One Perfect Thing

Edward Steichen’s legacy was a matter of debate long before his death. This was both interesting to him and not. He was never good at accepting direction, and owing to a healthy dose of amour propre, he rarely swerved from his course once he had set the trajectory. Implacably curious, he was also an unapologetic autodidact. He certainly worked hard to make a case for himself—his ways and means—through exhibitions, writing, interviews, and action. But he was not entirely immune from criticism, nor incapable of self-appraisal, as evinced by his total retreat from painting in the 1920s. His greatest handicap was, perhaps, his relentless quest for perfection, both in the studio and the garden. His daughter Kate recalled, “My father, in all his life, in everything he did, sought the one perfect thing.”[i] In writing about Steichen as a photographer, the art critic Charles Caffin described him as being “somewhat arrogantly intolerant of the commonplace; rapturously devout toward that which is choicely beautiful.”^[ii] This also describes his approach to flowers. Variations on the word perfection were used repeatedly by Steichen to describe what he was seeking in a delphinium. What he meant by that, precisely, proved to be as elusive as the thing itself.

Most gardeners find fulfillment in watching the seeds they sow take root and grow, in selecting and arranging plants for the border, in designing the garden. Few have the capacity (time, money, interest, expertise) to make the leap into plant genetics. Even the famous English garden designer Gertrude Jekyll (1843–1932), who was known to compare gardening to painting, and whose ideas regarding color in the garden still hold sway, didn’t trouble with plant hybridization.^[iii] Steichen, on the other hand, began toying with plant genetics within two years of getting started in the garden at Voulangis, and, even with the interruption of two world wars, never really looked back. One wonders if gardening as a pastime would have held Steichen’s attention at all if he had not discovered plant breeding was such an inventive enterprise oriented toward the creation of inceptive natural beauty. When he began gardening in earnest, he was already recognized as a master in the darkroom, someone skilled at calibrated experiments with complex processes designed to further his artistic vision. It was this element of resourcefulness that found fertile ground in plant breeding.

The horticultural activities Steichen had conducted over the years were no secret and became firmly established in the Steichen lore during his lifetime. The New York Herald Tribune described Steichen in 1951 as a “man whose chief love outside his wife and photography is delphiniums.”^[iv] The commendations he received during the years he served as president of the American Delphinium Society were immensely gratifying to him, because they came from people whose opinion mattered in the world of horticulture, but who were also working gardeners. Perhaps Steichen’s most cherished compliment came from the illustrious Liberty Hyde Bailey, when, in his book The Garden of Larkspurs (1939), he wrote that the “reasons for Steichen’s success in growing these great delphiniums are his artistic eye and high ideal of perfection, discriminating choice of strong disease-free stock, good land well enriched, irrigation when necessary, rigorous elimination of all plants year by year that do not meet requirements, all coupled with accurate recognition of the special treatment required by the different strains or kinds.”^[v] This was high praise from America’s “Father of Modern Horticulture,” and, no doubt, especially pleased Steichen in how it stressed both the artistic and practical requirements of good flower culture.

“To me, the breeding of flowers is a creative art,” Steichen claimed. “It is a form of poetry using living materials and the process and technique is of life itself.”^[vi] That said, he was no better than anyone else in the horticultural community at delineating the “aesthetics” of flowers.^[vii] Just as he sought the “blueprint of the ideal,” he rejected the idea that external standards could be applied to living plants designed by man in alliance with nature. During his earliest experiments in France, Steichen had cheerfully entered his new plants into regional horticultural competitions, where they won awards. By the 1930s, he had grown to distrust floral competitions. One suspects there were several reasons for this, ranging from simple pride—his work with delphiniums was beyond judgment—to his frequent objection to the application of “points” in such competitions. But it might also have had something to do with a strong desire to preserve the purity of the space that his garden had come to represent. Possessing such a space and having the freedom to operate at will—and vanish into that space—is what truly sustained him. This might also explain why he was incapable of realizing his plans for a commercial nursery: the exigencies of the consumer market, as he had learned through his photography business, have a way of dictating outcomes.

Steichen withheld his original delphinium hybrids from any form of distribution or commercialization for decades. He claimed to have created hundreds of original strains at Umpawaug, but only one is remembered by name. He was incredibly proud of the Connecticut Yankees and its release ranked—in his heart and mind—as one of his greatest triumphs. But the Yankees would be his only “official” contribution to the genus, after a lifetime of hard work. The financial return was minuscule as compared to the investment. The sad irony of the situation was not lost on Steichen. Even the purity of the strain itself could not be guaranteed; it is doubtful that the Connecticut Yankees of today are genetically linked to those grown by Steichen.

