Unholy Loves

Excerpt

For an hour and a half she wanders aimlessly about the stacks in the library, drawing her hand across the spines of books; from time to time she pauses to take up a book and open it and read a few lines. She has always been absurdly superstitious: she believes that anything she might come upon, in such a situation, could have great bearing upon her life—could alter the course of her life. (Always, when she has been most unhappy, she has wandered into libraries, often into the libraries of unfamiliar cities; she has spent hours like this, rather like a blind woman, drawing at random to open. After a particularly unpleasant scene with Stanley she fled to a tiny branch library, and by accident came across a book on Mozart, and became so absorbed in it that she forget the quarrel entirely; when she at last looked up, hours later, she was dazed and disoriented and could hardly believe anything so trivial as a quarrel with her husband could have upset her so. In a world in which Mozart had lived, and written music, and died—died as he did, so cruelly—how could the Fifields' disagreements matter?) But today she is fearful of what she might read. Perhaps it will be too significant, or perhaps it will have no meaning at all—To live alone one must be either an animal or God, says Aristotle; I hold that God is the immanent, and not the extraneous, cause of all things, says Spinoza. All is in God; all lives and moves in God.

A dreary prospect, such transcendence of duality, Brigit thinks. If she and Alexis are in God, and nothing of them remains that is not God, how was it possible that they had ever loved each other for a time . . . . The God immanent in them had been a God of erotic necessity, not to be placated or denied.

Their last quarrel: both of them white-faced, trembling, abusive. You want me as a sort of husband, Alexis shouted. But I'm not your husband—I'm nothing of yours!

Brigit pulls another book from the shelf and opens it blindly. Anything to still her lover's anguished voice . . . .To Carthage then I came, where a cauldron of unholy loves sang all about mine ears. St. Augustine. The Confessions. Which she has not glanced at since her sophomore year at Smith.

Epigraph

Masks are arrested expressions and admirable echoes of feelings once faithful, discreet, and superlative. Living things in contact with the air must acquire a cuticle, and it is not urged against cuticles that they are not hearts. Yet some philosophers seem to be angry with images for not being things, and with words for not being feelings; words and images are like shells—not less integral parts of nature than the substances they cover, but better addressed to the eye and more open to observation. I would not say that substance exists for the sake of appearance or faces for the sake of masks, or the passions for the sake of poetry and virtue. Nothing arises in nature for the sake of anything else. All these phrases and products are equally involved in the round of existence.

—Santayana, Soliloquies in England

Reviews

• Kirkus Reviews, August 1, 1979, p883
• Publishers Weekly, September 3, 1979, p90
• Village Voice, September 17, 1979, p44
• Booklist, October 1, 1979, p219
• Library Journal, October 1, 1979, p2120
• Village Voice, October 1, 1979, p47
• New York Times Book Review, October 7, 1979, p9
• Newsweek, October 29, 1979, p99
• Christian Science Monitor, November 7, 1979, p17
• Washington Post Book World, December 9, 1979, p8
• America, December 29, 1979, p435
• Best Sellers, January 1980, p366
• Change, February-March, 1980, p58-59
• Listener, August 28, 1980, p281
• Observer, September 7, 1980, p29
• New Statesman, September 12, 1980
• Times Literary Supplement, September 12, 1980, p983

Note

Working Title: Soliloquies

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