Sadness

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 Bluets (2009)

  5. But first, let us consider a sort of case in reverse. In 1867, after a long bout of solitude, the French poet Stéphane Mallarmé wrote to his friend Henri Cazalis: “These last months have been terrifying. My Thought has thought itself through and reached a Pure Idea. What the rest of me has suffered during that long agony, is indescribable.” Mallarmé described this agony as a battle that took place on God’s “boney wing.” “I struggled with that creature of ancient and evil plumage—God—whom I fortunately defeated and threw to earth,” he told Cazalis with exhausted satisfaction. Eventually Mallarmé began replacing “le ciel” with “l’Azur” in his poems, in an effort to rinse references to the sky of religious connotations. “Fortunately,” he wrote Cazalis, “I am quite dead now.” 6. The half-circle of blinding turquoise ocean is this love’s primal scene. That this blue exists makes my life a remarkable one, just to have seen it. To have seen such beautiful things. To find oneself placed in their midst. Choiceless. I returned there yesterday and stood again upon the mountain. 7. But what kind of love is it, really? Don’t fool yourself and call it sublimity. Admit that you have stood in front of a little pile of powdered ultramarine pigment in a glass cup at a museum and felt a stinging desire. But to do what? Liberate it? Purchase it? Ingest it? There is so little blue food in nature—in fact blue in the wild tends to mark food to avoid (mold, poisonous berries)—that culinary advisers generally recommend against blue light, blue paint, and blue plates when and where serving food. But while the color may sap appetite in the most literal sense, it feeds it in others. You might want to reach out and disturb the pile of pigment, for example, first staining your fingers with it, then staining the world. You might want to dilute it and swim in it, you might want to rouge your nipples with it, you might want to paint a virgin’s robe with it. But still you wouldn’t be accessing the blue of it. Not exactly. 8. Do not, however, make the mistake of thinking that all desire is yearning. “We love to contemplate blue, not because it advances to us, but because it draws us after it,” wrote Goethe, and perhaps he is right. But I am not interested in longing to live in a world in which I already live. I don’t want to yearn for blue things, and God forbid for any “blueness.” Above all, I want to stop missing you. 9. So please do not write to tell me about any more beautiful blue things. To be fair, this book will not tell you about any, either. It will not say, Isn’t X beautiful? Such demands are murderous to beauty. 10. The most I want to do is show you the end of my index finger. Its muteness.

• From Henry and June (1986)

  The sadness I experience as I listen to him shows how deeply his songs and sweetness have receded for me, into a past linked to the present hour only by the continuity of memories. Memories alone hold Hugo and me together; and my journal preserves them. Oh, to be able to leap forward without this web around me. Index The following abbreviations are used in this index : AN = Anaïs Nin HM = Henry Miller JM = June Edith Miller A Age d’Or (film by Buñurel), 11 Albertine disparue (Proust), 13 , 91 Allendy, René Félix (Dr.), 140 , 158 , 182 , 186 , 204 , 216 AN’s analysis with, 115–17 , 125 , 128–34 , 138–39 , 144–45 , 156–57 , 159–60 , 162 , 165–67 , 172–77 , 189–90 , 194–98 , 206 , 231 , 235 , 238 , 246 , 258–60 , 262 , 268–69 , 271 AN’s meetings with, 161 , 197–98 , 249–50 , 253–56 AN’s seduction of, 238–39 , 243–47 , 249–52 , 257–58 as Eduardo’s psychoanalyst, 96 , 105 , 107 , 113 , 115–17 on frigidity, 130 , 173 , 176–77 and HM, 114 , 129–30 , 227–30 , 238–39 , 241 , 268 as Hugo’s psychoanalyst, 246–47 , 250 , 253 , 254 , 257 , 260–61 , 264 , 266–67 on women, 188 , 194 , 237 Allendy, Yvonne, 165–66 , 172 B Bald, Wambly, 50 Blue Angel (film), 11 Buñuel, Luis, 10 C Celine, Louis-Ferdinand, 108 Cocteau, Jean, 75 Collazo, Ramiro, 257 “Count Bruga” (puppet), 29 , 32 , 48 D Debussy, Claude, 49 Dostoevsky, Fedor, 5 , 44 , 45 , 47 , 88–89 , 126–27 , 210 212 HM likened to, 116 , 135 Drake, Lawrence, 6–10 , 12 , 14 , 21 Drugs, 21 , 25 , 28 , 34 , 179 , 201–2 , 206 , 207 E Eduardo. See Sánchez, Eduardo Emilia (AN’s maid), 18 , 37–38 , 49 , 121 , 264 Erskine, John, 58 , 75 , 98 , 140 , 182 , 232 , 246 , 247 , 249 , 253 , 260 and AN’s earlier diaries, vii , 41 , 49 , 149 influence of, on AN, 8 , 50 , 111 , 119 , 122 , 129 prank involving letter from, 216–18 F Faithfulness. See also Love: and passion AN on, 12 , 25 , 55 , 107 , 111 , 120 , 141 , 159 , 192–93 , 202 , 217 , 229 , 230 , 250 HM on, 102 , 107 , 147–48 , 230 Father. See Nin y Castellanos, Joaquin J. Femmes fatales, 135 , 146 , 173–74 Fraenkel, Michael, 160 , 161–62 , 212 France, Anatole, 127 Frank, Waldo, 11 Fred.