If gardens are a form of autobiography, then Steichen wrote his in his first garden at Voulangis, France and at Umpawaug Plant Breeding Farm, places that are rendered only as scenery in expositions of his professional life in photography. Steichen would not have wanted it this way. The magnitude of his creative alliance with nature was on open display in his 1961 retrospective exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art and was further expounded in his book A Life in Photography, published two years later. By his telling, he had been defined equally by the alchemy he effected in the garden as by that explored in the darkroom. In 1937, a reporter for House & Garden declared, “Henceforth Steichen and Delphiniums will be synonymous as Steichen and superb photography”^[viii]—something that has not come to pass. From the perspective of the garden, then, it is wonderfully subversive to speculate that Steichen’s legacy rests on his photography, because it is the pictures that have survived, while the flowers, a fugitive medium at best, have not.

Sarah Anne McNear is an independent author and curator based in Chicago and Deer Isle, Maine.

[i] Kate Steichen quoted in Lou Bottino, second draft screenplay, “Steichen . . . The Photographer,” which aired as “Steichen: A Century in Photography,” WXXI-TV, Rochester, NY: 1980, 63, IX.C.44, ESA MoMA Archives, NY.

^[ii] Charles H. Caffin, “The Art of Eduard J. Steichen,” Camera Work, no. 30 (April 1910): 34.

^[iii] George Gessert, “Bastard Flowers,” Leonardo, 29, no. 4 (MIT Press, 1996), 291.

^[iv] Tex McCrary and Jinx Falkenberg, “New York Close Up,” New York Herald Tribune, January 26, 1951, 19.

^[v] Liberty Hyde Bailey, The Garden of Larkspurs (New York: Macmillian, 1939), 63–64.

^[vi] Steichen, manuscript notes for Matthew Josephson, [summer] 1944, 13, Matthew Josephson Papers, Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.

^[vii] See Gessert, “Bastard Flowers,” 291–298.

^[viii] Robinson Wright, “Men Who Make Our Flowers—II, Edward J. Steichen, Creator of Beauty,” House & Garden, January 1937, 60.

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“It is the paradox of Walden, and of all great literature that seeks to represent the real world, that by rooting his narrative so firmly in actualities of his own time and place, Thoreau created a work that remains vitally relevant to our own.”—Robert Finch, Los Angeles Times

This is the authoritative edition of an American literary classic: Henry David Thoreau’s Walden, an elegantly written record of his experiment in simple living. With this edition, Thoreau scholar Jeffrey S. Cramer has meticulously corrected errors and omissions from previous editions of Walden and provided illuminating notes on the biographical, historical, and geographical contexts of the great nineteenth-century writer and thinker’s life.

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This new selection of Thoreau’s essays traces his trajectory as a writer for the outlets of his day—the periodical press, newspapers, and compendiums—and as a frequent presenter on the local lecture circuit. By arranging the writings chronologically, the volume re-creates the experience of Thoreau’s readers as they followed his developing ideas over time.

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“This collection of quiet delight illustrates the naturalist’s alertness to Concord wildlife . . . and the poetry of his prose. . . . Sketches by Debby Cotter Kaspari, as well as small drawings by Thoreau, augment the book and lend it a snug and welcoming feel.”—Nina MacLaughlin, Boston Globe

Many of the most vivid writings in the renowned Journal of Henry David Thoreau concern creatures he came upon when rambling the fields, forests, and wetlands of Concord and nearby communities. A keen and thoughtful observer, he wrote frequently about these animals, always sensitive to their mysteries and deeply appreciative of their beauty and individuality.

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It was his friend Ralph Waldo Emerson, another inveterate journal keeper, who urged Thoreau to keep a record of his thoughts and observations. Begun in 1837, Thoreau’s journal spans a period of twenty-five years and runs to more than two million words, coming to a halt only in 1861, shortly before the author’s death. The handwritten journal had somewhat humble origins, but as it grew in scope and ambition it came to function as a record of Thoreau’s interior life as well as the source for his books and essays. Indeed, it became the central concern of the author’s literary life. Critics now recognize Thoreau’s journal as an important artistic achievement in its own right.

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“Thoreau’s Wildflowers collects some of Thoreau’s best botanical observations, pairing his prose with black and white drawings by illustrator Barry Moser. Most readers of Thoreau’s Wildflowers will be meeting these musings on plants for the first time.”—Danny Heitman, Wall Street Journal

This inviting selection of Thoreau’s best flower writings is arranged by day of the year and accompanied by Thoreau’s philosophical speculations and his observations of the weather and of other plants and animals. They illuminate the author’s spirituality, his belief in nature’s correspondence with the human soul, and his sense that anticipation—of spring, of flowers yet to bloom—renews our connection with the earth and with immortality.

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As he explores Mt. Katahdin (an Indian word meaning “highest land”), Lake Chesuncook, the Allagash River, and the East Branch of the Penobscot, Thoreau muses on his own vulnerability and the humility engendered by his solitude in the wilderness. Throughout Thoreau invokes the forest of Maine—the mountains, waterways, fauna, flora, and the people—in his singular style. Echoing Walden, Thoreau’s passionate outcry against the degradation of the environment in The Maine Woods will resonate strongly today.

