Love

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From Henry and June (1986)

  But my wisdom prevented me from believing. He, too, knows, because he adds, “I’m weak in June’s hands, Anaïs. If, when she comes back, I act exactly as she wants me to act, you must not feel that I disappoint you or fail you.” This surprises me, because it seems to me that when I first rushed into my passion, with characteristic intensity, and sensed the instability, the tragedy in the situation, I pulled back and diminished the importance of our relationship. I exhausted my capacity for tragedy with John Erskine. I suffered then to the limit. I don’t know if I can ever suffer as much again, and I believe Henry’s feelings are similar. I want to enjoy the present hour deeply, thoughtlessly. Henry bending over me, desirous, Henry’s tongue between my legs, Henry’s vigorous, torrential possessiveness. “You are the only woman I can be faithful to. I want to protect you.” When I see June’s photograph in Henry’s room, I hate June, because at this moment I love Henry. I hate June, and yet I know that I also am in her power, and that when she comes back . . . “What I feel with you that I don’t feel with June is that beyond love, we are friends. June and I are not friends.” One cannot escape from one’s own nature, although Henry said yesterday, “There are flaws in your goodness.” Flaws. What a relief. Fissures. I may escape through them. Some perversity drives me outside of the role I am forced to play. Always imagining another role. Never static. When Henry wants to read my journal, I tremble. I know he suspects that I betray him constantly. I would like to, and I cannot. Since he has come to me I have practiced instinctively the faithfulness of the whores: I do not take any pleasure except with him. My greatest fear is Hugo’s desiring me the same day, and it happens frequently. Last night he was ardent, ecstatic—and I, obedient and deceptive. Simulating enjoyment. He thought it an exceptional night. His pleasure was tremendous. When I seem to be overflowing and calling for all the sensual pleasures obtainable, do I mean it? If I felt attracted to some woman in the street or a man I danced with, would I really be able to satisfy my desire? Is there a desire? The next time such a feeling overtakes me, I will not resist it. I must know.

• From Aquinas's Summa Theologiae (Critical Essays on the Classics Series) (2006)

  The Prima Secundae moves more slowly. Having briefly sketched a distinction between the different species of cardinal virtues (political, purifying, and so on), Thomas turns to the three theological virtues: faith, hope, and charity (Ia IIae, q. 62). These are the sole virtues that have God as their object. Because they enable us to share in the divine nature and direct us to a happiness unattainable in the present life, we cannot acquire them through our own resources; we can have them only through the grace of God. Thomas follows St. Paul in praising charity or love as the greatest of the theological virtues (Ia IIae, q. 62, a. 4; 1 Cor 13:13). Although God infuses all three virtues together, one can still discern a conceptual order. Through faith, we believe what God has revealed of Himself and of the future life; through hope, we come to love Him as the source of our own happiness; but only through charity can we love Him as an end in Himself—as the supreme good, deserving of more love than any other, not merely as good for us. The love characteristic of hope is the love of desire; charity alone produces the genuine love of friendship. The crucial difference in motivation explains why Thomas describes charity as the “mother,” “root,” and “form” of all the virtues, even going so far as to declare that faith and hope are not virtues properly so called in the absence of charity (Ia IIae, q. 62, a. 4; Ia IIae, q. 65, a. 4; Ia IIae, q. 66, a. 6). Readers must wait until the next question, concerning the causes of virtue, to learn more about the prudence and moral virtues given by God. Thomas argues first that we need these infused virtues to attain the complete happiness of the afterlife, then that they differ not merely in degree of perfection but in kind (species) from virtues acquired naturally (Ia IIae, q. 63, aa. 3—4). The difference in kind derives partly from the different goods to which the virtues are ordered. While naturally acquired moral virtues make people well suited to the human affairs and earthly happiness that concern all—because we are all human—infused moral virtues make people well suited to the life Christians must live because they are Christians: persons belonging to the household of God, with love of God as the highest good, faith in God’s word, and hope for the happiness of the afterlife. The difference in perceived goods and related motivations dictates different standards of conduct. This is Thomas’s second reason for regarding naturally acquired and infused moral virtues as different species. For instance, while human reason alone establishes that people should not eat or drink in ways harmful to body or mind, the higher rule of divine law requires more in the way of abstinence (Ia IIae, q. 63, a. 4).

• From Henry and June (1986)