• From Bluets (2009)

  196. I suppose I am avoiding writing down too many specific memories of you for similar reasons. The most I will say is “the fucking.” Why else suppress the details? Clearly I am not a private person, and quite possibly I am a fool. “Oh, how often have I cursed those foolish pages of mine which made my youthful sufferings public property!” Goethe wrote years after the publication of The Sorrows of Young Werther . Sei Sh ō nagon felt similarly: “Whatever people may think of my book,” she wrote after her pillow book gained fame and notoriety, “I still regret that it ever came to light.” 197. I suppose it is possible that one day we will meet again and it will feel as if nothing ever happened between us. This seems unimaginable, but the fact is that it happens all the time. “No whiteness (lost) is so white as the memory / of whiteness,” wrote Williams. But one can lose the memory of whiteness, too. 198. In a 1994 interview, about twenty years after he wrote “Famous Blue Raincoat,” Cohen admitted that he could no longer remember the specifics of the love triangle that the song describes. “I always felt that there was an invisible male seducing the woman I was with, now whether this one was incarnate or merely imaginary I don’t remember.” I find this forgetting quite heartening and quite tragic, in turns. 199. For to wish to forget how much you loved someone—and then, to actually forget—can feel, at times, like the slaughter of a beautiful bird who chose, by nothing short of grace, to make a habitat of your heart. I have heard that this pain can be converted, as it were, by accepting “the fundamental impermanence of all things.” This acceptance bewilders me: sometimes it seems an act of will; at others, of surrender. Often I feel myself to be rocking between them (seasickness). 200. “You cannot step into the same river twice”—a heartening anthem, without a doubt. But really this is but one version of the fragment left behind by Heraclitus, who was justly nicknamed “The Riddler” or “The Obscure.” Other versions: “On those stepping into rivers staying the same other and other waters flow”; “We step and do not step into the same river; we are and we are not”; “You cannot step twice into the same river, for other waters and yet others, go flowing on.” It seems that something is staying the same here, but what? 201. I believe in the possibility—the inevitability, even—of a fresh self stepping into ever-fresh waters, as in the variant: “No man ever steps into the same river twice, for it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man.” But I also sense something in Heraclitus’s fragment that allows for the possibility of a mouse shocking its snout on a hunk of electrified cheese over and over again in a kind of static eternity.

• From Bluets (2009)

  236. Do not be overly troubled by this fact. “Nine days out of ten,” wrote Merleau-Ponty of Cézanne, “all he saw around him was the wretchedness of his empirical life and of his unsuccessful attempts, the debris of an unknown celebration.” 237. In any case, I am no longer counting the days. 238. I want you to know, if you ever read this, there was a time when I would rather have had you by my side than any one of these words; I would rather have had you by my side than all the blue in the world. 239. But now you are talking as if love were a consolation. Simone Weil warned otherwise. “Love is not consolation,” she wrote. “It is light.” 240. All right then, let me try to rephrase. When I was alive, I aimed to be a student not of longing but of light. (2003–2006) 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 .

• From Bluets (2009)

  75. Mostly I have felt myself becoming a servant of sadness. I am still looking for the beauty in that. 76. At one point in history, to approximate the color of ultramarine, which comes from lapis, which for quite some time was available in only one mine, in what we now call Afghanistan— Sar-e-Sang, the Place of the Stone— and had to be journeyed out via hundreds of miles of treacherous trade roads, Westerners would churn up cheaper pigments with blood and copper. Generally speaking we don’t do this anymore. We don’t store our oils in the bladders of pigs. We go to the store. If we want to know what a phosphene is, we don’t mash our fists into our eyes. We Google the word. If you’re depressed, you take a pill. Some of these pills are bright blue. If you’re lonely, there’s a guy on Craigslist two blocks away who says he has an hour to kill and a dick longer than a donkey’s. He has posted a photograph to prove it. 77. “Why should I feel lonely? is not our planet in the Milky Way?” (Thoreau). 78. Once I traveled to the Tate in London to see the blue paintings of Yves Klein, who invented and patented his own shade of ultramarine, International Klein Blue ( IKB ), then painted canvases and objects with it throughout a period of his life he dubbed “l’epoque bleue.” Standing in front of these blue paintings, or propositions, at the Tate, feeling their blue radiate out so hotly that it seemed to be touching, perhaps even hurting, my eyeballs, I wrote but one phrase in my notebook: too much . I had come all this way, and I could barely look. Perhaps I had inadvertently brushed up against the Buddhist axiom, that enlightenment is the ultimate disappointment. “From the mountain you see the mountain,”wrote Emerson. 79. For just because one loves blue does not mean that one wants to spend one’s life in a world made of it. “Life is a train of moods like a string of beads, and as we pass through them they prove to be many-colored lenses which paint the world their own hue, and each shows only what lies in its focus,” wrote Emerson. To find oneself trapped in any one bead, no matter what its hue, can be deadly. 80. What I have heard: when the mines of Sar-e-Sang run dry (locals say the repressive rule of the Taliban, who, in 2000, blew up the two giant statues of Buddha at the mines’ entrance—Buddhas whose blue auras were the oldest-known application of lapis on earth—caused a particularly long dry spell; God only knows what the American bombing has done since), the miners use dynamite to bleed a vein, in hopes of starting a “blue rush.” 81. What I know: when I met you, a blue rush began. I want you to know, I no longer hold you responsible.

