Devotion

I felt helplessly at peace. The rain dissipated. My shoes were muddied. There was an absence of light, but not of love.

Why do we write? Because we cannot simply live.

And that’s how I became Philadelphia, she wrote later in her journal. Like the city of freedom. Yet I was not free. Hunger is its own warden.

It cost me a lot, she was thinking, not with regret, but with pride.

The confession booth is not wide enough to hold my sins. It is but a small boat in the center of a terrible sea.

Stirred by a chorus of sensations, she was at once liberated and trapped.

The unexpected gift suggested small hopes, a vague but promising human connection. She felt a delight but also a fear of it, for it momentarily seemed to eclipse her impatience to skate. She lived only for skating, she told herself; there was no room for anything else. Not love, school, or scraping the walls of memory. Negotiating a bouquet of confusion, the lace on her skate broke in her hand. She quickly knotted it, then unfastened the skirt of her new coat and stepped onto the ice.

-I am Eugenia, she said, to no one in particular.

Theirs was a story that could not resolve, only unravel.

He wrote of lifting her in the air and delighting in the fact that she had his mother’s eyes, deep brown eyes that seemed to contain everything.

I remember seeing Voltaire's cap in a glass case in a museum somewhere. A very humble flesh-colored lace cap. I harbored an intense desire for it, a strange fascination that lingered coupled with a superstitious notion that the wearer might access the residue of Voltaire's dreams. All in French of course, all of his period, and at that moment it occurred to me that dreamers through time dreamed of those in their own epoch. The ancient Greeks dreamed of their gods. Emily Bronte of the moors. And Christ? Perhaps he did not dream, yet knew all there was to dream, every combination, until the end of time.

“We were in our early twenties, when everything, including the sentimental head of the poet, was a revelation.”

“I imagine writing a story guided by the atmosphere conjured by the resonance of a particular human voice. Her voice. No plot in mind, just trailing her tones, timbres, and composing phrases, as if music, and superimposing them, transparent layers, over hers.”

“The dance is over and the face of love is nothing but the wide skirt and burnished heels of winter.”

“Inspiration is the unforeseen quantity, the muse that assails at the hidden hour. The arrows fly and one is unaware of being struck, and that a host of unrelated catalysts have joined clandestinely to form a system of its own, rendering one with the vibrations of an incurable disease—a burning imagination—at once unholy and divine.

What is to be done with the resulting impulses, these nerve endings flickering like an illuminated map of thieving constellations? The stars pulse. The muse seeks to be vivified. But the mind is also the muse. It seeks to outsmart its glorious opponents, to rewire such sources of inspiration. A crystal stream suddenly dried. A thing of beauty joyless, defiled. Why does the creative spirit turn on itself? Why does the maker twist all drama? The pen is lifted, guided by the shattered muse. Without discord, it marks, harmony passes unnoticed, without discord, it continues, Abel is rendered no more than a forgotten shepherd.”