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Noble Beasts: Hunter and Hunted in French Eighteenth-Century Art tells a story about violence, animality, masculinity, and human and species hierarchies. It’s a book about how a seemingly minor genre of art production became a widespread, high-profile, and extremely powerful form of aesthetic and political expression.

But–let’s be honest–it’s also a book about dogs.

Of all the animals that populated hunting art, dogs occupied a special place in human hearts and thought. By the eighteenth century, dogs were firmly established as domesticated and companion animals in households at all levels of society, and they were particularly prized by wealthy men as hunting partners. So it’s not surprising that those men lavished attention and money on their dogs, and commissioned some of the best artists of the day to create likenesses of their beloved Diane, Blonde, Nonette, or Lise (these are all real eighteenth-century dog names).

To a twenty-first century viewer, nothing could be more natural than wanting a portrait (or many portraits) of your dog. You probably have a portrait of a dog on your phone right now. But in eighteenth-century France, animal portraiture was a recent invention, and one that actively challenged artistic and species hierarchies.

The dog portrait on the cover of Noble Beasts is a case in point. In 1740, Jean-Baptiste Oudry–a painter to the king and an influential member of the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture–offered a gift to an important client: Carl Gustav Tessin, the Swedish envoy to Paris and a collector of contemporary French art who had just facilitated the purchase of eleven Oudry paintings by the Swedish crown.

The gift took the form of a portrait of Tessin’s beloved hunting dog Pehr (Swedish for Peter). Pehr was what was known in the eighteenth century as a basset–and despite his small stature, he was a formidable hunting dog. He was also a beloved family member. Pehr had been given to Tessin and his wife by the Swedish royal family and he accompanied the Tessins on their travels to Vienna (where he posed alongside his owners for a hunt-themed portrait by Martin van Meytens) and to Paris. The Tessins’ account books for the Paris trip note the purchase of a basket and a collar for him.

Pehr’s portrait is emphatically vertical, in direct opposition to his own horizontality. The choice of format immediately draws attention to Pehr’s diminutive status, as does the point of view, which puts us at Pehr’s level and requires us to look up at the dead hare and pheasant as well as the looming wall to which they are nailed. The presence of the gun, with its perfectly rendered burlwood stock and its gleaming trigger and cock turned invitingly toward the viewer, implies the presence of the human hunter, as does the equally illusionistic dead game. Indeed, scholars have argued that the painting is as much a portrait of Tessin as it is of Pehr.

Given how attached Tessin was to Pehr, and how personally invested he was in his art collecting, the Oudry painting certainly bolstered his patron’s self-image. But the painting remains a meditation on canine rather than human subjectivity. The long vertical lines of Oudry’s composition, produced by the cast shadow of the gun, the stretched-out corpses of the game, and even the vertical edges of the masonry, draw our attention to Pehr’s face and body. His small scale, along with his heroic musculature and his elegant three-quarters pose, is certainly meant to be amusing, parodying both human hunting portraiture (like that produced by Meytens for the Tessins a few years earlier) and the portraits of Louis XV’s hunting dogs that had made Oudry famous.

However, Pehr’s compact vitality also invites us to meditate on the differences between the alert dog and the gun, the wall, and the dead game. Pehr is presented as the one sentient being of the composition, facing us and training his eyes, nose, and ears on who or whatever is outside the picture plane. His uprightness, which Oudry literally highlights by picking out his face and front paws with light-colored brushstrokes, contrasts with the inverted sprawl of the lifeless pheasant and hare just above his head. Like the gun, Pehr radiates explosive potential, but unlike the gun, he is emphatically alive. His animation does not depend on the human hand–except, of course, Oudry’s.

Tessin was evidently delighted by Pehr’s portrait. To mark his esteem, he sent Oudry a gold tabatière worth over 500 livres as a gift in exchange. The portrait was also exhibited in public at the Salon of 1740, a testimony to both the artist’s and the patron’s satisfaction with it. Tessin, moreover, ordered an engraving of the painting the same year from the printmaker Pierre Aveline, which identified the collector (but not Pehr) by name. Shortly before Tessin left Paris, Oudry painted a portrait of another of his hunting dogs, Zephyr.

Oudry’s deeply compelling portrait of Pehr confronts us with the animal self, in both its familiarity and its strangeness. It encourages us to contemplate–in the most pleasurable way, and in the body of a beloved companion–the question of animal selfhood and its implications for human subjectivity. The very beauty of a painting like this indicates how receptive eighteenth-century artists and viewers were to the idea that their dogs were much like themselves.

Imagining that your dog is just like you, or that you are just like your dog, requires something of a leap. But on a literal level, dog portraiture, like all hunting art and like hunting itself, is all about taking that leap, about throwing yourself into another being’s consciousness, and into their world, without restraint, even without reason.

Amy Freund is associate professor and Kleinheinz Family Endowment for the Arts and Education Endowed Chair in Art History at Southern Methodist University.

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On April 30, Pace Gallery in New York will host a day-long symposium centering on new ways of thinking about how these publications can be produced and utilized, offering perspectives and insights from scholars and experts in several fields—for more information on the event, visit the gallery’s website. Next year, Pace will present a major exhibition of Modigliani’s work, organized in collaboration with the Institut Restellini, in New York.

