What I remember most clearly from that evening is how much I enjoyed sitting there between Philip and Marie. They had a closeness which I could not help but notice. Not the sort of unspoken awareness that shuts other people out, the self-absorption of a couple in the first throes of love who need constantly to make contact by look or touch, nor the fragile intimacy which makes an outsider feel like a disruptive element and gives you the urge to simply leave the lovers alone with their delicate alliance. They had an air of peace about them, Marie and Philip, which reminded me of the time, five years ago, when I first met Thomas. The sudden feeling of sharing something inexplicable, a sense of wonder at the existence of the other—the one person who makes everything simple—a feeling of being calmed down and thrown into turmoil at one and the same time. Philip and Marie had clearly decided to spend the rest of their lives together, it was as simple as that, so what could they do but see what the future would bring.

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Was he testing to see how elastic love could be? Was he simply a man who had gladly given his youth to a man in midlife and now, nearing midlife himself, wanted back the fortune he squandered? Wanted sex and love and folly? The very things Robert saved him from all those years ago? As for the good things, as for safety, comfort, love—Less found himself smashing them to bits. Perhaps he did not know what he was doing; perhaps it was a kind of madness. But perhaps he did know. Perhaps he was burning down a house in which he no longer wanted to live.

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There was suddenly a great deal Isbell wanted to say. They could have talked. They could have pushed the plates aside and leaned forward on their elbows, talking while the dust floated sideways through bolts of sunshine and the eggs turned cold, but it didn’t quite happen. The moments don’t fulfill themselves always. Somehow they started eating in silence and it was impossible to begin.

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I will not forget the last time he looked at me. The morning light filled the room, reminding me of so many mornings and of the morning I had first come there. Giovanni sat on the bed, completely naked, holding a glass of cognac between his hands. His body was dead white, his face was wet and grey. I was at the door with my suitcase. With my hand on the knob, I looked at him. Then I wanted to beg him to forgive me. But this would have been too great a confession; any yielding at that moment would have locked me forever in that room with him. And in a way this was exactly what I wanted. I felt a tremor go through me, like the beginning of an earthquake, and felt, for an instant, that I was drowning in his eyes. His body, which I had come to know so well, glowed in the light and charged and thickened the air between us. Then something opened in my brain, a secret, noiseless door swung open, frightening me: it had not occurred to me until that instant that, in fleeing from his body, I confirmed and perpetuated his body’s power over me. Now, as though I had been branded, his body was burned into my mind, into my dreams. And all this time he did not take his eyes from me. He seemed to find my face more transparent than a shop window. He did not smile, he was neither grave, nor vindictive, nor sad; he was still. He was waiting, I think, for me to cross that space and take him in my arms again—waiting, as one waits at a deathbed for the miracle one dare not disbelieve, which will not happen. I had to get out of there for my face showed too much, the war in my body was dragging me down. My feet refused to carry me over to him again. The wind of my life was blowing me away.

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One horror of motherhood lies in the moments when she can see both the exquisiteness of her child and his utter inconsequence to others. There are so many boys in the world.

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She had a way of walking up the block that had made me uncomfortable from the time I was ten years old. She walked like no other woman in the neighborhood. A woman’s walk might be brisk or lazy, but inevitably it was the errand-bound walk of a housewife; her legs were attached to her torso for the strict purpose of useful locomotion, she was not walking to feel her body in motion or to have its movement acknowledged or responded to. Nettie was. Her walk was slow and deliberate. She moved first one haunch, then the other, making her hips sway. Everyone knew this woman was going nowhere, that she was walking to walk, walking to feel the effect she had on the street. Her walk insisted on the flesh beneath the clothes. It said, “This body has the power to make you want.” There was nothing like her for a thousand miles around. Men and women alike hungered for her.

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“Do you know Gödel’s first incompleteness theorem? In mundane terms, it states that there are some statements of mathematics that are true but can never be proven. Xie, who’s the UO China lead containment architect, was telling me that if you extend that concept from mathematics to the real world you get an assertion that some physical realities are just going to be there and scientifically unjustifiable. Inexplicabilities. Like there’s going to be a wall we hit one day, where all the remaining Unknowns are just going to be fixtures, permanently Unknowable, and we’ll have two options: give up and live our lives, or die trying and failing to know them.”

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On the verge of the one thing that he had been denied his entire career, he could think of nothing else, and abandoned himself completely. But even in the midst of his ecstasy, he continued to worry. Why had he suddenly been granted this strange gift? Why him, why now? He had done nothing to deserve it. The last years of his life had been a waste, and ever since he had met Nelly, his entire consciousness had been consumed by the many trivial worries of romantic love. Though perhaps that was the key to all of this: possession, a sudden invasion from without, work that was not the product of thought or will but, as the Greeks knew well, of rapture and ardor. He needed to get out of the way, to let things pass through him, and be changed.