  Henry comes to Louveciennes on a hot summer afternoon and lays me on the table, and then on the black carpet. He sits on the edge of my bed and looks transfigured. The scattered man, easily swayed, now collects himself to talk about his book. At this moment he is a big man. I sit and marvel at him. A moment before, flushed by drink, he was scattering his riches. The moment he crystallizes is beautiful to watch. I was slow in tuning myself to his mood. I could have fucked all afternoon. But then I also loved our transition into big talk. Our talks are wonderful, interplays, not duels but swift illuminations of one another. I can make his tentative thoughts click. He enlarges mine. I fire him. He makes me flow. There is always movement between us. And he is grasping. He takes hold of me like a prey. Here we lie, putting order in his ideas, deciding on the place of realistic incidents in his novels. His book swells up inside of me like my very own. I am fascinated by the activity in his head, the surprises, the curiosity, the gusto, the amorality, the sensibilities, and the rascalities. And I loved his last letter to me: “Don’t expect me to be sane any more. Don’t let’s be sensible. It was a marriage at Louveciennes, you can’t dispute it. I came away with a piece of you sticking to me; I am walking about swimming, in an ocean of blood, your Andalusian blood, distilled and poisonous. Everything I do and say and think relates back to our marriage. I saw you as the mistress of your home, a Moor with a heavy face, a Negress with a white body, eyes all over your skin, woman, woman, woman. I can’t see how I can go on living away from you—these intermissions are death. How did it seem to you when Hugo came back? Was I still there? I can’t picture you moving about with him as you did with me. Legs closed. Frailty. Sweet treacherous acquiescence. Bird docility. You became a woman with me. I was almost terrified by it. You are not just thirty years old—you are a thousand years old. “Here I am back and still smoldering with passion, like wine smoking. Not a passion any longer for flesh, but a complete hunger for you, a devouring hunger. I read the papers about suicides and murder and I understand it all thoroughly. I feel murderous, suicidal. “I still hear you singing in the kitchen . . . a sort of inharmonic, monotonous Cuban wail. I know you’re happy in the kitchen and the meal you’re cooking is the best meal we ever ate together. I know you would scald yourself and not complain. I feel the greatest peace and joy sitting in the dining room listening to your rustling about, your dress like

• From Henry and June (1986)

  I feel great joy at receiving a long letter from Henry. I realize that he and June have made Dostoevsky alive and terrible to me. At some moments I melt with gratitude at the thought of what Henry has given me, in just being what he is; at others, I am in despair over the liberated instincts which make him such a bad friend. I remember that he showed more hurt vanity than love when the Hungarian tried to put his hands under my dress that night at the Select. “What did he think I was, a fool?” When drunk, he is capable of anything. Now he has his head shaved like a convict’s, in self-abasement. His love of June is self-laceration. In the end, all I know is that he has fecundated me in more than one way and that I will have few lovers as interesting as Henry. As we again begin our duel of letters—mad, merry, free letters—I feel a physical, gnawing pain at his absence. It looks to me today that Henry is going to be a part of my life for many years even if he is only my lover for a few months. A snapshot of him, with his heavy mouth open, moves me. I quickly start thinking about a lamp that will be better for his eyes, become concerned over his vacation. It makes me acutely happy that he has finished rewriting his second book within the last two months, that he is so energetic and productive. And what do I miss? His voice, his hands, his body, his tenderness, his bearishness, his goodness and deviltry. As he says, “June has never been able to discover whether I am a saint or a devil.” I don’t know either. At the same time I find plenty of love to give Hugo. I marvel at this, when we are acting like lovers, cursing the twin beds and sleeping in great discomfort in a too small bed, holding hands over the dinner table, kissing in the boat. It is easy to love and there are so many ways to do it. When I ask Henry what stopped him from reading the rest of my purple journal, he answers: “I don’t know any more than you why I stopped reading at a certain point. You may be sure I regret it. I can only say that it was an impersonal sadness, things turning out badly not because of evil or maliciousness but through a sort of inherent fatality. Making even the most cherishable and sacred things seem so illusory, unstable, transitory. If you substituted X for a certain character, it would be just the same. As a matter of fact, perhaps I was substituting myself.”

• From Henry and June (1986)

  with walls of newborn leaves, blossoms, neatly raked alleys, names of flowers on sticks, old trees, hoary ivy, mistletoe. I will fill it with Henry. I walk up the hill remembering him grave, withdrawn, watching dancers. I ring the bell thinking of one of his humorous corrections of my book. In my bedroom I take off my stained underwear. I remember phrases of his that I will savor in the night. The taste of his penis is still in my mouth. My ear is burning from his bites. I want to fill the world with Henry, with his diabolical notes, plagiarisms, distortions, caricatures, nonsense, lies, profundities. The journal, too, will be filled with Henry. Yet I told him that he had killed the journal. He had been teasing me about it, and I had just discovered vegetative enjoyment. I was lying in bed after dinner, rose dress crumpled and stained. The journal was a disease. I was cured. For three days I had not written. I had not even written about our mad night of talking, when we heard the birds, looked out of the kitchen window and saw the dawn. I had missed so many dawns. I didn’t care about anything except lying there with Henry. No more journal writing. Then his teasing vanished. Oh, no, that would be a pity, he said. The journal must not die. He would miss it. It did not die. I can find no other way of loving my Henry than filling pages with him when he is not here to be caressed and bitten. When I left him this morning, early, he was asleep. I wanted so much to kiss him. I felt despair as I quietly packed my black valise. Hugo will be home in four hours. Henry said that in my novel it was curious to note the difference between the me who talks to Hugo and the one who talks to John. With Hugo, I behave youthfully, naively, almost religiously. With John, I show maturity and dexterity. It is the same even now. To Hugo I give idealistic explanations of my actions, because that is what he craves. Quite the opposite of what I give Henry. Henry says that after reading my book he can never again be sure of me. His worldliness helps him to catch every unconscious revelation, every innuendo. I feel that the book would hurt Hugo, whereas Henry feels I have, in the end, glorified him. And it is true. Henry even helped me to discard a few passages which weakened Hugo’s character. But I will never again write about Hugo, because what I write for him and about him is hypocritical and youthful. I write about him as one writes about God, with traditional faith. His qualities are precious to me but not the most inspiring. All that is over now. And in dropping the constant effort to exalt my love of Hugo, I also drop the last vestiges of my immaturity.