The conversation that follows has been edited and condensed.

Marc Restellini: My background with Modigliani goes back many years. I was born into a family that knew Léopold Zborowski, Modigliani’s dealer and my grandfather’s dealer. My grandfather, Isaac Antcher, was a painter of the School of Paris. He never knew Modigliani, but he was very close with Jonas Netter, who collected my grandfather’s work and was also one of the biggest collectors of Modigliani in history—he had around 60 paintings by Modigliani. The friendship between the Antcher and Netter families has persisted for three generations, and I have remained extremely close to the Netter descendants. Currently, I’m the curator of the Netter collection, structured as a foundation, which is also the largest collection of Isaac Antcher’s paintings.

My first physical contact with Modigliani occurred when I was six or seven years old in Netter’s house. I touched a painting, and I remember my mother told me, “Don’t touch! It’s very expensive.” I was shy and didn’t understand what the work was. Years later, when I was studying at the Sorbonne University, I had a professor who knew my family’s background and encouraged me to study Modern art and the School of Paris. This was complicated because, to me, a historian needs to be objective and can’t have this kind of family interest. I was fixated on this problem, and for a long time it felt impossible. But ultimately, I  began my research on the School of Paris at university, and I wrote my master’s thesis specifically on Zborowski and the painters he collected.

I organized my first exhibition of works by Modigliani, Chaim Soutine, and my grandfather in 1989. A few years later, in 1992, I made an exhibition of more than 55 paintings by Modigliani at the Tobu Museum in Japan. This was when I really started my work with Modigliani.

When I pursued my PhD in the 1990s, I started using the computer for art historical research. I got a microcomputer with dBase III and created a database and methodology that could support the production of a catalogue raisonné. I was hired to work on uniting computers, research, and art history as a lecturer at the Sorbonne.

Marc Glimcher: It’s very hard for people to understand the role of technology and the way we thought about art and research back in the 1990s. In 1994, Pace got dBase III as well, and we started to design a system to hold the inventory and history of the gallery. Now it seems like crude, old technology, but at the time it was the beginning of the basic ideas of scientific methodology for humanities research. It felt like the first possibility of objective truth coming into our world, which was very radical. Before then, truth was defined by people—this expert or that expert, this opinion or that opinion. Computers challenged that. It’s amazing to hear about how technology shaped your research and your work with Modigliani. Can you speak more about the beginnings of your work on the catalogue raisonné?

MR: I was put in contact with Daniel Wildenstein, the dealer and art historian, in the mid-1990s and he encouraged me a lot to start the catalogue raisonné. He suggested that I use his Institute as a workspace and as support to the project. He knew all about the Modigliani exhibition I had organized in Japan and my strong connection with the Netter family. I was a little reluctant because I knew how difficult it would be—I wanted to create a catalogue raisonné with the least outside intervention, the least subjectivity, as possible. Only with facts, information, and scientific results. I wanted to remove and erase the expert, which was a real paradox at that time.

I started working on provenance, style, and scientific analysis. I asked Daniel Wildenstein to invest in an infrared camera and tools for pigment analysis, and he agreed. We used a control group of pigment samples from paintings in major Modigliani collections—including that of Jonas Netter and Paul Alexandre, who were two of the earliest collectors of the artist’s work.

I created a methodology based on three pillars: scientific analysis, stylistic comparisons, and provenance research. With this documentation, we decided whether a painting would be included in the catalogue raisonné or not.

MG: That’s an amazing story. I think it’s worth noting a few of these points that are essential not only to the historical record and legacy of Modigliani but also to the future of art historical research. It’s interesting that this idea of eliminating the expert, eliminating subjectivity, is so recent in our world. It’s a very new idea, but, of course, it’s an idea from the Enlightenment. And then, centuries later, we get the principle of the null hypothesis—we make a hypothesis and then we attempt to disprove it.

We’re now seeing this penetrate the world of catalogues raisonnés. By and large, catalogues raisonnés include essays about artists and some brief conversation about the making of the publication, but they are essentially tantamount to scientific journal papers with no methodology section, which would never be accepted in any other field. We have catalogue raisonné after catalogue raisonné that present us with a set of facts that we are to take as truth, but with no methodology. It gets lost in a kind of tradition instead of an analysis, or an adherence to the null hypothesis. That’s not how we do science, nor how we do rigorous humanities research. For this to be acceptable, there must be results, and there must be a conclusion that can be tested and verified.

Could you talk a little bit about how you came to the decision to create volume one of this book, which gives a full explanation of your methodology?

MR: Volume one contains all the information from and documentation of our process, as well as stylistic comparisons and scientific analyses. In this volume, we created a template, a scheme, explaining how we used these methods to arrive at our conclusions. The subject of pigment, to take only one example, is extremely complicated—it’s about compatibility with a specific period but also with the artist’s technique, and that can only be obtained if you have enough information and data for each painting.

