the text was combined with illustrations in diptychs like aphorisms or stray thoughts. Here the text, isolated, all caps, alone, is like a small red scream in a white void, expressing exactly the title of Bourgeois’s book, The Trauma of Abandonment. The text seems almost like something carved into skin, and the plainness and uniformity of the type belies the inner turmoil of the speaker, who begs the reader, “Hold my bones together.”

3 Things I’m in Love With This Week

1. Walt Disney’s “The Peter Tchaikovsky Story”: Because of the holiday season, I’ve been listening to Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker a lot, and last week’s post on Sleeping Beauty reminded me of a short film about Tchaikovsky that used to be in my Sleeping Beauty DVD’s Bonus Features. I don’t know how true to Tchaikovsky’s life this 30-minute movie is, but I love how it depicts the young composer’s feverish dedication to music, his emotional upheavals, his sensitivity, his personal and professional struggles, and his compositions of Swan Lake and Sleeping Beauty. Plus, you get an introduction by Walt himself, chummily instructing you on how you can hear this program “in stereophonic sound.”

   

2. The “soft start-up”: In a six-year longitudinal study, psychologist John Gottman and his collaborators found that divorce can be predicted in the first 3 minutes of marital conflict—96% of the time, those 180 seconds determined not only the trajectory of the conversation but the trajectory of the relationship itself, six years down the line. Nobody’s perfect, everybody’s stressed, so when you see someone close to you failing to use a coaster (even though you’ve told them a thousand times) or leaving their dirty socks everywhere, it’s easy to blow up on them, which makes it hard for them to actually respond to your concern.

   

   Instead, describe your feelings about a specific situation, then express a positive need: e.g. “I feel frustrated you didn’t use a coaster because I don’t want the furniture to be damaged. Could you please use a coaster?” And if you’re on the receiving end of blame or criticism, try to see the need or request behind it. Easier said than done, but a skill worth practicing—not just for marriage but for any interaction with one of your frustrating, flawed, all-too-human fellow creatures.

3. Using a calendar: My whole life, I’ve been one of those free spirits who says they have it all in their head. Well, it turns out that one’s head is filled with all sorts of flotsam and jetsam, and this week I actually started using my calendar not just for external obligations, meetings, and appointments but for pretty much all the activities in my life. The calendar I use is the Calendar app on my Mac; I like how you can color code things, move things around, add in travel time, and put in alerts. Maybe 2025 Ramya will be put-together Ramya. After all, perhaps I should take my own advice: “The habits we build, the structures and routines we implement, shape our days and our lives, for better or for worse.” One should make appointments with oneself—and keep them.

Words of Wisdom

A habit of graceful surrender on trivial issues will make you difficult to resist when you stand and fight on a major issue.

— David Ogilvy, Ogilvy on Advertising

Basically “pick your battles.” Earlier this week somebody told me that there are big problems and little problems, i.e. major issues and trivial issues. It’s important to be able to discern what is a trivial issue and what isn’t. Not everything is worth having big emotions over, and you’ll save yourself (and others) a lot of time and energy when you learn to put things in perspective and gracefully let them go. That way, when something important really does come up, people will take you seriously—since you don’t fight for every little thing, what you fight for must truly be important.

Poetry Corner

A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published

As virtuous men pass mildly away,
     And whisper to their souls to go,
Whist some of their sad friends do say
     The breath goes now, and some say, No:

So let us melt, and make no noise,
     No tear-floods, nor sigh-tempests move;
’Twere profanation of our joys
     To tell the laity our love.

Moving of th’ earth brings harms and fears,
     Men reckon what it did, and meant;
But trepidation of the spheres,
     Though greater far, is innocent.

Dull sublunary lovers’ love
     (Whose soul is sense) cannot admit
Absence, because it doth remove
     Those things which elemented it.

But we by a love so much refined,
     That our selves know not what it is,
Inter-assured of the mind,
     Care less, eyes, lips, and hands to miss.

Our two souls therefore, which are one,
     Though I must go, endure not yet
A breach, but an expansion,
     Like gold to airy thinness beat.

If they be two, they are two so
     As stiff twin compasses are two;
Thy soul, the fixed foot, makes no show
     To move, but doth, if the other do.

And though it in the center sit,
     Yet when the other far doth roam,
It leans and hearkens after it,
     And grows erect, as that comes home.

Such wilt thou be to me, who must,
     Like th’ other foot, obliquely run;
Thy firmness makes my circle just,
     And makes me end where I begun.

—John Donne

John Donne (1572–1631) is one of my favorite poets because his poems always feel like little riddles to me, hearkening back to the beginnings of the English poetic tradition. I love their “conceits”—their complex, extended metaphors that are drawn out so that the reader’s mind is made to bend and twist with their logic, surprised by a striking image, startled by an unlikely comparison. Famously, Samuel Johnson derided just this quality of what he called the “metaphysical” poets: “The most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together; nature and art are ransacked for illustrations, comparisons, and allusions; their learning instructs, and their subtlety surprises; but the reader commonly thinks his improvement dearly bought, and, though he sometimes admires, is seldom pleased.”3

Johnson goes on to say that the metaphysical poets “were not successful in representing or moving the affections.” This poem by John Donne, about a lover having to say farewell to his beloved, blatantly refutes Johnson’s assertion, using those “most heterogenous ideas” exactly in the service of beautifully representing the affections.

The first metaphor is that of “virtuous men” dying, whose bodies part so “mildly” from their souls that those at their bedside cannot say which breath is their last. The speaker and his beloved, the speaker says, should be that mild, making “no noise,” moving no “tear-floods, nor sigh-tempests,” having no earthquake-like separations full of “harms and fears.” Such dramatic partings are for “dull sublunary lovers” because their love, dependent on sense, the sensual delights of “eyes, lips, and hands,” is destroyed by absence.

The love between the speaker and the beloved, however, is a love of mind and soul, therefore “inter-assured.” Separation cannot cause a “breach” but is instead “an expansion / Like gold to airy thinness beat” (one of my favorite similes ever). The two lovers, in the poem’s longest conceit, stretching across three stanzas (like that airy gold), are like the two feet of a compass, able to part but still attached, one foot fixed while the other roams, each always and firmly home for the other to circle back around to.

Beauty Tip

Make shower time fun! There are so many ways to make bath time fun: bath salts, bath soaks, bath scrubs, bubble bath. You can read in the bath, eat in the bath, light a candle in the bath. The poor shower, on the other hand, has been relegated to the realm of 5-minutes-and-out-the-door, a rush of water, a dollop of soap, some frantic scrubbing, a bit of panic, you’re clean and you’re gone. But I always enjoy lingering in the shower, where I can briefly be a genius, and I don’t think I’m the only one. Moreover, how many people really use or even have bathtubs these days?