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They handled it by making of their lives a theater piece, a family romance. It was their story of triumph over adversity, one of the best women’s stories there is in America: hopeful, enduring, centered in family, and fraudulent—not especially because it was deceitful but because it was built on so much unadmitted pain that it was impossible to sustain.

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As she sat with him now and received the word of God, muted but not defeated by Dwight Haefle’s delivery of it, she wondered what the purpose of a person’s life was. Almost everything in life was vanity—success a vanity, privilege a vanity, Europe a vanity, beauty a vanity. When you stripped away the vanity and stood alone before God, what was left? Only loving your neighbor as yourself. Only worshiping the Lord, Sunday after Sunday. Even if you lived for eighty years, the duration of a life was infinitesimal, your eighty years of Sundays were over in a blink. Life had no length; only in depth was there salvation.

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“Men don’t feel bad the way you want them to,” I told her. “They just get grouchy and depressed when they can’t have what they want. That’s why you got fired. You’re depressing. Consider it a compliment, if you want.”

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The spring was on and the days were getting longer. I missed my bus often, waiting to spy on the wife in the town-house apartment. How could I do it, how could a person go that low? And I understand your question, to which I reply, Are you kidding? That’s nothing. I’d been much lower than that. And I expected to see myself do worse.

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The fragrance of spring-time met me. The very atmosphere of boyhood and youth, so deeply familiar and yet so legendary, was around me and in my veins flowed the blood of those days. All that I had done and thought and been since, fell away from me and I was young again. An hour, a few minutes before, I had prided myself on knowing what love was and desire and longing, but it had been the love and the longing of an old man. Now I was young again and this glowing current of fire that I felt in me, this mighty impulse, this unloosening passion like that wind in March that brings the thaw, was young and new and genuine.

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However hot the day became, the sea here was a refrigerator throwing off a sceptical little breeze. She liked the feeling that Maine was basically inhospitable, that it would soon shake out its summer visitors, like a dog on a beach. In the chink between two winters the northern light sparkled hungrily on the sea. She imagined it stretched out like a gaunt El Greco saint. The thought made her want to paint again. She wanted to make love again. She wanted to think again, if she was going to start making lists, but somehow she had lost her independence. Her being was fused with Thomas’s. She was like someone whose clothes had been stolen while she was having a swim, and now she didn’t know how to get out of this tiring beautiful pool.

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“Just give him a second,” Jordi said. “The initial reaction isn’t the eternal reaction.” This was a thing from a Jungian self-help book that we often told each other when our partners fucking hated us.

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“There’s no meaning. What’s the meaning of the universe? What’s the meaning of a flea? It’s just there. That’s it. And your own meaning is that you’re there. We’re so engaged in doing things to achieve purposes of outer value that we forget that the inner value, the rapture that is associated with being alive, is what it’s all about.”

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The breeze at dawn has secrets to tell you.
Don’t go back to sleep.
You must ask for what you really want.
Don’t go back to sleep.
People are going back and forth across the doorsill
where the two worlds touch.
The door is round and open.
Don’t go back to sleep.

I would love to kiss you.
The price of kissing is your life.

Now my loving is running toward my life shouting,
What a bargain, let’s buy it.

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Love is not reliant on judgment, but on a decision to set judgment aside. Love is anarchy. Love is chaos. We don’t love the deserving; we love flawed and imperfect human beings, in an emotional logic that belongs to an entirely different weather system than the chilly climate of reason.

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Why should life be made endurable? I know that nothing consoles and nothing justifies except a story - but that doesn’t stop all stories from being lies. Only the greatest men can speak and still be truthful. Any artist knows this obscurely; he knows that a theory is death, and that all expression is weighted with theory. Only the strongest can rise against that weight. For most of us, for almost all of us, truth can be attained, if at all, only in silence. It is in silence that the human spirit touches the divine. This was something which the ancients understood. Psyche was told that if she spoke about her pregnancy her child would be a mortal; if she kept silent it would be a god.

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Maybe we’re just born to love and worry about the people we know, and to go on loving and worrying even when there are more important things we should be doing. And if that means the human species is going to die out, isn’t it in a way a nice reason to die out, the nicest reason you can imagine? Because when we should have been reorganizing the distribution of the world’s resources and transitioning collectively to a sustainable economic model, we were worrying about sex and friendship instead. Because we loved each other too much and found each other too interesting. And I love that about humanity, and in fact it’s the very reason I root for us to survive—because we are stupid about each other.

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