• From Bluets (2009)

  43. Before a faculty meeting, talking again with the expert on guppy menopause. What do biologists make of the question, Does color exist? I ask. Duh, he says. A male guppy looking for a mate doesn’t worry about whether color exists, he says. A male guppy only cares about being orange, in order to attract one. But can it really be said that the guppy cares about being orange? I ask. No, he admits. The male guppy simply is orange. Why orange? I ask. He shrugs. In the face of some questions, he says, biologists can only vacate the field. 44. This particular conversation with the expert on guppy menopause takes place on a day when, later that afternoon, a therapist will say to me, If he hadn’t lied to you, he would have been a different person than he is . She is trying to get me to see that although I thought I loved this man very completely for exactly who he was, I was in fact blind to the man he actually was, or is. 45. This pains me enormously. She presses me to say why; I can’t answer. Instead I say something about how clinical psychology forces everything we call love into the pathological or the delusional or the biologically explicable, that if what I was feeling wasn’t love then I am forced to admit that I don’t know what love is, or, more simply, that I loved a bad man. How all of these formulations drain the blue right out of love and leave an ugly, pigmentless fish flapping on a cutting board on a kitchen counter. 46. Disavowal, says the silence. 47. Is there a good kind of hustler? I wonder, as I steer my car through the forest of gargantuan billboards, ghostly palm trees, and light-flattened boulevards that have become my life. 48. Imagine, for example, someone who fucks like a whore. Someone who seems good at it, professional. Someone you can still see fucking you, in the mirror, always in the mirror, crazy fucking about three feet away, in an apartment lit by blue light, never lit by daylight, this person is always fucking you from behind in blue light and you both always seem good at it, dedicated and lost unto it, as if there is no other activity on God’s given earth your bodies know how to do except fuck and be fucked like this, in this dim blue light, in this mirror. What do you call someone who fucks this way? 49. There is a color inside of the fucking, but it is not blue.

• From Bluets (2009)

  Eventually I confess to a friend some details about my weeping—its intensity, its frequency. She says (kindly) that she thinks we sometimes weep in front of a mirror not to inflame self-pity, but because we want to feel witnessed in our despair. ( Can a reflection be a witness? Can one pass oneself the sponge wet with vinegar from a reed? ) 93. “At first glance, it seems strange to think that an innocuous, inborn behavior such as crying could be dysfunctional or symptomatic,” writes one clinical psychologist. But, this psychologist insists, we must face the fact that some crying is simply “maladaptive, dysfunctional, or immature.” 94.—Well then, it is as you please. This is the dysfunction talking. This is the disease talking. This is how much I miss you talking. This is the deepest blue, talking, talking, always talking to you. 95. But please don’t write again to tell me how you have woken up weeping. I already know how you are in love with your weeping. 96. For a prince of blue is a prince of blue because he keeps “a pet sorrow, a blue-devil familiar, that goes with him everywhere” (Lowell, 1870). This is how a prince of blue becomes a pain devil. 97. And now, I think, we can say: a glass bead may flush the world with color, but it alone makes no necklace. I wanted the necklace. 98. Vincent van Gogh, whose depression, some say, was likely related to temporal lobe epilepsy, famously saw and painted the world in almost unbearably vivid colors. After his nearly unsuccessful attempt to take his life by shooting himself in the gut, when asked why he should not be saved, he famously replied, “The sadness will last forever.” I imagine he was right. 99. After a few months in the hospital, my injured friend is visited by a fellow quadriparalytic as part of an out-reach program. From her bed she asks him, If I remain paralyzed, how long will it take for my injury to feel like a normal part of my life? At least five years, he told her. As of next month, she will be at three. 100. It often happens that we count our days, as if the act of measurement made us some kind of promise. But really this is like hoisting a harness onto an invisible horse. “There is simply no way that a year from now you’re going to feel the way you feel today,” a different therapist said to me last year at this time. But though I have learned to act as if I feel differently, the truth is that my feelings haven’t really changed.

• From Bluets (2009)

  I looked at dozens of apartments and when I entered the hallway of the one I moved into next I knew I could live there because it was cheap and the hallway was baby blue. My friends all told me it smelled as bad there as it did in the last one but I found a heads-up penny on the threshold and anyway I don’t live there anymore. 85. One afternoon in 2006, at a bookstore in Los Angeles. I pick up a book called The Deepest Blue . Having expected a chromatic treatise, I am embarrassed when I see the subtitle: How Women Face and Overcome Depression . I quickly return it to its shelf. Eight months later, I order the book online. 86. The implication of the title is that men get blue, but women get the deepest blue . Another form of aggrandizement, to be sure—one which brings to mind a night I spent in an emergency room in Brooklyn years ago—some mystery ailment, a burning in my lower left side—a woman wailing in the waiting room about having gas from fried chicken, though she looked riddled with crack and sadness, not gas from fried chicken—a young doctor inside asked me to rate my pain on a scale of 1 to 10—I was flummoxed, I felt as though I shouldn’t be there at all—I said “6”—he said to the nurse, Write down “8,” since women always underestimate their pain. Men always say “11,” he said. I didn’t believe him, but I supposed he might know. 87. “suffering, joy, exertion, is not for [woman]; her life should flow by more quietly, trivially, gently than the man’s without being essentially happier or unhappier,” wrote Schopenhauer. What women, one would like to ask, did he know? At any rate, would that it were so . 88. Like many self-help books, The Deepest Blue is full of horrifyingly simplistic language and some admittedly good advice. Somehow the women in the book all learn to say: That’s my depression talking. It’s not “me.” 89. As if we could scrape the color off the iris and still see. 90. Last night I wept in a way I haven’t wept for some time. I wept until I aged myself. I watched it happen in the mirror. I watched the lines arrive around my eyes like engraved sunbursts; it was like watching flowers open in time-lapse on a windowsill. The tears not only aged my face, they also changed its texture, turned the skin of my cheeks into putty. I recognized this as a rite of decadence, but I did not know how to stop it. 91. Blue-eye , archaic: “a blueness or dark circle around the eye, from weeping or other cause.” 92.