Where I volunteer, we recently hosted a winter market featuring local small businesses, and one of these, Anchor’d Inc., and its founder, Shabranae Patton, showed off an invention that really caught my eye: the shower tea! The shower tea is exactly what it sounds like: sachets of botanicals and essential oils that you can hang in your shower. The steam releases the tea’s aroma into the air, making your shower serene and sweet-smelling. Anchor’d also creates and sends post-trauma care packages to survivors of sexual assault and domestic violence—I highly recommend checking out more of their aromatherapy products!

Lingering Question

What’s a trivial issue you’re spending too much time thinking about? Is there something major beneath it that you aren’t seeing clearly? Is there something else major that could be worth putting more of your time and thought into?

Dear Readers, happy Friday! I hope you enjoyed this one! If you did, please like this post, share with a friend, and subscribe to Soul-Making, and I always love hearing your thoughts in the comments! Have a wonderful wonderful weekend.

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Once Upon a Dream

Something reminded me of Sleeping Beauty, the 1959 Disney film, the other day, so I went back to watch it. Until middle school, basically the only movies I was allowed to watch were Disney movies, and we mostly had the princess ones—I guess I mostly liked the princess ones—so I would watch them again and again and again. Sleeping Beauty was my favorite until, as a teenager, I received the message that princesses should be saving themselves, getting themselves down from the tower, themselves doing battle with dragons, themselves outwitting the witch, themselves foiling the evil queen, and so Sleeping Beauty drifted away, sinking down to the sea floor of my self, where, no doubt, unbeknownst to me, it continued to let out its vapors, exhaled its vague odor, from some substratum of my soul.

I guess I spent most of my teenage years sleeping. I don’t mean that literally, because I pulled more all-nighters than my (comparatively) elderly, tired self can now fathom, but in that I was always in my own inner world of daydreams or delusions, reading, writing, musing, poeticizing, scrolling the Internet, and what they’ve since coined “bedrotting.” It was a passive existence. I think I was depressed. I lived as though in a tower: I had no siblings, I had no friends I was really close to, I had no faith in what the future would bring me, and I was content to drift, content to be sheltered, content to sleep “forever in a moon-green pool.”

Then college came, and I grew out of Sylvia Plath and the Virgin Suicides, I grew out of circling the drain of myself, I learned to take my happiness into my own hands, I walked, breathed the fresh air, studied, pushed and applied myself, ate real meals, and took real joy in everything that life had to offer. Yet she was still there, always, that Sleeping Beauty, eyes closed, a smile on her rose-red lips, even then seeping out her fairy-tale magic into the conflux of my personality. Even now I relate to the girls who have grown tired of girlbossing and want to girlrot, I can see myself as one of the girls who’d rather do “girl math” than be in STEM, I sympathize with “girl dinners,” which I ate regularly at a time in my life when I had no care for health, no knowledge of nutrition, and, like the fairy Fauna, no cooking skills.

In recent years, there’s been an uptick in girls exhibiting what one might call “princess syndrome.” They want to be taken care of, they associate themselves with bunnies and lambs, with big-eyed does and little pink bows, they aspire to be the soft-life tradwife, they’d like nothing better than to sleep and dream while the prince fends off the dragon and defeats evil and wakes one up into a better, easier world with nothing more demanding than true love’s kiss. Little do they realize that the women—not girls—who actually get the wealthy men are often hard-edged and ambitious, equally if not more business-minded than their spouses. Rarely will it be that someone will simply drop out of the sky and reward you for your goodness and purity of heart. Ah, if only. If only we could magic rocks into bubbles and broken bridges into rainbows and “the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune” into a shower of harmless falling blossoms. If only!

I think girlhood failed me. Either it brought me a vision of the feminine that was all passivity, all roses and romanticized rot, or it told me that the only other option was to reject that femininity altogether, try to make myself good at or passionate about the things that didn’t come naturally to me, eschew my desire for romantic love, instinctive feeling for family over office life, or attraction to what was masculine in men, and become hyperindependent and thus alone. I think I probably should have been exposed to bugs and dirt, I think I should have been given more responsibility, I think I should have been less sheltered, I think I should have learned a little self-reliance, and yet I like the person I am today, I wouldn’t want to be anybody else. Now that I am no longer girl but woman, no longer child but—thank goodness—adult, I have the power to correct my faults and try to synthesize the disparate pieces of myself into a common whole.

Ever since I was a child, my favorite activity was dreaming, and my favorite thing to dream about was the people I loved. Sleeping Beauty, too, dreamt “of true love / in slumber repose.” My earliest memories are of being in the basement of our house, imagining that I was in a dark forest and a witch was chasing me, and then I would dash up four flights of stairs, fling myself onto my bed, pull the covers over my head, and, calm then, think of my parents and how much I loved them and fall asleep with a smile on my lips.

It is all very well to dream. Every action needs the backing of some motivation, every “how” and “when” and “what” and “where” a “why,” every doing a designing. But even Sleeping Beauty ventured out into the woods one day, with a mission to collect some berries, and sang a little song, and danced a little dance, and spoke and joked with her fellow creatures, and gazed out upon the world, without which she would never have met her true love, not in any dream, assuredly, but in reality.

Mood Board of the Week

(left to right, top to bottom)

1. Ling Tan for John Galliano Fall 1998 Fur Collection: In 1998, designer John Galliano teamed up with Stallion Furs at the Metropolitan Club to present this “Casanova”-inspired collection: big fur coats, opulent jewelry, dramatic silhouettes, long tapers of candles, banquets of fake fruits, rococo romanticism, endless glamor. I like the way this image mirrors the last, two women, almost a century apart, looking into their handheld mirrors.

2. Photograph by jurist--academia on Tumblr: Anything shot on film charms me but old buildings the most, especially if there is something solitary about them, or tucked-away and hidden, reminiscent of a long-forgotten afternoon.

3. Joel Meyerowitz, Dinner Table, Provincetown, Massachusetts (1983): Born in 1938, Joel Meyerowitz quit his job as an art director at an advertising agency in 1962 to take up a career as a photographer, first documenting the streets of New York City. He advocated for the use of color film when only black-and-white was considered proper for “serious” photography and used it to capture street scenes, portraits, buildings, nature, and still lifes. I like the composition of this one, the subtlety of the colors, the mystery of the fallen pink petals, the array of cups and half-filled wine glasses and spoons and a single solitary teapot, obviously no dinner on the “dinner table,” simultaneously “as-is” and contrived, as the best still lifes are. In another photograph, taken of the same table from a different angle, titled “Early morning still life,” it becomes easy to imagine a late dinner, ending with an overflow of wine and conversation, abandoned by sleepy guests, the forlorn table waking up to the calm of the ocean in the early hours.