MG: This is really a milestone in the history of catalogues raisonnés, and this is something we have been involved with at Pace since the 1990s, when technology was starting to creep into the art world. Digital technology and the emergence of the very early internet suggested to us at Pace that catalogues raisonnés could be living things that would allow dynamic historical recording. We started imagining a digital catalogue raisonné system that would allow the data to be live.

We founded Artifex Press, which is now part of the Cahiers d’Art Institute. We’ve always been interested in how the facts and information that travel with artworks would evolve. When we first learned about your publication coming to completion, we immediately recognized it as a major evolutionary turning point for the catalogue raisonné as an idea.

You’ve not only been working on Modigliani your whole life, but you’ve also been in and around the community of researchers making catalogues raisonnés for the last thirty years. What are some of the key moments of change you’ve seen, and what does this book mean for the ways that catalogues raisonnés will be produced in the future?

MR: That’s a big question. I’ve seen a lot of evolution over the last thirty years. When I started with scientific analysis, everyone in the market laughed. My nickname was “X-man,” and everyone called me crazy. “Why do you want to use this? We don’t need that,” they said. It’s taken many years for everyone to acknowledge that scientific analysis is very important. If future catalogues raisonnés use what I did as a reference point, I think the market will be much safer.

MG: It all rests on having authority created by methodology rather than authority created by someone’s position or tradition, or by some kind of subjective consensus. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, there was a rising fear of inauthentic works. A demand for absolute reference points in artists’ bodies of work started to surge, and no such reference point existed for Modigliani. The market reverted to Ambrogio Ceroni’s catalogue raisonné, which was produced between 1958 and 1970. Ceroni’s book is woefully incomplete; it’s missing some of Modigliani’s most famous paintings—many, many paintings that have been known for a long time.

So, the purpose of our 2027 exhibition of Modigliani’s work in New York is to highlight the publication of this new catalogue raisonné and all your research over these past three decades. The show will, by necessity, feature many paintings that are not in Ceroni’s publication. It’s going to highlight this expansion of knowledge about Modigliani’s legacy—we’re hoping to show some paintings that haven’t been exhibited in many years.

MR: My dream is to show the paintings alongside scientific materials that we used in our research and to explain some of Modigliani’s stylistic techniques. It would be very interesting to offer a new perspective on all these aspects of Modigliani in the exhibition, inviting visitors to discover something new.

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“A majestic work that goes a long way in unraveling . . . the country’s enigmas and apparent contradictions.”
—Ervand Abrahamian, New York Review of Books

This history of modern Iran is not a survey in the conventional sense but an ambitious exploration of the story of a nation. It offers a revealing look at how events, people, and institutions are shaped by currents that sometimes reach back hundreds of years.

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“A compelling portrait of revolution, protest, and reform in modern Iran.”—Eskandar Sadeghi-Boroujerdi, author of Revolution and Its Discontents

In this comprehensive history, Homa Katouzian explores Iran from the 1940s to the present, showing how the 1979 revolution came into being. From the chaos of oil nationalisation to the overthrow of Mosaddeq in 1953, through the revolutionary moment itself, to the resistance movements of contemporary Iran, the revolution has had long and lasting effects.

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“If one has only limited time to gain an appreciation of the revolutionary force of Islam in Iran, it should be spent here.”
—Scott Armstrong, Washington Post Book World

In this substantially revised and expanded version of Nikki Keddie’s classic work Roots of Revolution, the author brings the story of modern Iran to the present day, exploring the political, cultural, and social changes of the past quarter century. Keddie provides insightful commentary on the Iran-Iraq war, the Persian Gulf War, and the effects of 9/11 and Iran’s strategic relationship with the U.S.

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“Katouzian is a convincing analyst of Iranian history.”
—Robert Carver, Tablet

In recent years, Iran has gained attention mostly for negative reasons—its authoritarian religious government, disputed nuclear program, and controversial role in the Middle East—but there is much more to the story of this ancient land than can be gleaned from the news. This authoritative and comprehensive history of Iran, written by Homa Katouzian, an acclaimed expert, covers the entire history of the area from the ancient Persian Empire to today’s Iranian state.

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“[A] wonderfully informative account of the triangular relationship among the US, Iran, and Israel.”—Peter Galbraith, New York Review of Books

In this era of superheated rhetoric and vitriolic exchanges between the leaders of Iran and Israel, the threat of nuclear violence looms. But the real roots of the enmity between the two nations mystify Washington policymakers, and no promising pathways to peace have emerged. This book traces the shifting relations among Israel, Iran, and the United States from 1948 to the present, uncovering for the first time the details of secret alliances, treacherous acts, and unsavory political maneuverings that have undermined Middle Eastern stability and disrupted U.S. foreign policy initiatives in the region.