• From Bluets (2009)

  She is trying to get me to see that although I thought I loved this man very completely for exactly who he was, I was in fact blind to the man he actually was, or is. 45. This pains me enormously. She presses me to say why; I can’t answer. Instead I say something about how clinical psychology forces everything we call love into the pathological or the delusional or the biologically explicable, that if what I was feeling wasn’t love then I am forced to admit that I don’t know what love is, or, more simply, that I loved a bad man. How all of these formulations drain the blue right out of love and leave an ugly, pigmentless fish flapping on a cutting board on a kitchen counter. 46. Disavowal, says the silence. 47. Is there a good kind of hustler? I wonder, as I steer my car through the forest of gargantuan billboards, ghostly palm trees, and light-flattened boulevards that have become my life. 48. Imagine, for example, someone who fucks like a whore. Someone who seems good at it, professional. Someone you can still see fucking you, in the mirror, always in the mirror, crazy fucking about three feet away, in an apartment lit by blue light, never lit by daylight, this person is always fucking you from behind in blue light and you both always seem good at it, dedicated and lost unto it, as if there is no other activity on God’s given earth your bodies know how to do except fuck and be fucked like this, in this dim blue light, in this mirror. What do you call someone who fucks this way? 49. There is a color inside of the fucking, but it is not blue. 50. The confusion about what color is, where it is, or whether it is persists despite thousands of years of prodding at the phenomenon. And literally prodding: in his zeal, in the “dark chamber” of his room at Trinity College, Newton at times took to sticking iron rods or sticks in his eyes to produce then analyze his perceptions of color. Children whose vision has been damaged have been known to smash their fingers into their eyes to recreate color sensations that have been lost to them. ( That’s the spirit! ) 51. You might as well act as if objects had the colors, the Encyclopedia says.—Well, it is as you please. But what would it look like to act otherwise? 52. Try, if you can, not to talk as if colors emanated from a single physical phenomenon. Keep in mind the effects of all the various surfaces, volumes, light-sources, films, expanses, degrees of solidity, solubility, temperature, elasticity, on color.

• From Bluets (2009)

  I suppose it is possible that one day we will meet again and it will feel as if nothing ever happened between us. This seems unimaginable, but the fact is that it happens all the time. “No whiteness (lost) is so white as the memory / of whiteness,” wrote Williams. But one can lose the memory of whiteness, too. 198. In a 1994 interview, about twenty years after he wrote “Famous Blue Raincoat,” Cohen admitted that he could no longer remember the specifics of the love triangle that the song describes. “I always felt that there was an invisible male seducing the woman I was with, now whether this one was incarnate or merely imaginary I don’t remember.” I find this forgetting quite heartening and quite tragic, in turns. 199. For to wish to forget how much you loved someone—and then, to actually forget—can feel, at times, like the slaughter of a beautiful bird who chose, by nothing short of grace, to make a habitat of your heart. I have heard that this pain can be converted, as it were, by accepting “the fundamental impermanence of all things.” This acceptance bewilders me: sometimes it seems an act of will; at others, of surrender. Often I feel myself to be rocking between them (seasickness). 200. “You cannot step into the same river twice”—a heartening anthem, without a doubt. But really this is but one version of the fragment left behind by Heraclitus, who was justly nicknamed “The Riddler” or “The Obscure.” Other versions: “On those stepping into rivers staying the same other and other waters flow”; “We step and do not step into the same river; we are and we are not”; “You cannot step twice into the same river, for other waters and yet others, go flowing on.” It seems that something is staying the same here, but what? 201. I believe in the possibility—the inevitability, even—of a fresh self stepping into ever-fresh waters, as in the variant: “No man ever steps into the same river twice, for it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man.” But I also sense something in Heraclitus’s fragment that allows for the possibility of a mouse shocking its snout on a hunk of electrified cheese over and over again in a kind of static eternity. 202. For the fact is that neuroscientists who study memory remain unclear on the question of whether each time we remember something we are accessing a stable “memory fragment”—often called a “trace” or an “engram”—or whether each time we remember something we are literally creating a new “trace” to house the thought.