4. Isabelle Adjani’s bedroom in 1995: The bedroom of actress Isabelle Adjani is thankfully a far cry from the one she inhabits in her most famous role as the heroine of Andrzej Żuławski’s horror movie Possession (1981). Now I, too, want a frilly heart-shaped pillow and a little blue lamp and a cozy bed nook.

5. Linda Evangelista by Nick Knight for Dior Fall 1997: Nick Knight is one of my favorite fashion photographers; I love the experimentation of his work, his embrace of new technologies, and most of all his openness in revealing his creative process “from conception to completion” on his website SHOWstudio, where he frequently invites others—supermodels, stylists, make-up artists, hairdressers, fashion designers—to do the same. Here I love the dreaminess of the picture, how it looks almost drawn or painted, pink and serene.

6. Jean Cocteau holding up two of his paintings outside of La Villa Santo-Sospir: Artist, playwright, novelist, designer, and film director Jean Cocteau decorated and drew on this villa, owned by socialite Francile Weisweiller, and then made a 35-minute documentary about it in 1952. You can watch the documentary here—it’s very joyful and playful and has the look and feel of a home movie.

   

7. Joan Didion’s belongs, photographed by Stair Galleries: Joan Didion is a writer, but she has achieved what most writers have not: style. Not prose-style but style-style: the long-lingering cool of posing in a floor-length dress in black-and-white, leaning against a Corvette, a cigarette between her fingers, indelibly etched into the American consciousness. She comes from the West where it is possible to be cool; no recluse Dickinson, depressive Woolf, or unmarried Austen or Brontë, she allowed Vogue a look into her home in 1972, resulting in bright, cheerful images of family life, lots of sunlight, lots of colors, lots of platters and vases and pots and baskets and jars brimmed with the California bounty. It’s sad to think of someone’s—anyone’s—most beloved belongs picked through and photographed and pulled apart and sold piecemeal at auction, but one likes to think these items have found new homes in which to be cherished.

8. Lillian Pitt, Pipestone Secrets (2013): Lillian Pitt is a Native American artist who grew up on the Warm Springs Reservation in Oregon and later moved to Portland. She started taking art classes in the 1970s when back problems put her hairdressing career on pause, and art became her vocation. Since then, she has produced sculptures, masks, works in glass and bronze, jewelry, and her distinctive petroglyphs, which draw on symbols etched into rock thousands of years ago by her ancestors along the Columbia River. I came across one of her petroglyphs at the MFA in Boston and was drawn to its distinctive shapes and its union of ancient and modern.

   

9. William Orpen, The Eastern Gown (1906): William Orpen (1878–1931) was an Irish artist who documented Edwardian society, becoming the most famous and commercially successful artist in Britain by the onset of WWI. The war turned him into a documenter of death and horror for a time, but he returned to society and commercial success soon after its end. I like the insouciance of his self-portraits and the ethereality of his women, like this one, Flossie Burnett, draped in a long transparent gown on a couch of strewn fabrics, her pearls on, her hair undone, contemplating—perhaps scrutinizing—herself in a mirror.

3 Things I’m in Love With This Week

1. Dead Souls by Nikolai Gogol: This book is hilarious. I’d forgotten how much I love Gogol. It was my father who introduced me to his work when I was an adolescent, and I read “The Overcoat” (out of which we have all, to quote Eugène-Melchior de Vogüé, come out of) again and again, before proceeding to devour the rest of Gogol’s short stories—“The Nose,” “The Tale of How Ivan Ivanovich Quarreled with Ivan Nikiforovich,” etc. Dead Souls, however, despite the fact that my father and I often read the same books together and then liked to go over them afterwards, became one of those low-priority to-do list items that get pushed further and further down, until at last ten years have passed and your father is dead.

   

   Dead Souls centers around a strange antihero, Pavel Ivanovich Chichikov, whose clever scheme to get rich quick involves acquiring from landowners dead serfs (the titular “souls”) whose deaths are not yet registered with the government. The landowners will no longer have to pay taxes on these dead souls, Chichikov can use the dead souls as collateral to buy an estate, and everyone wins. But the landowners, with all their eccentricities and peculiarities, prove difficult to deal with, and of all the dead souls, it is his own that Chichikov must most pay heed to.

2. “The New Business of Breakups” by Jennifer Wilson in The New Yorker: The business of heartbreak seems a slimy one: after all, you are profiting off the misery and sadness of others. But in this article, in which Wilson goes from heartbreak specialist to heartbreak specialist, she writes that nearly all of them “had the same origin story”: their own “earth-shattering” heartbreak. The stories of heartbreak—mostly breakups—strewn across this story touched me, as did the sometimes hokey, sometimes cheesy, mostly sincere efforts marshaled in the service of mending those broken hearts. It’s when we lose one another that we see just how attached we really are.

3. Car with stained glass window by MrsZero07 on Reddit: No joke, I would kill to have a car with a stained glass window like this. I’d outfit it with chandeliers, like this other car, and then I might actually start to look forward to driving, instead of avoiding it like the plague.

Words of Wisdom

Should we look at the spring blossoms only in full flower, or the moon only when cloudless and clear? To long for the moon with the rain before you, or to lie curtained in your room while the spring passes unseen, is yet more poignant and deeply moving. A branch of blossoms on the verge of opening, a garden strewn with fading petals, have more to please the eye….

In all things, the beginning and end are the most engaging. Does the love of man and woman suggest only their embraces? No, the sorrow of lovers parted before they met, laments over promises betrayed, long lonely nights spent sleepless until dawn, pining thoughts for one in some far place, a woman left sighing over past love in her tumbledown abode—it is these, surely, that embody the romance of love.

Rather than gazing on a clear full moon that shines over a thousand leagues, it is infinitely more moving to see the moon near dawn and after long anticipation, tinged with most beautiful palest blue, a moon glimpsed among cedar branches deep in the mountains, its light now hidden again by the gathering clouds of an autumn shower. The moist glint of moonlight on the glossy leaves of the forest shii oak or the white oak pierces the heart, and makes you yearn for the distant capital and a friend of true sensibility to share the moment with you.

Are blossoms and the moon merely things to be gazed at with the eye? No, it brings more contentment and delight to stay inside the house in spring and, there in your bedroom, let your heart go out to the unseen moonlit night.

–Yoshida Kenko, Essays in Idleness, translated by Meredith McKinney

This translation of Kenko’s Essays in Idleness was accompanied by Chomei’s much shorter Hojoki, both works from the Kamakura period of Japanese history (1185-1333), both works written by men who took Buddhist vows and turned their backs on the world. Essays in Idleness, nevertheless, is full of wisdom for those of us still attached to the world, and it’s amazing how true Kenko’s words ring under vastly different circumstances. Here I have quoted one of my favorite passages from the book for the beauty of its descriptions and its images of moon and blossoms.