• From Henry and June (1986)

  But when we talk and write, a wonderful deformation takes place, whereby we heighten, exaggerate, color, distend. There are satanic joys known to writers only. His muscular style and my enameled one wrestle and copulate independently. But when I touch him, the human miracle is accomplished. He is the man I would scrub floors for, I would do the humblest and the most magnificent things for. He is thinking of our marriage, which I feel will never be, but he is the only man I would marry. We are greater together. After Henry, there will never again be this polarity. A future without him is darkness. I cannot even imagine it. Allendy admits to Hugo that there is danger in my literary friendships because I play with experience like a child and take my games seriously, that my literary adventures carry me to milieus where I don’t belong. Big, compassionate Allendy and faithful and jealous Hugo, anxious over the child who has such a dangerous need of love. Allendy has not taken my literary-creative side seriously, and I have resented his simplification of my nature to pure woman. He has refused to cloud his vision with a consideration of my imagination. The absolute sincerity of men like Allendy and Hugo is beautiful but uninteresting to me. It does not fascinate me as much as Henry’s insincerities, dramatics, literary escapades, experiments, rascalities. When Henry and I are lying in each other’s arms, all games cease, and for the moment we find our basic wholeness. When we take up our work again, we instill our imagination into our lives. We believe in living not only as human beings but as creators, adventurers. That side of me which Allendy discards, the disturbed, dangerous, erotic side, is precisely the side Henry seizes and responds to, the one he fulfills and expands. Allendy is right about my need of love. I cannot live without love. Love is at the root of my being. He talks to ease Hugo’s burning jealousy, perhaps to ease his own doubts. His passion is protective, compassionate, so he underlines my frailty, my naïveté; whereas I, with a deeper instinct, choose a man who compels my strength, who makes enormous demands on me, who does not doubt my courage or my toughness, who does not believe me naïve or innocent, who has the courage to treat me like a woman. January 1932 We met, June and I, at American Express. I knew she would be late, and I did not mind. I was there before the hour, almost ill with tenseness.

• From Henry and June (1986)

  She sits there about to leave me and I stand by in torment. “I want to kiss you,” I say. “I want to kiss you,” says June, and she offers her mouth, which I kiss for a long time. When she left, I just wanted to sleep for many days, but I still had something to face, my relationship with Henry. We asked him to come to Louveciennes. I wanted to offer him peace and a soothing house, but of course I knew we would talk about June. We walked off our restlessness, and we talked. There is in both of us an obsession to grasp June. He has no jealousy of me, because he said I brought out wonderful things in June, that it was the first time June had ever attached herself to a woman of value. He seemed to expect I would have power over her life. When he saw that I understood June and was ready to be truthful with him, we talked freely. Yet once I paused, hesitant, wondering at my faithlessness to June. Then Henry observed that although truth, in June’s case, had to be disregarded, it could be the only basis of any exchange between us. We both felt the need of allying our two minds, our two different logics, in understanding the problem of June. Henry loves her and always her. He also wants to possess June the character, the powerful, fictionlike personage. In his love for her he has had to endure so many torments that the lover has taken refuge in the writer. He has written a ferocious and resplendent book about June and Jean. He was questioning the lesbianism. When he heard me say certain things he had heard June say, he was startled, because he believes me. I said, “After all, if there is an explanation of the mystery it is this: The love between women is a refuge and an escape into harmony. In the love between man and woman there is resistance and conflict. Two women do not judge each other, brutalize each other, or find anything to ridicule. They surrender to sentimentality, mutual understanding, romanticism. Such love is death, I’ll admit.” Last night I sat up until one o’clock reading Henry’s novel, Moloch , while he read mine. His was overwhelming, the work of a giant. I was at a loss to tell him how it affected me. And this giant sat there quietly and read my slight book with such comprehension, such enthusiasm, talking about the deftness of it, the subtlety, the voluptuousness, shouting at certain passages, criticizing, too. What a force he is!

• From Henry and June (1986)

  I remember the afternoon Henry came to Louveciennes after reading my childhood diary, expecting to find a girl of eleven. He was still moved by its pages. But my deviltry laughed away the child, and very soon I had him stirred up, saying mad things and fucking me. I wanted to triumph over the child. I refused to become sentimental, to retrogress. It was like a duel. The woman in me is strong. And Henry said he was drunk with looking at me. I told him I didn’t want him for a husband (why, I don’t know). I laughed at his passionateness. And the minute he was gone I wanted to have him back, to love him with ferocity. I had been more moved by his German seriousness and sentimentality than I had wanted to show. Heinrich! How I love his jealous questions, his cynical suspicions, his curiosity. The streets of Paris belong to him, the cafés and the whores. Modern writing belongs to him; he does it better than any. Every potency, from the whip of the wind to a revolution, belongs to him. I love his defects, too. One of them is fault finding, a demoniac habit of contradiction. But does it matter, since we understand each other so well that he cannot imagine us quarreling seriously over anything? When I think of him talking about June, I see a very hurt man. This man in my arms is not very harmful to me, because he needs me. He even says, “It’s strange, Anaïs, but with you I feel relaxed. Most women make a man feel strained and tense. And I feel at my best because of that.” I give him a feeling of absolute intimacy, as if I were his wife. Hugo is lying in bed beside me, and I am still writing about Henry. The idea of Henry sitting alone in the kitchen at Clichy is unbearable to me. And yet Hugo has grown these days. We laugh together about it. Now that we are both free of fears, we are living easily. He has been traveling with a man from the bank, a plain, simple, joyous man. And they have drunk together, exchanged obscene stories, and danced in cabarets. Hugo has at last been taken up by men. He has loved it. And I say: “Go away, travel a great deal. We both need that. We can’t have it together. We can’t give it to each other.” I think of Fred observing Henry’s sacrileges against good taste: lighting a match on the sole of his shoe, putting salt on the pâté de foie gras, drinking the wrong wines, eating sauerkraut. And I love it all.