• From Henry and June (1986)

  “It isn’t for me to be asking questions, Anaïs,” Henry continues, “but listen, I am not being personal now. I myself like Hugo. I think he is fine. But I am just trying to understand your life. I imagine that you married him when your character was not yet formed, or for the sake of your mother and brother.” “No, no, not for that. I loved him. For my mother and brother I should have married in Havana, in society, richly, and I couldn’t do that.” “That day Hugo and I went out for a walk, I tried to grasp him. The truth is, if I had seen only him in Louveciennes, I would have come once, said here’s a nice man, and forgotten all about it.” “Hugo is inarticulate,” I said. “It takes time to know him.” And all the while my old, secret, immense dissatisfaction wells up like a poison, and I keep saying foolish things about the bank subduing him, and how different he is on vacations. Henry curses. “But it’s so obvious that you are superior to him.” Always that hateful phrase—from John, too. “Only in intelligence,” I say. “In everything,” says Henry. “And listen, Anaïs, answer me. You are not just making a sacrifice. You’re not really happy, are you? You want to run away from Hugo at times?” I cannot answer. I bow my head and cry. Henry comes and stands over me. “My life is a mess,” I say. “You’re trying to make me admit something I will not even admit to myself, as you could see by the journal. You sensed how much I want to love Hugo and in just what way I do. I’m all broken up with visions of what it might have been here, with you, for instance. How satisfied I have been, Henry.” “And now, only with me,” says Henry, “you would blossom so quickly that you would soon exhaust all I can give and pass on to another. There are no limits to what your life could be. I have seen how you can swim in a passion, in a large life. Listen, if anybody else did the things you have done, I would call them foolish, but somehow or other you make them seem so terribly right. This journal, for instance, is so rich, so terribly rich. You say my life is rich but it is only full of events, incidents, experiences, people. What is really rich are these pages on so little material.” “But think what I would make of more material,” I say. “Think of what you said about my novel, that the theme [faithfulness] was an anachronism. That stung me. It was like a criticism of my own life. Yet I cannot commit a crime, and to hurt Hugo would be a crime. Besides, he loves me as nobody has ever loved me.” “You haven’t given anybody else a real chance.”

• From Bluets (2009)

  The most I can say is that I abided it. 231. That month I touched myself every night in my narrow bed and came thinking of you, knowing all the while that I was planting the seeds of a fresh disaster. The disaster did not come then, but it did come later. “Though six days smoothly run, / The seventh will bring blue devils or a dun” (Byron, 1823). The most I can say is that this time I learned my lesson. I stopped hoping. 232. Perhaps, in time, I will also stop missing you. 233. That the future is unknowable is, for some, God’s means of suturing us in, or to, the present moment. For others, it is the mark of a malevolence, a sure sign that our entire existence here is best understood as a sort of joke or mistake. 234. For me, it is neither. It is simply the way that it is. Whether this accident be a happy or unhappy one is probably more a matter of mood than anything else; the difficulty is that “our moods do not believe in each other” (Emerson). One can wander about the landscape looking for clues, amassing evidence, but even the highest pile never seems to decide the case. 235. “One thing they don’t tell you ’bout the blues when you got ’em, you keep on fallin’ ’cause there ain’t no bottom,” sings Emmylou Harris, and she may be right. Perhaps it would help to be told that there is no bottom, save, as they say, wherever and whenever you stop digging. You have to stand there, spade in hand, cold whiskey sweat beaded on your brow, eyes misshapen and wild, some sorry-ass grave digger grown bone-tired of the trade. You have to stand there in the dirty rut you dug, alone in the darkness, in all its pulsing quiet, surrounded by the scandal of corpses. 236. Do not be overly troubled by this fact. “Nine days out of ten,” wrote Merleau-Ponty of Cézanne, “all he saw around him was the wretchedness of his empirical life and of his unsuccessful attempts, the debris of an unknown celebration.” 237. In any case, I am no longer counting the days. 238. I want you to know, if you ever read this, there was a time when I would rather have had you by my side than any one of these words; I would rather have had you by my side than all the blue in the world. 239. But now you are talking as if love were a consolation. Simone Weil warned otherwise. “Love is not consolation,” she wrote. “It is light.” 240. All right then, let me try to rephrase. When I was alive, I aimed to be a student not of longing but of light. (2003–2006)

• From Bluets (2009)

  208. Cornell’s diary entry for February 28, 1947: “Resolve this day as before to transcend in my work the overwhelming sense of sadness that has been so binding and wasteful in past.” 209. Duras did not think of alcohol as a false god, but rather as a kind of placeholder, a squatter in the space made by God’s absence. “Alcohol doesn’t console,” she wrote. “All it replaces is the lack of God.” It does not necessarily follow, however, that if and when a substance vacates the spot (renunciation), God rushes in to fill it. For some, the emptiness itself is God; for others, the space must stay empty. “Lots of space, nothing holy”: one Zen master’s definition of enlightenment (Bodhidharma). 210. For Emerson, dreams and drunkenness were but the “semblance and counterfeit” of an “oracular genius.” Therein lies their danger: they mimic—often quite well—the “flames and generosities of the heart.” I suppose he is advocating, in his “sermons,” which steadily displace the God of theology with one of Nature, what we might now term “a natural high.” 211. But are you sure—one would like to ask—that it really is mimicry, fumisterie? —Well, don’t ask, but look. Look for yourself, and ask not what has been real and what has been false, but what has been bitter, and what has been sweet. 212. If I were today on my deathbed, I would name my love of the color blue and making love with you as two of the sweetest sensations I knew on this earth. 213. But are you certain—one would like to ask—that it was sweet? 214.—No, not really, or not always. If I am to enforce a rule of “brutal honesty,” perhaps not even often. 215. It often happens that we treat pain as if it were the only real thing, or at least the most real thing: when it comes round, everything before it, around it, and, perhaps, in front of it, tends to seem fleeting, delusional. Of all the philosophers, Schopenhauer is the most hilarious and direct spokesperson for this idea: “As a rule we find pleasure much less pleasurable, pain much more painful than we expected.” You don’t believe him? He offers this quick test: “Compare the feelings of an animal engaged in eating another with those of the animal being eaten.” 216. Today is the fifth anniversary, the radio says, of the day on which “everything changed.” It says this so often that I turn it off. Everything changed. Everything changed . Well, what changed? What did the blade reveal? For whom did it come? “I grieve that grief can teach me nothing,” wrote Emerson.