Poetry Corner

Fairy-tale Logic

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Fairy tales are fully of impossible tasks:
Gather the chin hairs of a man-eating goat,
Or cross a sulphuric lake in a leaky boat,
Select the prince from a row of identical masks,
Tiptoe up to a dragon where it basks
And snatch its bone; count dust specks, mote by mote,
Or learn the phone directory by rote.
Always it’s impossible what someone asks—

You have to fight magic with magic. You have to believe
That you have something impossible up your sleeve,
The language of snakes, perhaps, an invisible cloak,
An army of ants at your beck, or a lethal joke,
The will to do whatever must be done:
Marry a monster. Hand over your firstborn son.

–A.E. Stallings

A.E. Stallings is one of my favorite contemporary poets for the way that she imparts a freshness and wit to the “stuffy” formal schemes most poets have long abandoned (I’ve written before about my own ambivalence towards free verse), drawing on her study of ancient writers. This poem, which appeared in the March 2010 issue of Poetry, is one I return to every now and again, for its reminder that fairy tales aren’t always what they seem, both in the tales themselves and, of course, most terrifyingly, in real life.

Beauty Tip

Spend a few moments to think about who you want to be in the upcoming year. Don’t limit yourself—allow yourself the indulgence of dreaming fully. Then take the first smallest actionable step towards that right now.

Lingering Question

What do you need to be more excited about in your life?

Dear Readers, I felt a bit uncomfortable writing this post, since the “girlhood essay” is so derided now on Substack anyway, and since I never thought I’d have much to say on the subject in the first place, but, well, you can’t always control where your creative instincts go. Anyway, I hope you enjoyed reading—please like this post if you did, share with a friend, and leave a comment because I always love hearing your thoughts!

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Gifts have never been my love language. They have always seemed too materialistic, too consumerist, too “thing-like” to express the million shades and hues and depths of affection one soul might bear towards another. We live in a society where we are continually exhorted to buy more, want more, need more—and this “more” piles up more and more and more, until we are overflowing with it. Sale after sale, discount after discount, Black Friday and Cyber Monday and Land Yourself in Credit Card Debt Wednesday—indeed, according to the shopaholic’s calculus1, when you buy a $200 item that is 50% off, you are saving $100, not (as is actually the case) spending it. “Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen and six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty-pound ought and six, result misery,” says Wilkins Micawber in Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield, who, landing himself in debtors’ prison, ought to know.

Then there are the several ill feelings that attend gifts and gift-giving. In the case of holidays and birthdays and other gift-giving occasions, there are (at least for me, always) the twin evils of procrastination and panic. At 2 in the morning on Christmas morning, you will invariably find me sitting with a roll of wrapping paper and tape, frantically looking up “how to wrap gifts.”

Should you give someone exactly the gift they have asked for, or should you try to imbue their life with the element of surprise?2 Should you give someone multiple small gifts or one big gift? Should you regift a gift you dislike, or simply hold onto it in the hope that it will grow on you? Gifting is its own language, and it has its own poetry. If someone gifts you something too expensive, you feel an uneasy sense of obligation; if someone gifts you something too cheap, you wonder what you are really worth to them. If someone gifts you something useful, you may feel that you are missing something, that there is nothing more to life than bald utility, barren practicality; if someone gifts you something utterly useless, yet beautiful, you may put it somewhere where it gathers dust or consign it to that realm of things too precious to see the sun, ever in need of dragon-like watchfulness. Personally, I favor the frivolous gift, the superfluous little luxury, for we are always buying ourselves things we need anyway, and life requires the thread of embroidery to cover over its coarser fabric.

Let us not, however, confuse the inexpensive gift for the cheap. Cheapness is a matter of taste and quality; something inexpensive can still be well-made, unique, thoughtful, lasting. Give the gift of time, the gift of thoughtfulness. The best gifts, after all, are more symbols than gifts, ciphers that someone thought of you, spent time or money or effort on you, loved you and cared for you, took pains to make you happy. They become in equal parts memory and talisman, accruing associations the way scents linger on an old sweater: a particular time, occasion, era, a funny mishap, a certain gesture, the place you were in, the person you were then, the way you felt, the relationship you had with the giver, who may now be far away, or dead, or still in your life, the gift one link of many in the adamantine chain that binds you to them.

This week, I was inspired by the onslaught of gift guides on Substack to create my own very small gift guide. All of these gifts are under $25 (they might be better as stocking stuffers or for something like Secret Santa or a white elephant gift exchange) because, as I said earlier, I don’t think a gift has to be expensive to bring delight. Of course, when the gift guides come out, the gift guide haters come out, but I say, bring on the gift guides! Most of what I see in a gift guide, I know I’ll never buy or even consider buying, but I do so love to see what fun, whimsical, beautiful, or unexpectedly useful things those two magicians, human ingenuity and capitalism, can conjure out of their top hat. I hope you do too.

Mood Board Gift Guide of the Week 2024 Holiday Season!!

(left to right, top to bottom)

1. Austin Press Little Hand Stand ($12): We all need a hand sometimes. Sometimes just a teeny-weeny itsy-bitsy cutesy little hand. This hand, designed by Kim Austin of Austin Press, inspired by Victorian calling card holders, sleeved in an elegant black-and-gold tube, could be that hand. Use it to hold postcards, playing cards, birthday cards, business cards, to-do lists, calendars, old photographs, new love-letters, locks of hair, precious rings, semi-precious rings, rings that are just rhinestone and precious to no one in the world but yourself, hopes, dreams, memories, little loves, little fancies. A little hand can do so much.

2. Cereria Introna Vanilla Frosting with Flowers Cupcake Candle ($25): This cupcake candle looks good enough to eat, but don’t eat it. It is made of paraffin wax, which actually, as it turns out, is safe to eat in small amounts, but in large amounts can cause intestinal obstruction, nausea, vomiting, abdominal pain, constipation, and wax poisoning. If, however, you can resist the urge, it makes for a very nice decorative object. Put it on a dresser or nightstand or desk or coffee table or bookshelf. Even better, the next time you host a dinner party, bring out some these candles and a bunch of real desserts and have your guests play a little guessing game. Just kidding! That would probably bad, considering the effects of paraffin wax consumption as delineated above. Below are some more beautiful delicious(-looking) candles from Cereria Introna, which you can buy here, here, and here.

3. Louis Sherry 2-Piece Tins ($13.50): Yes, each chocolate, one a milk chocolate salted caramel, the other a dark chocolate Sicilian orange truffle, costs $6.75, but you are not paying for the chocolate. You are paying for the small adorable tin, lettered and edged with gold, which you can fit into a chic evening clutch or one of those micro purses when the pendulum inevitably swings back and they are “in” again or an unsuspecting friend’s pocket or a Christmas stocking or a little corner of your bedroom so you can “discover” them a few days later and surprise yourself or the beloved unwary hand of your crush, accompanied by a note, “sweets to the sweet” (what else?), after which you can promptly flee. The Monet tin is my favorite, but unfortunately on the official Louis Sherry website they require you to buy three, so you can either mix and match, or purchase elsewhere.