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In her private notes, Gwen John described herself as “a seer of strange beauties.” Her desire to look closely at the world propelled her creative practice, leading her to paint and draw the same subjects over and over again, each time observing and rendering them anew. Her work, which mainly features women, children, and nature, bears some of the hallmarks of modernism yet stands apart from the early twentieth-century avant-garde. She pushed the boundaries of figurative representation, developing her own visual language rooted in a subtle symbolism and a poetic view of the world. She exploited the tension between figuration and abstraction, drawing attention to unassuming, everyday details. While steeped in Western art history and its ideals of beauty, she depicted her subjects from her own female point of view, undercutting centuries-old formal traditions that served the male gaze. Even her use of the plural “beauties” refuses singular and authoritative interpretations of the concept, emphasizing beauty’s many manifestations and guises. John’s desire to see strange beauties is the starting point for our project and offers a lens through which to apprehend her work and practice, to embrace her art’s enigmatic qualities, and to expand our understanding of what made her vision unique.

In May 1926, a month before her fiftieth birthday, John opened the only solo exhibition of her lifetime, offering a rare glimpse into how she wanted her work to be perceived. She was instrumental in selecting the forty-four oil paintings and works on paper on view and had a hand in how they were displayed. The show demonstrated John’s evolution as an artist: early works such as Portrait of the Artist’s Sister, Winifred (ca. 1898) highlight the realism she was taught as a student at London’s Slade School of Fine Art, while later paintings such as The Pilgrim (ca. 1924) feature the dry, impasto technique she perfected in the 1910s and ’20s and used to abstract her figures.

Scholarship has often presented a narrower view of John’s work than she herself held. The narratives spun around her have centered on her proclivity for depicting female subjects and interiors, often relating these images to John’s own life, and have focused on her modest output of approximately 150 oil paintings while paying less attention to her large number of works on paper, which vary in subject matter, technique, and color palette. In her solo exhibition, John not only displayed her works on paper alongside her oil paintings but also removed all descriptions of her mediums from the catalogue, indicating that she was not interested in the traditional hierarchies between painting and drawing. She showed the portraits of women for which she is best known alongside landscapes, drawings of her cats, still lifes, and sketches of church congregants, presenting a wider range of subjects than she is often credited with. She hung her muted, tonal paintings alongside sixteen watercolor studies that likely revealed her use of vibrant color, undermining common perceptions about her palette. Additionally, the exhibition included two slightly different versions of her now well-known oils of a woman reading in a wicker chair (ca. 1920), highlighting her practice of returning to the same subjects and compositions. Her unusual decision to present her watercolors and drawings in albums organized by themes such as “Meudon at Night” and “Studies of a Child” suggests that she wanted viewers to understand the serial nature of her work and reveals her prodigious attention to its display and presentation.

Although John did not align with any feminist causes, she has come to represent the “New Woman,” who was educated, was generally well-off, and rejected rigid Victorian morality and gender roles in order to seek autonomy in her professional and romantic life. While this feminist framing of John developed in the second half of the twentieth century, her contemporaries also grappled with what it meant for her to depict her world as both an artist and a woman. As Mary Chamot, who was one of the few female critics of that time and later became the Tate’s first female curator, wrote in Country Life,

One is tempted . . . to establish wherein lies the feminine contribution to art. The problem is a new one, for this is the first generation to see almost as many women painters as men, and few are so truly feminine, in the best sense of the word without any of the weaknesses it might imply, as Gwen John.

Chamot identified John’s femininity in the “quiet luminosity” of her work and in its capacity to unite “softness” with “force.” In contrast with the traditionally pejorative descriptor of feminine, which connoted a certain timidity or lack of boldness, the critic presented John’s female perspective as an attribute that not only set her apart from mainstream modernism but also signaled a major contribution to “the development of art” more broadly, one that would become “a factor to be reckoned with in the future.”

It has now been 100 years since John’s solo show and 150 since her birth. In the intervening century, her reputation has steadily grown. Contemporary artists including Celia Paul and Elizabeth Peyton have expressed their affinities with John and have made tributes to her. Exhibitions, biographies, novels, and a biopic have explored her art and life as a passionate, independent woman artist. However, this anniversary retrospective and publication, unlike their predecessors, examine the full scope of her work and foreground the development of her practice. Drawing on new technical research, our project reveals an artist more varied and experimental than previously thought and also redresses the bias toward her oil paintings by honoring John’s own belief that her works on paper are, in her own words, “quite as serious.” Forming the backbone of this new scholarship are the works on paper that John left in her studio after her death in 1939, over nine hundred of which are housed at Amgueddfa Cymru–Museum Wales. Largely overlooked and unpublished, these drawings and watercolors provide insights into the wide range of her processes, including sketching from life, working from memory, and copying existing images. John’s unfinished studies, often annotated with numbers and handwritten notes, show the ways in which she developed her compositions, mapped out her palettes in advance, and used aide-mémoire to record colors and atmospheres.

We aim to foreground John’s experimentation and productivity, which until now have been predominantly measured by the relatively modest number of oil paintings she completed. Her drawings tell the story of her evolving techniques and color palettes and how she moved from traditional figuration toward abstraction over her lifetime. What emerges from this comprehensive view is a portrait of an artist whose focused pursuit of “strange beauties” resulted in her own ways of seeing and making, grounded in at once a close observation of the material world and a belief that all things are sacred.