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  The light filtered through the leaves and was scattered in a greenish haze that shifted gradually to the tender pink of the heather and the purple of wild mint that grew all over the ground in this huge natural palace. But even today the tart scent of mint and the smell of honey and heather still make me feel sick at my stomach; the mere sight of little boats made of cork or of wooden canes such as we used to carve all day long, like invalids or prisoners in institutions, fills me with a sadness that cuts me off from the world. A wave of anguish sometimes comes over me quite suddenly in the course of conversation with someone who is in other respects quite indifferent to me; then I discover an odor, a color, a fragment of some object that has reminded me of those hateful afternoons. I developed the habit of secretly wandering away from my companions and the clearing in the wood. As soon as I no longer heard their voices clearly, I was even more lonely, but at last able to weep over my own loneliness. I wept bitter tears, my breathing interrupted by my gasps as I allowed myself an orgy of pity for myself and my own powerlessness. My Christian companions had at least one event that came to interrupt the monotony of those days — I mean Sunday morning mass. I was surprised to note that I no longer knew the days of the week, though I had been accustomed never to be wrong on this point. Sunday mass brought order into the week of the Christians: as early as Saturday night, they were aroused from their weekday apathy. They had managed to obtain permission, on that day, to remain in the camp in order to brush and press their clothes and take their weekly baths. I envied them their preoccupations, their awareness of the importance of the moment. The next morning, close to the dormitory, we watched the believers gather in a small group. Their hair shiny with lotion, their clean shirts, everything about them conspired to make them at the same time unusually excited and quiet. On their return from the village where they attended mass, well after noon, they would describe to us with interest everything that they had seen. As for us, our Sunday morning was made different only by their gaiety. It was Mimouni who gave me the idea of it, confiding in me his intention of attending mass.

• From Bluets (2009)

  191. On the other hand, it must be admitted that there are aftereffects, impressions that linger long after the external cause has been removed, or has removed itself. “If anyone looks at the sun, he may retain the image in his eyes for several days,” Goethe wrote. “Boyle relates an image of ten years.” And who is to say this afterimage is not equally real? Indigo makes its stain not in the dyeing vat, but after the garment has been removed. It is the oxygen of the air that blues it. 192. Cyanosis: “ a blueness of the skin due to imperfectly oxygenated blood, as from a malformation of the heart.” As in: “His love for me produces a cyanosis” (S. Judd, 1851). 193. I will admit, however, upon considering the matter further, that writing does do something to one’s memory—that at times it can have the effect of an album of childhood photographs, in which each image replaces the memory it aimed to preserve. Perhaps this is why I am avoiding writing about too many specific blue things—I don’t want to displace my memories of them, nor embalm them, nor exalt them. In fact, I think I would like it best if my writing could empty me further of them, so that I might become a better vessel for new blue things. 194. One can wish to be surprised ( état d’attente ), but it is hard, if not impossible, to will being surprised. Perhaps the most one can do is look back and see that surprises have occurred, chances are that they will again. “Though lovers be lost love shall not,” etc. But I am not yet sure how to sever the love from the lover without occasioning some degree of carnage. 195. Does an album of written thoughts perform a similar displacement, or replacement, of the “original” thoughts themselves? (Please don’t start protesting here that there are no thoughts outside of language, which is like telling someone that her colored dreams are, in fact, colorless.) But if writing does displace the idea—if it extrudes it, as it were, like grinding a lump of wet clay through a hole—where does the excess go? “We don’t want to pollute our world with leftover egos” (Chögyam Trungpa). 196. I suppose I am avoiding writing down too many specific memories of you for similar reasons. The most I will say is “the fucking.” Why else suppress the details? Clearly I am not a private person, and quite possibly I am a fool. “Oh, how often have I cursed those foolish pages of mine which made my youthful sufferings public property!” Goethe wrote years after the publication of The Sorrows of Young Werther . Sei Sh ō nagon felt similarly: “Whatever people may think of my book,” she wrote after her pillow book gained fame and notoriety, “I still regret that it ever came to light.” 197.