• From Henry and June (1986)

  Today I meet Fred, and as we walk towards Trinité together the sun comes out of a rain cloud and blinds us. And I begin quoting from his writing about a sunny morning in the market, which touches him. He has told me I am good for Henry, that I give him things June couldn’t give him. And yet he admits that Henry is entirely in June’s power when she is there. June is stronger. I am growing to love Henry more than June. Fred marvels at how Henry can love two women at the same time. “He is a big big man,” he says. “There’s so much room in him, so much love. If I loved you, I couldn’t love another woman.” And I was thinking: I am like Henry. I can love Hugo and Henry and June. Henry, I understand your clasping June and me. One doesn’t exclude the other. But June may not feel this, and certainly you didn’t understand June clasping you and Jean together. No, you demanded a choice. We are going to taste all we can give each other. Before June comes we are going to lie together as often as possible. Our happiness is in danger, yes, but we are going to devour it quickly, thoroughly. For every day of it I am thankful. Letter to June: “This morning I awakened with a profound and desperate desire for you. I have strange dreams. Now you are small and soft and pliable in my arms, now you are powerful and domineering and the leader. At once mothlike and indomitable. June, what are you? I know you wrote Henry a love letter, and I suffered. I have found at least one joy and that is to be able to talk openly about you to Henry. I did it because I knew he would love you more. I gave him my June, the portrait of you I wrote down during the days we were together. . . . Now I can say to Henry, ‘I love June,’ and he does not combat our feelings, he does not abhor them. He is moved. And you, June? What does it mean that you have not written me? . . . Am I a dream to you, am I not real and warm for you? What new loves, new ecstasies, new impulses move you now? I know you don’t like to write. I don’t ask for long letters, only a few words, what you feel. Have you ever wished yourself back here in my house, in my room, and do you have regrets that we were so overwhelmed? Do you ever wish to live those hours over again and differently, with more confidence. June, I hesitate to write everything, as if I felt again that you would run downstairs to escape me, as you did that day, or almost.

• From Henry and June (1986)

  Hugo drove me to Allendy’s. I had planned a trip to London, where I would meet new people and find salvation, sanity. By the time I saw Allendy, I had control of myself. He was so happy to have saved me from masochism. He imagined the end of my subjection to Henry and June. While he kissed my hands continuously he talked eloquently and humanly. The jealous Allendy versus Henry. He is so deft. I happened to say that Henry’s great need of woman was due to his being such a man, a hundred-percent man; glory be to the pagan gods that there was no femininity in him. But Allendy said it is precisely the sexually mature man who contains tender and intuitive feminine qualities. The true male has strong protective instincts, which Henry does not have. Allendy is a sage except where Henry is concerned. He, the great analyst, is so jealous that he made the insane statement that perhaps Henry is a German spy. He wants me to be liberated of the need of love so that I can love him of my own volition. He does not want the need of love to push me into his arms. He does not want to use his influence over me to possess me, as he could. He wants me, first, to stand on my own feet. He said that Henry enjoyed the power of a love such as I gave him, that he would never again possess such a precious gift in his life, that this happened only because I had no sense of my own value. He hoped, for my sake, that it was over. I accepted all this rationally. I trust Allendy, and I am drawn to him. (Particularly today, when I saw the sensual modulation of his mouth, the possibility of savagery.) But underneath, I felt, like all women, a strong, protective love for Henry—the more imperfect, the more to be loved. I grow strong. I telephone Eduardo to help him, to sustain him. I give up my trip to London. I do not need it. I can face Henry and June. The suffocating knot of pain is gone. I do not need to lean on external changes, on new friends. All this is nothing but a fierce defense against the loss of the lover I will never forget. What is going to become of his work, his happiness.? What will June do to him?—my love, Henry, whom I filled with strength and self-knowledge; my child, my creation, soft and yielding in women’s hands. Allendy says he will never again have a love like mine, but I know that I will always be there for him, that the day June hurts him I will be there to love him again.