   

4. Anne Carson, Nay Rather (2013), published by Sylph Editions3 (£14): Sylph Editions has a Cahiers Series published in collaboration with The American University of Paris; these little volumes explore writing and translation by some of the best writers and translators writing and translating today—Richard Pevear, Lydia Davis, Elfriede Jelinek, Jhumpa Lahiri—and feature beautiful full-color illustrations and images. The Anne Carson fan(atic) that I am, Nay Rather is the volume I drool over the most. It “explores the role of silence in translation” through an essay and a poem, Carson translating her silence through Joan of Arc and Homer, Hölderlin and Paul Celan.

5. Officine Universelle Buly The Eyebrow-Raiser (€16.67): Dandyism died out; it was laughed to death. The dandy, poor creature, was sensitive, you see, and could do nothing more than wilt like a flower. But only give him this minuscule comb, and he will revive once again, pausing in the middle of a street before a store window to regard his own reflection, taking out, very carefully, this gently curving instrument of cosmetic beauty, and smoothing it through his pomaded eyebrows.

6. The Met Store Louis C. Tiffany Hibiscus and Parrots Bookmark ($22): A couple of years ago for Christmas, my mother got me this Stradivarius violin bookmark, which is my favorite bookmark ever, and which I thought I’d lost in the writing of this, panicked, and then subsequently found in a stay copy of the Bhagavad Gita, typical, but the Met has several of these beautiful metal bookmarks based on artworks and objects in their collection, and if I had to choose a second favorite, it would be this one based on a Favrile glass panel designed by Louis Comfort Tiffany. In contrast to paintings and violins, stained glass translates particularly well to the bookmark format—I love the Art Deco style of these birds and flowers and the beautiful green and blue hues that make them stand out. Coincidentally, the Met has just installed a giant new Tiffany Studios stained glass window in its American Wing this month, designed by Agnes Northrop.

   

7. Roger & Gallet Hand & Nail Cream Tin 1 ($24.95): Apparently, this limited edition trio of hand & nail creams—Gingembre Rouge (Red Ginger), Fleur de Figuier (Fig Blossom), and Rose (Rose)—was “inspired by the most beautiful Mediterranean nights, when the stars bloom in a thousand colors.” The sapphire-blue tin, illustrated by Charlotte Colt, certainly takes you there, with its profusion of doves and stars and gold and pink accents.

   

8. TOPS Malibu Magic Butterfly ($8): A butterfly! A shiny gold butterfly that flitters and floats when you wind it up! What could be more delightful? Follow the instructions here in order to wind up the wings. Then tuck the wound-up butterfly in a card or book—when opened, the butterfly will take off, leaving in its wake surprise and joy and childlike wonder.

   

9. Jenway Tea Co. Boutique Jenway Tea Sugar Cubes ($10): If I were a pony, these would be on the very top of my wishlist. If you had a pony, you could make her the happiest pony in the world by giving her these sugar cubes. They’re good for humans, too, though, inlaid with delicately placed dried flower petals and shiny nonpareils, making your teatime experience pink, chic, and very pretty. For an extra special gift, pair with one of Jenway’s winter tea blends—Velvet Vanilla Spiced Chai, Sugar Cookie Dreams, Cinnamon Almond Biscotti.

3 Things I’m in Love With This Week

Holiday Recipes Edition!

1. My Favorite Hot Chocolate Recipe

Just as soon as Thanksgiving is over, I rush excitedly to the stove to go and make this hot chocolate. It’s technically drinking chocolate, not hot cocoa, because it uses melted chocolate instead of cocoa powder, making it much more rich and complex in flavor than the stuff you just dump into milk and stir around. It’s also much more indulgent, so I’m not sure if I’d recommend it as a daily drink—but the banner of “holiday spirit” does, after all, cover up a myriad of sins, so I won’t blame you if you take to sipping this morning, noon, and night.

Ingredients

• 1 1/2 cups of milk—I like to use almond milk

• 2/3 cup high-quality dark chocolate chips

• 2-3 tablespoons of maple syrup

• A pinch of salt

• 1/2 teaspoon of vanilla extract

• 1/8 teaspoon of peppermint extract

• Whipped cream, crushed candy canes, marshmallows, etc. for topping

Instructions

1. Add the milk to a small pot or saucepan on medium heat and stir.

2. Once milk is hot, add the chocolate chips and stir vigorously until combined.

3. Add the maple syrup, salt, vanilla extract, and peppermint extract, and stir until all ingredients are incorporated.

4. Serve with whipped cream (if you’re vegan you can use coconut cream) and/or crushed candy canes and marshmallows.

2. Gingerbread Crêpes with Cranberry Compote

I found this recipe over at Rainbow Plant Life back when I trying to find more vegan recipes to be a little healthier. I don’t know if it’s actually that healthy, because it does have quite a bit of sugar, but it’s certainly very festive and Christmassy, and it’s a lovely way to make use of any extra cranberries you have lying around after Thanksgiving! I went back to try and find the original recipe, but it seems to have disappeared from the website, so I will reproduce the version I have in my recipe book below—all credit goes to Nisha Vora, or course.

Ingredients (for crêpes)

• 1 1/2 cups all-purpose or whole-wheat flour, sifted

• 1/2 teaspoon salt

• 1 teaspoon ground cinnamon

• 3/4 teaspoon ground ginger

• 1/4 teaspoon nutmeg

• pinch of cloves

• 3 tablespoons brown sugar

• 1 1/2 tablespoons organic blackstrap molasses

• 1 cup + 2 tablespoons almond milk

• 1/4 cup sparkling water

• 1 tablespoon melted vegan butter

• 1 teaspoon vanilla extract

• 1 teaspoon baking powder

Instructions (for crêpes)

1. Place all ingredients in a blender and blend until you obtain a smooth and lump-free batter, or use a whisk.

2. Cover better & chill for 1 hour.

3. Place a non-stick or cast-iron skillet over medium heat. Once hot, add a little bit of cooking oil.

4. Then, remove the skillet from the heat. Pour in 1/4 crepe batter and quickly tilt and turn the pan to form the batter into a thin circle. Return the pan to heat and cook for 2 minutes until golden brown. Flip and cook for 1 minute.