• From Bluets (2009)

  They do not signify romance. They were sent by no one in celebration of nothing. I had known them all along. 226. As I collected blues for this project—in folders, in boxes, in notebooks, in memory—I imagined creating a blue tome, an encyclopedic compendium of blue observations, thoughts, and facts. But as I lay out my collection now, what strikes me most is its anemia —an anemia that seems to stand in direct proportion to my zeal. I thought I had collected enough blue to build a mountain, albeit one of detritus. But it seems to me now as if I have stumbled upon a pile of thin blue gels scattered on the stage long after the show has come and gone; the set, striked. 227. Perhaps this is as it should be. Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus—the first and only book of philosophy he published in his lifetime—clocks in at sixty pages, and offers a grand total of seven propositions. “As to the shortness of the book I am awfully sorry for it; but what can I do? ” he wrote to his translator. “If you were to squeeze me like a lemon you would get nothing more out of me.” 228. My injured friend is now able to write letters via voice-recognition software to keep her friends abreast of changes in her condition, of which there have been many. “My life can change, does change,” she asserts—and it has, and does, often in astonishing ways. Nonetheless, near the end of these letters, she usually includes a short paragraph that acknowledges her ongoing physical pain, and her intense grief for all she has lost, a grief she describes as bottomless. “If I did not write of the difficulties under which I labor, I would fear to be misrepresenting the grinding reality of quadriplegia and spinal cord injury,” she says. “So here it is, the paragraph that roundly asserts that I continue to suffer.” 229. I am writing all this down in blue ink, so as to remember that all words, not just some, are written in water. 230. Holed up in the north country for the month of May, a May which saw but four days of sunshine. The rest of the month was solid gray, drizzling or pouring rain, rendering everything green. Rushing and verdant. In short, a nightmare. Each day I took long walks in my yellow poncho, looking for blue, for any blue thing. I found only tarps (always tarps!) pinned over stacks of firewood, a few blue recycling containers kicked over in the streets, a grayish blue mailbox here and there. I came back to my dark chamber each night empty-eyed, empty-handed, as if I had been panning fruitlessly for gold all day in a cold river. Stop working against the world , I counseled myself. Love the one you’re with. Love the color green . But I did not love the green, nor did I want to have to love it or pretend to love it.

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  Only Kalla, because she was too nervous to stay in bed, got up and went to my father; and when the cough hardened into a threat of convulsions, she would stand beside the bed, motionless and mute as a ghost, her pale delicate face framed by black hair always marvelously supple and wavy. She would stand there and suffer with him. The morning after an attack, my father often rose in a bad temper. His illness was a part of his life and he didn’t seem to try to avoid it absolutely. He would sit cross-legged on the bed and, despite the doctor’s continually repeated warnings, begin to chain-smoke those horrible cigarettes that are full of straw and bits of wood and that filled the flat with an acrid, stinking fog. He smoked, then coughed, then spat into the yellow pot that was always at the foot of his bed. Afterwards, he would moan and beg God to help him out of this miserable life. Finally, he would dress in the suffocating fumes of the bedroom and go off for a day of ten uninterrupted hours of work. The younger children had known my father’s illness from birth and were not greatly surprised by his sufferings. If he had an unspectacular attack, once the surprise passed, they would return to their games; and my father took bitter note of this. I could never get used to his illness and each attack further convinced me of my selfishness. At night, I would bury my head in the pillow, trying to stifle the whistling of his anguished chest, his hoarse groans, his appeals to God. I had learned to gauge the gravity of each attack. When he came home on those murderously damp winter evenings and flung himself gasping and with bulging eyes on the bed, I knew the evening would be unpleasant. He would be unable to speak and would wave his hand desperately to my mother who was hurrying to his help. She filled the little fire-yellowed saucer with medicated powder and threw a lighted match into it. My father bent over the smoke, opened his mouth and gasped. At once, he began to cough with all his body and lungs, and the sweat dripped from his face. Sometimes, the cough dragged on and on and never seemed to stop. Caught in the horrible rhythm of his coughs, he became panicky, tried to break out of it, rose suddenly, dropped back onto the bed, and then continued to gasp and cough until, overcome by his anguish, he would thrust his fingers down his own throat. Then, I would pack my notebooks in a briefcase and run from the house, followed a long way down the street by the odor of Legras powder and the sound of my father’s cough. ~ 4. UNCLE JOSEPH’S DEATH ~

• From Henry and June (1986)

  But I cannot enjoy sexuality for its own sake, independent of my feelings. I am inherently faithful to the man who possesses me. Now it is a whole faithfulness to Henry. I tried to enjoy Hugo today, to please him, and I couldn’t. I had to pretend. If there were no June in the world today, I could know the end of my restlessness. I awoke one morning crying. Henry had said to me, “I really take no pleasure in your body. It isn’t your body I love.” And the sorrowfulness of that moment comes back. Yet, the last time we were together he had said wild things about the beauty of my legs and of my knowing so well how to fuck. Poor woman! Both Hugo and Henry like to watch my face when they make love to me. But now, for Hugo, my face is a mask. Allendy told Hugo at the concert that I was a very interesting subject, that I responded so sensitively and quickly. That I was almost cured. But that evening I again had the sensation of wanting to dazzle Allendy, while concealing some secret part of my real self. There must always be something secret. From Henry I conceal the fact that I rarely get ultimate sexual satisfaction because he likes my legs wide open, and I need to close them. I don’t want to diminish his pleasure. Besides, I get a kind of disseminated pleasure which, even if it is less keen, lasts longer than an orgasm. Henry wrote me a letter after the concert. I put it under my pillow last night: “Anaïs, I was dazzled by your beauty! I lost my head, I felt wretched. I have been blind, blind, I said to myself. You stood there like a Princess. You were the Infanta! You looked thoroughly disappointed in me. What was the matter? Did I look stupid? I probably was. I wanted to get down on my knees and kiss the hem of your dress. So many Anaïses you have shown me—and now this one!—as if to prove your Protean versatility. Do you know what Fraenkel said to me? ‘I never expected to see a woman as beautiful as that. How can a woman of such femininity, such beauty, write a book [on D. H. Lawrence]?’ Oh, that pleased me no end! The little tuft of hair coming up over the crown, the lustrous eyes, the gorgeous shoulder line, and those sleeves I adore, regal, Florentine, diabolistic! I saw nothing below the bosom. I was too excited to stand off and survey you. How much I wanted to whisk you away forever. Eloping with the Infanta—ye gods. Feverishly I sought out the Father. I think I spotted him. His hair was the clue. Strange hair, strange face, strange family. Presentiment of genius. Ah, yes, Anaïs, I am taking everything quietly—because you belong in another world. I see nothing in myself to recommend your interest. Your love ? That