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  Leading Thoughts: God chose us in Christ before the foundation of the world that we should be holy and without blemish before him in love (Eph. 1:4). In him we have our redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of our trespasses, according to the riches of his grace (1:7). He purposed to sum up all things in Christ, the things in the heavens, and the things upon the earth (1:10). God gave him to be head over all things to the church, which is his body, the fulness of him that filleth all in all (1:23). God, being rich in mercy, quickened us together with Christ and raised us up with him, and made us to sit with him in the heavenly places, in Christ Jesus (2:4–6). By grace have ye been saved through faith; and that not of yourselves: it is the gift of God: not of works, that no man should glory (2:8, 9). Christ is our peace, who made both one, and broke down the middle wall of partition (2:14). Ye are no more strangers and sojourners, but ye are fellow-citizens with the saints, and of the household of God, being built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Christ Jesus himself being the chief corner stone (2:19, 20). Unto me, who am less than the least of all saints, was this grace given, to preach Unto the Gentiles the unsearchable riches of Christ (3:8). That Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith; to the end that ye, being rooted and grounded in love, may be strong to apprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ which passeth knowledge, that ye may be filled unto all the fulness of God (3:17–19). Give diligence to keep the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace (4:3). There is one body, and one Spirit, one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all, who is over all, and through all, and in all (4:6). He gave some to be apostles; and some, prophets; and some, pastors and teachers for the perfecting of the saints (4:11, 12). Speak the truth in love (4:15). Put on the new man, which after God hath been created in righteousness and holiness of truth (4:24). Be ye therefore imitators of God, as beloved children, and walk in love, even as Christ also loved you, and gave himself up for as, an offering and a sacrifice to God for an odor of a sweet smell (5:1, 2). Wives, be in subjection unto your own husbands, as unto the Lord (5:22). Husbands, love your wives, even as Christ also loved the church, and gave himself up for it (5:25). This mystery is great; but I speak in regard of Christ and of the church (532). Children, obey your parents in the Lord (6:1). Put on the whole armor of God, that ye may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil (6:11).

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  Christianity once established was its own best missionary. It grew naturally from within. It attracted people by its very presence. It was a light shining in darkness and illuminating the darkness. And while there were no professional missionaries devoting their whole life to this specific work, every congregation was a missionary society, and every Christian believer a missionary, inflamed by the love of Christ to convert his fellow-men. The example had been set by Jerusalem and Antioch, and by those brethren who, after the martyrdom of Stephen, "were scattered abroad and went about preaching the Word."4 Justin Martyr was converted by a venerable old man whom he met "walking on the shore of the sea." Every Christian laborer, says Tertullian, "both finds out God and manifests him, though Plato affirms that it is not easy to discover the Creator, and difficult when he is found to make him known to all." Celsus scoffingly remarks that fuller, and workers in wool and leather, rustic and ignorant persons, were the most zealous propagators of Christianity, and brought it first to women and children. Women and slaves introduced it into the home-circle, it is the glory of the gospel that it is preached to the poor and by the poor to make them rich. Origen informs us that the city churches sent their missionaries to the villages. The seed grew up while men slept, and brought forth fruit, first the blade, then the ear, after that the full corn in the ear. Every Christian told his neighbor, the laborer to his fellow-laborer, the slave to his fellow-slave, the servant to his master and mistress, the story of his conversion, as a mariner tells the story of the rescue from shipwreck. The gospel was propagated chiefly by living preaching and by personal intercourse; to a considerable extent also through the sacred Scriptures, which were early propagated and translated into various tongues, the Latin (North African and Italian), the Syriac (the Curetonian and the Peshito), and the Egyptian (in three dialects, the Memphitic, the Thebaic, and the Bashmuric). Communication among the different parts of the Roman empire from Damascus to Britain was comparatively easy and safe. The highways built for commerce and for the Roman legions, served also the messengers of peace and the silent conquests of the cross. Commerce itself at that time, as well as now, was a powerful agency in carrying the gospel and the seeds of Christian civilization to the remotest parts of the Roman empire.

• From The Decameron (1353)

  The latter, having renewed his covenant with the gentleman, seated himself with the lady in a part of the saloon at a great distance from every one and began to say thus, 'Noble lady, meseemeth certain that you have too much wit not to have long since perceived how great a love I have been brought to bear you by your beauty, which far transcendeth that of any woman whom methinketh I ever beheld, to say nothing of the engaging manners and the peerless virtues which be in you and which might well avail to take the loftiest spirits of mankind; wherefore it were needless to declare to you in words that this [my love] is the greatest and most fervent that ever man bore woman; and thus, without fail, will I do[170] so long as my wretched life shall sustain these limbs, nay, longer; for that, if in the other world folk love as they do here below, I shall love you to all eternity. Wherefore you may rest assured that you have nothing, be it much or little worth, that you may hold so wholly yours and whereon you may in every wise so surely reckon as myself, such as I am, and that likewise which is mine. And that of this you may take assurance by very certain argument, I tell you that I should count myself more graced, did you command me somewhat that I might do and that would pleasure you, than if, I commanding, all the world should promptliest obey me. Since, then, I am yours, even as you have heard, it is not without reason that I dare to offer up my prayers to your nobility, wherefrom alone can all peace, all health and all well-being derive for me, and no otherwhence; yea, as the humblest of your servants, I beseech you, dear my good and only hope of my soul, which, midmost the fire of love, feedeth upon its hope in you,--that your benignity may be so great and your past rigour shown unto me, who am yours, on such wise be mollified that I, recomforted by your kindness, may say that, like as by your beauty I was stricken with love, even so by your pity have I life, which latter, an your haughty soul incline not to my prayers, will without fail come to nought and I shall perish and you may be said to be my murderer. Letting be that my death will do you no honour, I doubt not eke but that, conscience bytimes pricking you therefor, you will regret having wrought it[171] and whiles, better disposed, will say in yourself, "Alack, how ill I did not to have compassion upon my poor Zima!" and this repentance, being of no avail, will cause you the great annoy.