Rachel Stratton is an independent scholar and curator and a former postdoctoral research associate at the Yale Center for British Art.. Lucy Wood is senior curator of art at Amgueddfa Cymru–National Museum Wales, Cardiff.

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Can Xue’s responses are translated by Annelise Finegan.

Since The Enchanting Lives of Others is so much about the experience of reading, of sharing reading, and of discussing reading, what emotions do you hope readers will feel in response to the novel? It also seems that reading is often described in your writing as solving riddles or enigmas. What is the deeper meaning behind what happens on the surface with the character’s lives and their book club?

Can Xue: I consider the greatest mystery within a mystery in human life to be the conflict of emotions and desires. It is in depicting this conflict that my experimental fiction often reaches its greatest heights. Reading is also solving riddles. And every reader should be solving the enigma of themselves. That is everything I hope for.

You read about the riddles of emotion and desire for the characters in the novel. You’re stimulated, and without realizing it you enter the world of the book as one of its characters. The instant you resonate with the other characters and interact with them, your body (the source of desire) will awake. You will begin to have reveries and then start to devote yourself, body and soul, to a state that is like the one you have been reading about—but it is your own state, and in that state you will deduce the emotions that your reading has aroused. This is the way of reading and the ideal reader that I anticipate.

Discussions that take place in a book club, as happens in The Enchanting Lives of Others, are even more lively and interesting. A number of people are reading a book at the same time, each of them stimulated by the same book. But every person has different riddles to solve in their lives and so is stimulated in different ways. The conversations among book friends not only broaden the perspectives of each reader but also expand the meaning of the original work.

I believe that a piece of writing is completed only through each reader’s unique ideas and deductions. If no one reads a book, that book has not been finished. All of my fiction is about emotional conflicts, and I hope that under the provocation of these writings my readers will charge their way into the depths of the desires within themselves and benefit from my method for solving such enigmas.

You have said that the characters in your writing are all aspects of yourself. How is this reflected by the characters in this book, who are all avid readers and writers?

CX: My writing is an outpouring from the core of my being, so that every character is my essential self. I’ve portrayed here the reading lives and love lives of all sorts of readers. These are my own most profound experiences and also possible ideal lives for myself. I’ve even portrayed the life of an author, the kind of life that could be an ideal life for myself. I’ve depicted the lives of some ordinary people as well, because I am myself an ordinary person, and I want to be as invigorated about my worldly existence as I am about my essential one. In this novel I write about the essential life of every character, but their essential lives are unified with their worldly lives, while the beauty of each permeates the other. The essential realizes the worldly. People long for the everyday; in their everyday lives, people also long for an essential elevation. This forms a circle.

There is a passage in the novel that reads, “While Xiao Sang was thinking of these unusual and fascinating events in her life, the plot of the book she’d just been reading kept flashing through her mind. These plots didn’t correspond to reality, but there always seemed to be some connection.” Later you write, about the character Han Ma, “The book became more and more engaging, and what was written in it seemed to be the same as her life now. Every time a plot appeared in the book, she could find correspondences in her life.” What is your perspective on the relationship between fiction and reality?

CX: This raises the fundamental question of my writing: the question of the relationship between worldly life and essential life. Narratives about this run through my entire work. The Enchanting Lives of Others realizes the unity and self-becoming of these two aspects of life in the most thoroughgoing way, which results in there being no chasm between the lives of others. The connection could be called seamless—it’s as though this were that, or that one thing has two sides.

Ever since I started writing I have created narratives about this (Five Spice Street, for example) in which I am trying to unify the essence of the depths of human nature (which is literature) with the surface phenomena of human nature (which is worldly), or to look upon both kinds of life as essence, to make them essential to each other. At the time of writing Five Spice Street, I chose a satirical method, and what I had my characters reveal was: even though people’s lives are divided this way, in opposition, the human or the self has in the end the grandest of structures, capable of applying the dialectics of contradiction to produce an unbelievable synthesis of these fissures and oppositions. I consider my experimental literature to have a surpassing technique that produces this “division within apperception, apperception within division.”

In most of my writing, I combine the two different lives through satire. The Enchanting Lives of Others was written in 2021, at a time when I’d reached old age and the state of my art made fully evident its pure, concordant side. I decided to make a new experiment, a utopian tale of “transforming the everyday into art, then restoring art to the everyday.” And thus I began the creation of this “imaginative” work. The experiment went so well that I didn’t even dare to believe it: I finished writing all 260,000 characters of the novel in ten months, so it was the quickest novel that I’ve written.