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  After the pogrom, however, as soon as it was again possible to move around, Ben Smaan came to see me. We went for a long walk all around the old ramparts, with me slowing my impatient gait to keep pace with his small unsteady steps. He talked a lot, perhaps to hide his own embarrassment and emotion, and I said almost nothing, not knowing what to say. He had worried about my personal safety but, even more, he admitted, about what I might think, and he now apologized for his doubts. He was sure that I had realized that it had all been cooked up. Yes, I had. It must be explained to all in our respective religious communities. Yes, certainly. (Would mine believe me, I wondered?) It was more than ever necessary to be united. Yes, it was. (I was sick of those nightmarish nights!) He was preparing a petition. Yes, I would sign it. Bissor was dead: what was I to do about this death? Whether it was a miserable European diversionary move or a spontaneous and blind mob action, no amount of research into responsibilities would ever bring him back to life. Ben Smaan was right: one had to educate the mob, unmask those who fooled it, and draw attention to the real problems. But I was tired and the results were too far off. For the moment I stood between two walls: how was I to choose between repulsive hypocritical anti-Semitism, which had probably been the instigator of the massacre, and these murderous explosions which, like letting blood, periodically relieved the pressure of so much accumulated hatred? How vain and futile are all theoretical and philosophical constructions of the mind when compared to the brutal realities of the world of men! The European philosophers build the most rigorous and virtuous moral codes, and their politicians, brought up by these teachers, foment murders as a means of government. After how bitter a struggle had I chosen the West and not the East! And now I was beginning to listen to the reasonings of Jewish nationalists when the war came to fill up our lives and postpone any solution to these problems. ~ 3. THE WAR ~ In order to emerge from my solitude, as I have already said, I tried making advances to the outside world. I did not have to do it for long; suddenly, the world flooded my life and dragged me in its wake with so much violence that I hardly knew what was happening to me. We had become accustomed to the idea of war; for a long time it had been a far-off and inoffensive affair, but then suddenly it was present, exploding between our walls.

• From Bluets (2009)

  It seemed unwise to contemplate this statement any further. 117. “How clearly I have seen my condition, yet how childishly I have acted,” says Goethe’s sorrowful young Werther. “How clearly I still see it, and yet show no sign of improvement.” 118. Not long after that afternoon I came across a photograph of you with this woman. You were wearing the shirt. I went over to the house of my injured friend and told her the story as I moved her legs in and out of the inflatable, thigh-high boots she wears to compress her legs while lying down so as to inhibit the formation of blood clots. How ghastly , she said. 119. My friend was a genius before her accident, and she remains a genius now. The difference is that these days it is nearly impossible to discount her pronouncements. Something about her condition has bestowed upon her the quality of an oracle, perhaps because now she generally stays in one place, and one must go unto her. Eventually you will have to give up this love , she told me one night while I made us dinner. It has a morbid heart. 120. In the end, climactically rebuffed, young Werther shoots himself in the head while wearing a blue coat—a coat which is a replica of the one he was wearing the night he first danced with his beloved. It then takes him all night to die a bloody death that inspired a rash of copycat, blue-coated suicides all over Germany and beyond. Note that here, as elsewhere, seeing clearly seems to take Werther, and us, no further. 121. “Clearness is so eminently one of the characteristics of truth, that often it even passes for truth itself,” wrote Joseph Joubert, the French “man of letters” who recorded countless such fragments in notebooks for forty years in preparation for a monumental work of philosophy that he never wrote. I know all about this passing for truth. At times I think it quite possible that it lies, as if a sleight of hand, at the heart of all my writing. 122. “Truth. To surround it with figures and colors, so that it can be seen,” wrote Joubert, calmly professing a heresy. 123. Whenever I speak of faith, I am not speaking of faith in God. Likewise, when I speak of doubt, I am not talking about doubting God’s existence, or the truth of any gospel. Such terms have never meant very much to me. To contemplate them reminds me of playing Pin the Tail on the Donkey: you get spun around until you wander off, disoriented and blindfolded, walking gingerly with a hand stretched out in front of you, until you either run into a wall (laughter), or a friend gently pushes you back toward the game. 124.