• From Henry and June (1986)

  I can make his tentative thoughts click. He enlarges mine. I fire him. He makes me flow. There is always movement between us. And he is grasping. He takes hold of me like a prey. Here we lie, putting order in his ideas, deciding on the place of realistic incidents in his novels. His book swells up inside of me like my very own. I am fascinated by the activity in his head, the surprises, the curiosity, the gusto, the amorality, the sensibilities, and the rascalities. And I loved his last letter to me: “Don’t expect me to be sane any more. Don’t let’s be sensible. It was a marriage at Louveciennes, you can’t dispute it. I came away with a piece of you sticking to me; I am walking about swimming, in an ocean of blood, your Andalusian blood, distilled and poisonous. Everything I do and say and think relates back to our marriage. I saw you as the mistress of your home, a Moor with a heavy face, a Negress with a white body, eyes all over your skin, woman, woman, woman. I can’t see how I can go on living away from you—these intermissions are death. How did it seem to you when Hugo came back? Was I still there? I can’t picture you moving about with him as you did with me. Legs closed. Frailty. Sweet treacherous acquiescence. Bird docility. You became a woman with me. I was almost terrified by it. You are not just thirty years old—you are a thousand years old. “Here I am back and still smoldering with passion, like wine smoking. Not a passion any longer for flesh, but a complete hunger for you, a devouring hunger. I read the papers about suicides and murder and I understand it all thoroughly. I feel murderous, suicidal. “I still hear you singing in the kitchen . . . a sort of inharmonic, monotonous Cuban wail. I know you’re happy in the kitchen and the meal you’re cooking is the best meal we ever ate together. I know you would scald yourself and not complain. I feel the greatest peace and joy sitting in the dining room listening to your rustling about, your dress like the goddess Indra studded with a thousand eyes. Anaïs, I only thought I loved you before, it was nothing like this certainty that’s in me now. Was all this so wonderful because it was brief and stolen? Were we acting for each other, to each other? Was I less I, or more I, and you less or more you? Is it madness to believe that this could go on? When and where would the drab moments begin? I study you so much to discover the possible flaws, the weak points, the danger zones. I don’t find them—not any. That means I am in love, blind, blind, blind. To be blind forever! “I picture you playing the records over and over—Hugo’s records. Parlez moi d’amour.

• From Henry and June (1986)

  And he writes me: “Anaïs, I was stunned when I got your note this evening. Nothing I can ever say will match these words. To you the victory—you have silenced me—I mean so far as expressing these things in writing goes. You don’t know how I marvel at your ability to absorb quickly and then turn about, rain down the spears, nail it, penetrate it, envelop it with your intellect. The experience dumbed me; I felt a singular exaltation, a surge of vitality, then of lassitude, of blankness, of wonder, of incredulity, everything, everything. Coming home I kept remarking about the Spring wind—everything had grown soft and balmy, the air licked my face, I couldn’t gulp down enough of it. And until I got your note I was in a panic. I was afraid you would disavow everything. But as I read—I read very slowly because each word was a revelation to me—I thought back to your smiling face, to your sort of innocent gayety, something I had always sought for in you but never quite realized. There were times when you began this way, at Louveciennes, and then the mind crashed through and I would see the grave, round eyes and the set purse of your lips, which used almost to frighten me, or at any rate, always intimidated me. “You make me tremendously happy to hold me undivided—to let me be the artist, as it were, and yet not forego the man, the animal, the hungry, insatiable lover. No woman has ever granted me all the privileges I need—and you, why you sing out so blithely, so boldly, with a laugh even—yes, you invite me to go ahead, be myself, venture anything. I adore you for that. That is where you are truly regal, a woman extraordinary. What a woman you are! I laugh to myself now when I think of you—I have no fear of your femaleness. And that you burned. Then I remember vividly your dress, the color and texture of it, the voluptuous, airy spaciousness of it—precisely what I would have begged you to wear had I been able to anticipate the moment. “Note how you were anticipating what I wrote today—I refer to your words about caricature, hate, etc. “I could stay here all night writing you. I see you before me constantly, with your head down and your long lashes lying on your cheeks. And I feel very humble. I don’t know why you should single me out—it puzzles me. It seems to me that from the very moment when you opened the door and held out your hand, smiling, I was taken in, I was yours. June felt it, too. She said immediately that you were in love with me, or else I with you. But I didn’t know myself that it was love. I spoke about you glowingly, without reserve. And then June met you and she fell in love with you.”

• From Henry and June (1986)