5. Top with cranberry compote down the center and fold over. Top with whipped cream and orange zest, if desired.

Ingredients (for compote)

• 1 cup cranberries

• 1 cup raspberries

• 1/2 cup sugar

• 1/3 cup water

• 3 peels orange zest

• 2 tablespoons orange juice

• 1 cinnamon stick

• 1/4 teaspoon ground ginger

• pinch of salt

• 1-2 teaspoons chia seeds (I never add these so let’s just consider them optional)

Instructions (for compote)

1. In a saucepan, combine all ingredients except chia seeds and boil.

2. Once boiling, reduce heat to medium-low and simmer for 15 minutes.

3. Add 1 teaspoon of chia seeds and stir to thicken; add more if necessary.

4. Remove from heat and allow to cool.

3. Thumbprint Cookies

Thumbprint cookies are my favorite cookies to make during the holiday season. They’re very simple to make, don’t require too many ingredients, and yet they’re always sure to be scrumptious. I often omit the icing and use this Holiday Jam from Stonewall Kitchen—made from pears, cranberries, and raspberries, with a hint of orange—to create extra special holiday flavor.

Words of Wisdom

“Love and large-hearted giving, when added together, can leave deep marks. It is never easy to cover these marks, dear friends—never easy.”

—O. Henry, “The Gift of the Magi”

“The Gift of the Magi” is a story I always think of when the holiday season rolls around and I begin to wonder how, this year, I can bring delight to my loved ones, show them just how much they really mean to me. It is a story about wanting too much and having too little, about the sacrifices we make for love, about how love is the best gift of all—and the most tragic, the most poignant, the most invaluable.

O. Henry (William Sydney Porter) was commissioned by the Sunday World to write a story for the Christmas issue. It would have to have something to do with Christmas, and it would be accompanied by color illustrations, meaning that the text would have to be ready well ahead of time. As writers often do, O. Henry procrastinated. The deadline approached, reached O. Henry, and sailed by. The editors wrung their hands. Finally, they decided to send the story’s illustrator, Dan Smith, to check up on O.. O. told Smith he hadn’t written a single word—he hadn’t even the faintest idea of what he would write. Smith despaired. O. Henry thought for a bit. Finally he told Smith to draw “a poorly furnished room” in which a man and girl are sitting, side by side, the man fingering a gold watch fob, the girl with “long beautiful hair that is hanging down her back.”4

From these bare bones—the shabby room, the man and the girl and their respective most precious possessions (their only precious possessions)—O. Henry created a tale of great poignancy, deploying, like a magician, his famous technique, the trick ending, to deadly effect. Sentimental as it may seem, neatly wrapped up and tied off with a bow as it may seem, it is not, however, a cheap trick. Having seen the rabbit that will come out of the hat, the card slid out of the sleeve, we are no less moved when we attend the show again and once more see the old trick—the magic has not worn off.

When does a gift become a sacrifice? Is every sacrifice a gift? When we give up what it pains us to give up, freely, willingly, placing the other’s happiness and well-being above our own, only then can we say that we truly love.

Poetry Corner

Gift

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“This is mint and here are three pinks
I have brought you, Mother.
They are wet with rain
And shining with it.
The pinks smell like more of them
In a blue vase:
The mint smells like summer
In many gardens.”

—Hilda Conkling

Hilda Conkling was born in 1910, the daughter of Grace Hazard Conkling, an English professor at Smith College. The whole of Hilda’s oeuvre was produced between the ages of 4 and 14. She would recite the poems to her mother, and her mother would transcribe them, then read them back to her, and Hilda would correct any deviations from what she had spoken. Her first poem was published in Poetry when she was 6 years old, and her first collection, Poems by a Little Girl, was published in 1920, with an introduction by the well-known imagist poet Amy Lowell. However, like her fellow poet prodigy Arthur Rimbaud, she stopped producing poems after a certain age.

In childhood, Hilda revealed in a 1983 interview with the Reading Eagle, the poems used to come to her freely; she didn’t realize her mother had a pen and pad ready and was taking down her words. Unlike the flowers in this poem, Hilda saw her precocious poetic ability as less a “gift” than a “handicap.” She was made to give interviews. The other children laughed at her when they went out to a Douglas Fairbanks movie and a newsreel played beforehand in which Hilda was the subject. Her domineering mother, afraid the publicity would make her too “self-centered,” began to discourage her poetry.

Hilda’s career ambitions dwindled, and she held odd jobs until the age of 40, when she opened a bookstore in Boston. After two decades of running it, she returned to Northampton to live with and take care of her ailing mother, working at a local bookstore there. “In her last few years, mother became more and more dependent on me. But I was starting to understand her better, and if she’d lived five more years, we might have become better friends,” the 72-year-old Conkling said.

Now reading “Gift” in light of learning more about Hilda’s relationship with her mother, I see the flowers almost as a metaphor for Hilda’s poems. The imagery of “Gift”—flowers, summer rain, gardens—may be out of season at this time of year, but it captures beautifully the essence of the perfect gift: beautiful, small, inexpensive, but chosen with delight and given with a full heart. It reminds me of the Percy Bysshe Shelley poem “The Question,” in which the speaker, in the middle of winter, imagines himself in a field full of springtime flowers. He picks them, makes a beautiful nosegay, and then hastens to present it, but—“Oh! to whom?”

Beauty Tip

The best things come in beautiful packages. It’s not just the thought that counts, it’s the way you’ve wrapped it. I wholeheartedly concur with ’s Rules for Wrapping. There’s no excuse for being lazy when tutorials like this one abound.

Lingering Question

What’s the best gift you’ve ever received that was totally unexpected? Let me know in the comments!

Other Substack Gift Guides!

• A Flower-Inspired Gift Guide by —these gifts are so fun and eclectic, and I love how they all center around the theme of one of my favorite things ever: flowers!

• a holiday gift guide by —recommendations for book lovers, career mavens, cool guys, and more

• A Collection of Stories and Thoughtful Finds by —there are so many really interesting, unique, and handmade items here!

• In Defense of the Humble Gift Guide by —helpfully organized by price range, with a little defense of the “recommendation culture” you often see here on Substack

• Habitually Chic Holiday Gift Guide No. 1 by —just the mere act of going through this gift guide makes me feel a thousand times chicer

• In last Friday’s post I included 3 gift ideas for the book-lover in your life and a gift for writers!

• Not a gift guide but a sobering dose of cold, hard reality about Black Friday from

• Finally, on gratitude—saying “thank you” to a gift is just as important as the art of gifting itself

Dear Readers, I hope you all have a lovely and restful weekend! If you enjoyed, please give this post a like, share your thoughts in the comment, and share with a friend!

For this week’s post, the mood board and little essay are one and the same, kind of like what I did in this post from July. Also, since last Friday’s post was quite intense, I wanted to give you guys something lighter. I hope you enjoy!

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9 Places to Read, Rated

When I read a book, and when I return to it, there is always engrained in my memory not only certain particulars of plot and character, word and phrase, the author’s style and tone and way of viewing the world, but also my own circumstances of reading. If I pick up Jane Eyre again, I always go back to those sunny summer afternoons I first read it as a teenager after long days of performing experiments with little tissues in a lab, waiting for my mother to pick me up. Goethe’s Elective Affinities always reminds me of a plane. I can’t separate Dickens’s Hard Times from lying in bed next to my father as a child.

These associations are where world meets word, where fiction and reality collide, where we see a book for what it really is: a portal. Sometimes page and place correspond and inform one another. When I went to New York last December, I was reading Lauren Elkins’s Flâneuse, in which she details some of her own experiences of walking around that city. I saw myself as part of a tradition of city-walkers, my walking linked with the walking of so many others, myself pawing back through the ghosts of eras past like Lucy in the wardrobe pushing aside old coats to reach Narnia.

Of all the places I love to read, the best is bed. Nothing is cozier, comfier, more suited to sailing off on the seas of the imagination. But books are thankfully portable, and there are many other places one might be found reading. Below are nine of them.

(left to right, top to bottom)

1. At a bookstall, with your nose glued to the pages — 2/10

Norman Rockwell, The Bookworm (Man with Nose in Book), 1926

This poor man. He is trying to bore a tunnel through the words with his nose. He is not just a bookworm, he is a bookmole. Reading like this would give me a headache. It seems almost as bad a reading experience as reading in a car (I’d give that a rating of 1/10–massive migraine guaranteed every time). Having all those other books and papers and ephemera—is that an umbrella?—tucked under the crook of my arm, sliding away, slipping out, inch by inch, with none of my hands free to catch the catastrophe, twists the knob of my anxiety all the way up to 11.

2. In a garden — 9/10

Henri Matisse, Woman Reading in a Garden, 1903

This is lovely. I can just imagine the light playing on the leaves, the scent of flowers rising up in a slow perfume, a beautiful summer breeze whispering through the leaves of trees, rustling the leaves of what I’m reading. What could be better than a long languid afternoon in nature, which is at one and the same time a long languid afternoon spent with one’s favorite author? The only reason this doesn’t get a 10/10 is the possibility of bugs.

3. Perusing a mystery novel on a train from San Francisco to New York before looking up from your book and witnessing a murder that lures you to get in contact with the novel’s author (whose skills in writing about crime you mistake for an ability to solve it) and eventually persuade him to not only leave his fiancée but marry you — 10/10

Deanna Durbin as Nicki Collins in Lady on a Train, 1945

What more is there to say? I think this is the apotheosis of fiction-reading. The reader dreams of nothing higher than for one’s favorite fictions to step off, suddenly, shockingly, magically, off the page and materialize around oneself, solid and real and sure, and for the beloved author of those fictions to love oneself back.

4. On a couch that matches the cover of your book, in front of a curtain that matches the cover of your book — 10/10

“The Spirit of England”: Vittoria Ceretti by Ellen von Unwerth for Harper’s Bazaar UK, April 2016

Do it for the aesthetic. A book should bleed from its pages and infect everything around it. The whole world should sing in concert with your book; this is what the poets meant when they said that Orpheus’s song could charm a rock into movement. Of course, every time you start a new book you will need to reupholster your sofas and redo your decor, but that’s nothing. A pittance.

5. By the side of an ethereal Kate Moss, whispering into her ear — 8/10

“Woman of Style”: Kate Moss and Setsuko Ideta by Tim Walker for Vogue Italia, September 2015

The reading of a book should be regularly interrupted by short breaks in which Kate Moss and I whisper, commiserate, and fraternize, while she looks dreamily on, great clouds of her hair standing on end. It almost looks as if Ideta is seducing Moss. But then, what is a great book but a wonderful seduction?

6. In the bathtub while having an argument with your significant other — 3/10

Brigitte Bardot and Michel Piccoli as Camille and Paul in Le Mépris (1954)

When I was a baby I used to have those squishy waterproof bathtub books. I don’t think any books other than bathtub books should be read in a bathtub. I know how clumsy I am. Mid-sentence, the book would slip from my soapy fingers and go plunging down into that murk of soap suds and sweat, bubbles and dirty water, to emerge unsalvageable. However, I give Brigitte Bardot a few points because I am pretty sure she is just using the book as a prop in the argument she is having with her husband, which takes up about a third of this movie. Her husband has been neglecting her and his own artistic integrity. He badgers her about why she has become distant and no longer loves him. The book becomes a statement, a protest, a weapon. It is also—being about Fritz Lang, the director who stars in Le Mépris as himself—a wink.

7. On the bench outside the high school you don’t go to anymore because your rich grandparents are paying for your private school, waiting for your high school boyfriend— 4/10

Alexis Bledel as Rory Gilmore in Gilmore Girls (2000–2007)

I love reading and I hate waiting. Reading ameliorates the pain of waiting, but waiting diminishes the joy of reading. The minutes shrink, the time sails by, the edge is taken off one’s boredom, but a low-level restlessness hums in the background—or, if one is so absorbed in one’s reading that the restlessness goes completely, the arrival of the awaited one comes as an unwelcome interruption. Still, reading while waiting is better than doing almost anything else while waiting, except possibly people-watching.

8. On the street, walking the dog, wearing an outfit that matches the dog — 3/10

Naomi Campbell by Peter Lindbergh for Vogue, June 1990

Multitasking—walking a dog, slaying in an outfit that matches the dog, and reading—probably comes naturally to Naomi Campbell, but for me, mere mortal that I am, I am sure I would get lost or lose my place in my reading or be given strange looks by the neighbors or, God forbid, step into dog poop. It would not look chic. It would look very, very stupid.

9. In the woods, standing up — 3/10

Carl von Marr (1858–1936), Untitled (Woman Reading)

There is no need to read in the woods. There is no need to read standing up. You could be attacked by a bear, and your legs would be too weak from all that standing to run fast enough. There are ticks in the woods. There are lots of things you don’t even know. Why take the risk? The only time I advise it is for reading fairytales, especially the Brothers Grimm. Like I said, do it for the aesthetic.

3 4 Things I’m in Love With This Week

Gifts for book lovers edition!

1. Book Darts: book darts are little metal line marks that you can slide onto a page of text in order to mark not just a page but a specific line. They come in an adorable vintage-looking tin, and the best thing is that they’re reusable, unlike the paper page flags I normally use.

   

2. First Folio Postcards by Louisa Hare: Louisa Hare is an artist and printmaker who grew up only a few miles from Stratford-upon-Avon, Shakespeare’s birthplace. While working in an antiquarian bookstore there, she discovered a beautiful reproduction of Shakespeare’s First Folio and decided to illustrate it using traditional letterpress printing, a method that has remained much the same since Shakespeare’s time. Their rustic quality is reminiscent of old woodcuts, and I love their different colors and the way they’re paired with expects from Shakespeare’s plays and poems. You can also get a set from the Folger Shakespeare Library.