  And when I come home, Emilia says, “There is a letter for the Señorita.” I run upstairs, hoping it is a letter from Henry. I want to be a strong poet, as strong as Henry and John are in their realism. I want to combat them, to invade and annihilate them. What baffles me about Henry and what attracts me are the flashes of imagination, the flashes of insight, and the flashes of dreams. Fugitive. And the depths. Rub off the German realist, the man who “stands for shit,” as Wambly Bald says to him, and you get a lusty imagist. At moments he can say the most delicate or profound things. But his softness is dangerous, because when he writes he does not write with love, he writes to caricature, to attack, to ridicule, to destroy, to rebel. He is always against something. Anger incites him. I am always for something. Anger poisons me. I love, I love, I love. Then at certain moments I remember one of his words and I suddenly feel the sensual woman flaring up, as if violently caressed. I say the word to myself, with joy. It is at such a moment that my true body lives. I spent a tense, harrowing day yesterday with Eduardo, who resuscitates the past. He was the first man I loved. He was weak, sexually. I suffered from his weakness, I know now. That pain was buried. It was newly aroused when we met again two years ago. It was buried again. I have had masculine elements in me always, knowing exactly what I want, but not until John Erskine did I love strong men; I loved weak or timorous, overfine men. Eduardo’s vagueness, indecision, ethereal love, and Hugo’s frightened love caused me torment and bewilderment. I acted delicately and yet as a man. It would have been more feminine to have been satisfied with the passion of other admirers, but I insisted on my own selection, on a fineness of nature which I found in a man weaker than I was. I suffered deeply from my own forwardness as a woman. As a man, I would have been glad to have what I desired. Now Hugo is strong, but I am afraid it is too late. The masculine in me has made too much progress. Now even if Eduardo wanted to live with me (and yesterday he was tormented by an impotent jealousy), we couldn’t do so because creatively I am stronger than he is, and he couldn’t bear it. I have discovered the joy of a masculine direction of my life by my courting of June. Also I have discovered the terrible joy of dying, of disintegrating.

• From Henry and June (1986)

  I sat at my table next to his, looking over fragments to be inserted in my book. I was filled with the strength of his writing. When he got hungry, I offered to cook the dinner. “Let me play at being the wife of a genius.” And I went to the kitchen in my stately rose dress. Henry’s very voice lifts me. I think of his saying, “When I write about you, I will have to write of you as an angel. I cannot put you on a bed.” “But I don’t behave like an angel. You know I don’t.” “I know, yes, I know. You’ve tired me out these past days. You’re a sexual angel, but you’re an angel just the same. Your sensuality doesn’t convince me.” “I’ll punish you for that,” I said. “From now on I’ll behave like an angel.” Two hours later Fred has gone to work and Henry is kissing me in the kitchen. I want to play at resisting him, but even a kiss on my neck melts me. I say no, but he puts his hands between my legs. He charges me like a bull. When we lie quiet, I love him still, his hands, his wrists, his neck, his mouth, the warmth of his body, and the sudden leaping of his mind. Afterwards we sit eating and talking about June and Dostoevsky while the cock crows. That Henry and I can sit and talk about our love of June, about her grandiose moments, is to me the greatest of victories. The long, tranquil hours with Henry are the most potent. He falls into a thoughtful quietness as he sits over his work, chuckling sometimes. He has in him something of a gnome, a satyr, and a German scholar. There are hard bumps on his forehead, which look as if they were about to burst. His body suddenly appears fragile, bowed. As he sits there, I feel that I can see his mind as I see his body, and it is labyrinthine, fertile, sentient. I am loaded with adoration for everything that his head contains and for the impulses which blow in gusts. He is lying in bed, body arched against my back, his arm around my breast. And in the circumference of my solitude I know I have found a moment of absolute love. His greatness fills the wounds and closes them, silences the desires. He is asleep. How I love him! I feel like a river that has overflowed. “Anaïs, when I came home last night I thought you were here, because I smelled your perfume. I missed you. I realized I didn’t tell you when you were here how wonderful it was to have you here. I never say those things. Look, here is a drawer full of your clothes—stockings. I want you to leave your perfume all through the place.”

• From Bluets (2009)

  BLUETS WAVE BOOKS SEATTLE AND NEW YORK MAGGIE NELSON BLUETS PUBLISHED BY WAVE BOOKS WWW.WAVEPOETRY.COM COPYRIGHT © 2009 BY MAGGIE NELSON ALL RIGHTS RESERVED WAVE BOOKS TITLES ARE DISTRIBUTED TO THE TRADE BY CONSORTIUM BOOK SALES AND DISTRIBUTION PHONE: 800-283-3572 / SAN 631-760X THIS TITLE IS AVAILABLE IN LIMITED EDITION HARDCOVER DIRECTLY FROM THE PUBLISHER LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA NELSON, MAGGIE, 1973 – BLUETS / MAGGIE NELSON. — 1ST ED. P. CM. ISBN 978-1-933517-64-3 (PBK. : ALK. PAPER) I. TITLE. PS 3564. E 4687 B 56 2009 811´54—DC22 2009005830 DESIGNED AND COMPOSED BY QUEMADURA 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 FIRST EDITION WAVE BOOKS 020 BLUETS And were it true, we do not think all philosophy is worth one hour of pain . PASCAL , Pensées Contents Bluets Credits Credits THE PRINCIPAL CORRESPONDENTS Rebecca Baron, Joshua Beckman, Brian Blanchfield (aka Student Blue), Mike Bryant, Lap-Chi Chu, Christina Crosby, Cort Day, Annie Dillard, Doug Goodwin, George Hambrecht, Christian Hawkey, Wayne Koestenbaum, Aaron Kunin, PJ Mark (aka Balarama), Anthony McCann, Sean Nevin, Martín Plot, Janet Sarbanes, Mady Schutzman, Matthew Sharpe, Craig Tracy (who supplied the ink), and my dearest Harry (who brought the light) . THE PRINCIPAL SUPPLIERS Ludwig Wittgenstein , Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe; Johann Wolfgang von Goethe , Theory of Colours, trans. Charles Lock Eastlake . OTHER SUPPLIERS American Folk Art Museum; David Batchelor , Chromophobia; Victoria Finlay , Color: A Natural History of the Palette; John Gage , Color and Culture: Practice and Meaning from Antiquity to Abstraction; Michel Pastoureau , Blue: The History of a Color; Patrick Trevor-Roper , The World through Blunted Sight; The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (online); Vermont Studio Center . OTHER APPEARANCES Some of these propositions first appeared, in various forms, in Black Clock, The Canary, The Hat, and MiPOesias. Grateful acknowledgment to their editors . DEDICATION For Lily Mazzarella first and forever princess of blue . BIOGRAPHY Maggie Nelson is most recently the author of Women, the New York School, and Other True Abstractions (University of Iowa Press, 2007; winner of the 2008 Susanne M. Glasscock Humanities Book Prize for Interdisciplinary Scholarship) and The Red Parts: A Memoir (Free Press, 2007; named a Notable Book of the Year by the State of Michigan). She is also the author of several books of poetry, including Something Bright, Then Holes (Soft Skull Press, 2007), and Jane: A Murder (Soft Skull, 2005; finalist, the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for the Art of the Memoir). A recipient of a Creative Capital/Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant, she currently teaches on the faculty of the School of Critical Studies at CalArts in Valencia, California, and lives in Los Angeles . 1. Suppose I were to begin by saying that I had fallen in love with a color. Suppose I were to speak this as though it were a confession; suppose I shredded my napkin as we spoke. It began slowly. An appreciation, an affinity.

• From Henry and June (1986)

  Henry’s letters give me the feeling of plentitude I get so rarely. I take great joy in answering them, but the bulk of them overwhelm me. I have barely answered one when he writes another. Comments on Proust, descriptions, moods, his own life, his indefatigable sexuality, the way he immediately gets tangled in action. Too much action, to my mind. Undigested. No wonder he marvels at Proust. No wonder I watch his life with a realization that my life will never resemble his, for mine is slowed up by thought. To Henry: “Last night I read your novel. There were some passages in it which were éblouissants , staggeringly beautiful. Particularly the description of a dream you had, the description of the jazzy night with Valeska, the whole of the last part when the life with Blanche comes to a climax. . . . Other things are flat, lifeless, vulgarly realistic, photographic. Still other things—the older mistress, Cora, even Naomi, are not born yet. There is a slapdash, careless rushing by. You have come a long way from that. Your writing has had to keep pace with your living, and because of your animal vitality you have lived too much. . . . “I have a strange sureness that I know just what should be left out, exactly as you knew what should be left out of my book. I think the novel is worth weeding out. Would you let me?” To Henry: “Please understand, Henry, that I’m in full rebellion against my own mind, that when I live, I live by impulse, by emotion, by white heat. June understood that. My mind didn’t exist when we walked insanely through Paris, oblivious to people, to time, to place, to others. It didn’t exist when I first read Dostoevsky in my hotel room and laughed and cried together and couldn’t sleep, and didn’t know where I was. But afterwards, understand me, I make the tremendous effort to rise again, not to wallow any more, not to go on just suffering or burning. Why should I make such an effort? Because I have a fear of being like June exactly. I have a feeling against complete chaos. I want to be able to live with June in utter madness, but I also want to be able to understand afterwards, to grasp what I’ve lived through.

• From Henry and June (1986)

  When I clothed her beauty, I possessed her. She said, “There are so many things I would love to do with you. With you I would take opium.” June, who does not accept a gift which has no symbolical significance; June, who washes laundry to buy herself a bit of perfume; June, who is not afraid of poverty and drabness and who is untouched by it, untouched by the drunkenness of her friends; June, who judges, selects, discards people with severity, who knows, when she is telling her endless anecdotes, that they are ways of escape, keeping herself all the more secret behind that profuse talk. Secretly mine. Hugo begins to understand. Reality exists only between him and me, in our love. All the rest, dreams. Our love is solved. I can be faithful. I was terrifyingly happy during the night. But I must kiss her, I must kiss her. If she had wanted to, yesterday I would have sat on the floor, with my head against her knees. But she would not have it. Yet at the station while we wait for the train she begs for my hand. I call out her name. We stand pressed together, faces almost touching. I smile at her while the train leaves. I turn away. The stationmaster wants to sell me some charity tickets. I buy them and give them to him, wishing him luck at the lottery. He gets the benefit of my wanting to give to June, to whom one cannot give anything. What a secret language we talk, undertones, overtones, nuances, abstractions, symbols. Then we return to Hugo and to Henry, filled with an incandescence which frightens them both. Henry is uneasy. Hugo is sad. What is this powerful magical thing we give ourselves to, June and I, when we are together? Wonder! Wonder! It comes with her. Last night, after June, filled with June, I could not bear Hugo reading the newspapers and talking about trusts and a successful day. He understood—he does understand—but he couldn’t share, he could not grasp the incandescent. He teased me. He was humorous. He was immensely lovable and warm. But I could not come back. So I lay on the couch, smoking, and thinking of June. At the station, I had fainted. The intensity is shattering us both. She is glad to be leaving. She is less yielding than I am. She really wants to escape from that which is giving her life. She does not like my power, whereas I take joy in submitting to her. When we met for half an hour today to discuss Henry’s future, she asked me to take care of him, and then she gave me her silver bracelet with a cat’s-eye stone, when she has so few possessions. I refused at first, and then the joy of wearing her bracelet, a part of her, filled me. I carry it like a symbol. It is precious to me. Hugo noticed it and hated it.