3. Guipure lace bookmarks: These lace bookmarks come from Bruges, Belgium, where a unique tradition of lacemaking sprung up in the 16th century. Large lacemaking schools were established, giving thousands of poor girls a way to earn a living. By the late 20th century, this number dwindled to a few hundred. Today, fortunately, some younger women seem to be reviving an interest in preserving the lacemaking craft again. I love the delicate beauty of these bookmarks, which are sure to bring joy to any reading experience.

plus a gift for writers!

4. Empress Box Writing Paper by Pineider: I couldn’t resist including this ever since I saw it online about a week ago while doing my once-in-6-months search for beautiful stationary sets that I’ll never actually end up buying. Apparently, Francesco Pineider created the first personalized printed letters in Italy, setting up shop in Florence. This letter set, with 24 sheets of paper and 24 matching envelopes, edged in a bright mango color, is so beautifully elegant, and I love the way that the top of the envelope curves and the other three sides are folded in. It would be beautiful to use if one had a fountain pen (I do) and beautiful handwriting (I don’t). But would I ever spend that much on stationery? Maybe if, as the name of the set implies, I were an empress.

   

Words of Wisdom

“It is true that we get nothing whatsoever except pleasure from reading; it is true that the wisest of us is unable to say what that pleasure may be. But that pleasure—mysterious, unknown, useless as it is—is enough. That pleasure is so curious, so complex, so immensely fertilising to the mind of anyone who enjoys it, and so wide in its effects, that it would not be in the least surprising to discover, on the day of judgement when secrets are revealed and the obscure is made plain, that the reason why we have grown from pigs to men and woman, and come out from our caves, and dropped our bows and arrows, and sat round the fire and talked and drunk and made merry and given to the poor and helped the sick and made pavements and houses and erected some sort of shelter and society on the waste of the world, is nothing but this: we have loved reading.”

— Virginia Woolf, “How Should One Read a Book?”

In “How Should One Read a Book?” (first given as a speech at Hayes Court Common school in 1926, then published in The Yale Review and later in The Second Common Reader) Virginia Woolf begins with the observation that today we can find books everywhere, we even have special rooms dedicated to them, all kinds of books, and that, easy enough as it is to string together letters, “how are we to teach people so to read Paradise Lost as to see that it is a great poem, or Tess of the D’Urbervilles so as to see that it is a good novel?”

First, we must acknowledge that poetry is different from novels is different from biography. Then, even within a genre, no two authors are the same; we must be charitable, we must leave the judges’ bench and go and stand with the criminal and understand the crimes, as it were, from within the criminal’s mind, for it is by their “uncompromising idiosyncrasy” that the best writers make us put effort into reading them correctly. But if we are now tired of fiction (seeing as “reading is one of the most arduous and exhausting of occupations”), we must refill the tank of the imagination with non-fiction, with fact. Only once our tank is full can we take on the extreme make-believe of poetry.

Then we reach the end of the final page and shut the book. What are we to make of it? Whatever it is we have read, we must put it down, we must go and do something else, we must wait for when “the whole book floats to the top of the mind complete,” and only then must we leave the criminal and “mount the bench” where the judges sit. There we must weigh the book against other books—the best books—of its kind we have read. Only by such reading are “masterpieces… helped into the world.”

As to the question of whether it is profit or pleasure we get from reading, Woolf comes down, at last, on the side of pleasure. Which, as everybody knows, is its own profit.

Poetry Corner

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Moððe word fræt.       Mē þæt þuhte
wrǣtlicu wyrd,       þā ic þæt wundor gefrægn,
þæt se wyrm forswealg       wera gied sumes,
þēof in þȳstro,       þrymfæstne cwide
ond þæs strangan staþol.       Stælgiest ne wæs
wihte þȳ glēawra,       þe hē þām wordum swealg.

A moth ate words. To me that seemed
a curious event, when I heard about that wonder,
that a worm swallowed the speech of some man,
a thief in the dark, glorious discourse
and its mighty foundation. The thieving visitor was not
a whit the wiser when he swallowed those words.

—Exeter Book Riddle 47, my translation

I love Old English riddles, they’re so fun and cheeky and full of wit. Some of them are quite hard to guess, genuine riddles, while others, like this one, have a solution that’s readily apparent but nevertheless delightful simply for the clever and elegant way the poet describes the object. The answer to this one—“bookworm”—doesn’t take much racking of brains, I don’t think. The “worm” here is a moth in its larval stage, and the “mighty foundation” of the “glorious discourse” is, of course, the parchment on which that discourse was written (parchment, made from animal skin, is definitely mightier than the paper most of our books are printed on today).

This riddle comes from the Exeter Book, one of four surviving manuscripts from the 10th century that preserve almost all the Old English poetry we have today. It was donated to the library of the Exeter Cathedral by Leofric, the first bishop of Exeter, in 1072, and, though its cover was used as a cutting board and a beer mat and its last 14 pages burnt at some point, it now seems to live there safely, locked up in a vault.

At the end of the Exeter Book, there is a compilation of about a hundred riddles, many of them inspired by the Aenigmata, a fourth- or fifth-century collection of riddles by the Latin poet Symphosius. However, the Anglo-Saxon riddles don’t merely translate the Latin ones, they expand on them, add detail to them, play around with them, linger on them. Here is the Aenigmata’s precursor to the poem above:

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Littera me pavit nec quid sit littera novi:
In libris vixi nec sum studiosior inde;
Exedi Musas nec adhuc tamen ipsa profeci. 

Letters fed me, but what letters are, I don’t know:
I lived in books, but I am not the more studious for it;
I devoured the Muses, but nevertheless I’ve made no headway.

The virtue of the Aenigmata riddle lies it its concision and neat parallelism: X nec Y, “I ate books and yet I’m still a dumb worm,” in three witty variations. What I like about the Exeter riddle is the insertion of the speaker—“To me that seemed… when I heard….” The speaker expresses his own sense of amazement (“a curious event,” “that wonder”) at witnessing this creature worm its way through manuscripts, and the fact that it is not “a whit the wiser” comes as a surprise, a realization, the punchline of a joke.

The “bookworm” could very well be metaphorical. I myself eat so many books, book after book, swallowing down now this person’s speech, now that person’s, gobbling and gulping great heaping spoonfuls of words, straight down the gullet, but, dumb worm that I am, what do I profit?

Beauty Tip

Go to a bookstore, browse a section you normally don’t, and pick a book that seems interesting—but totally out of the ordinary for you!

Lingering Question

What’s your favorite place to read? Or what’s a reading experience (in terms of your reading environment) that’s been particularly memorable for you? I’d love to know in the comments!

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