Since I was combining the two lives into one in a direct way, using the plainest language, my passions were more unrestrained and animated than ever before. I think it was because the texture of everyday life gave me direct stimulus. I am Chinese, and Chinese people consider worldly life important—clothing, food, housing, means of travel, and also sex. Our experience of the aesthetics of material life is no less than the aesthetics of spiritual life that Westerners experience. Besides, I believe that the beauty of the everyday that I see seems as essential as the beauty of the spirit, like the two sides of a coin Borges spoke of in “The Zahir.” I have deduced this kind of unified life, bringing the two extremes into contact, letting them change each other, offering the reader a new experience—namely, transforming phenomena into essences while also realizing the essential as a phenomenon.

Through my writing process I have come to think that Western people can surely understand these other (worldly) aesthetics, because they are the essence of the spirit. In this way, the life of worldly phenomena becomes essential life through the author’s eyes, and this is what “turning life into art” means. My readers must be “world-enterers” who love their everyday life, not “world-leavers” who belittle it. As to what I have said in the past about “negating the superficial worldly life,” this in fact was an intricate way of celebrating the beauty of everyday existence through the negation of satirical narratives. So for me, what my fiction deduces is how to make essential life worldly and make everyday life into art. I believe that I have done so in this novel.

What about the connection between literature and love? The novel contains many reflections by the characters such as “What is literature? It’s love,” or about how we’re “drawn into love with all our hearts, just like we long to read and write. The difference lies in how love’s outcome cannot be predicted, while reading and writing are sure to bring about happiness.” How does this dynamic between love and literary appreciation play out in The Enchanting Lives of Others?

CX: Literature depicts the essence of love. The essence of love is the same for each and every individual: a lofty spirit and physical passion. What literature deduces about essential love produces in all readers feelings of happiness. Even if the discovery is a tragedy, readers will still experience the joy and way of being moved that are human, which will arouse their lust for the pursuit of freedom and beauty. Although love in reality comes in all different kinds: there are comedies and there are tragedies, and the ones in love cannot predict which it will be. My perspective is that if you love literature, literature will cultivate your sensibilities. In this way, even if your love is tragic, you will become beautiful in the process, because you have a literary soul.

What makes literature fascinating is that it always reveals the sensibility of beauty, so that the reader feels that living is worthwhile, and is happy. Literature also can give people a love for everyday life, realizing the desires of the human heart through means of worldly beauty, which leads to feelings of happiness. Going further, experimental literature has a special element, in that it requires a reader to become one of the characters in the book, to take part in deduction and, in the midst of deduction, to demonstrate the creativity of the self, activating one’s desire to dream, to experience personally. It asks readers to become extremely familiar with the novel’s plots, to place the book nearby for reading whenever there’s time, to commit it to memory. Why should you do this? To arouse your lust, to give you the impulse to create. I hope that readers will try out this way of reading—there will be results.

The Enchanting Lives of Others takes place in three long parts, without chapters, and the third part loops back to the time before the first part takes place, and then retells the story of Xiao Sang and Heishi from a different perspective along with the story of Qiaozi. Could you share your thoughts about the form of The Enchanting Lives of Others and how it developed while you wrote the novel?

CX: What if I were to tell you that I have never worked out the plot of a piece of fiction carefully, or that when I write, I never deliberate, just immerse myself in passion, relying on intuition to express myself at will? You might not believe me. But in fact, that is how I write.

After I finished writing The Enchanting Lives of Others and went back to read it, my reaction was surprise. The novel contains numerous plotlines but leaves an impression of seamlessness. Yet I actually did not consider this at all, with the sentences and dialogues and plot coming readily to hand. You’ve mentioned Part Three, which wasn’t created by meticulous design but came about because I felt that the storylines that came before weren’t a completed vision, so I wanted to add to them slightly. Then it was a wonder: as soon as I picked up my pen, the plotline I was writing joined all of its own accord to the ones from before, so that my narrative became seamless. In fact, all of my writing tallies with the scenario I’m describing here. It’s just that most of my previous fiction has been obscure and difficult to understand, so no one noticed this feature.

The narrative of this novel is prosaic, even easy to understand, and readers may think that I planned the form. But actually I was following my usual rule of “automatic writing”: writing up to where I write to. What is automatic writing? It would take a long essay to explain. I will speak about it in simpler terms for now. Automatic writing depends not on composition but on practical intuition. The kind of intuition that comes into play in music, athletic competitions, and scientific inventions, or in the thinking of mathematical prodigies and military tacticians. This is a function of the body and not a function of logic, put into action by human desires and emotions, its essentiality demonstrated in intuitive diagrams and not shown through speculative language.

When practical intuition is at work, the one using it must hold in check the self’s inner desires and practical reason, to allow the rise and fall of regulated rhythm to squeeze passion, to build things new to the universe. While practical intuition is at work, the person is immersed in passion, and analytical reasoning recedes backstage. There is only practical reason accompanying intuition as it dashes forward. . . . What intuitive writing attends to isn’t how to come up with plots by thinking about them, but rather the mechanism of inner desires, and that’s enough.

The mechanism of our desires is the greatest mechanism of intelligence that Mother Nature endows us with. It is the source of creation, and so long as we are self-aware about this mechanism, and let it function spontaneously, we are building new things, while the human construct within these things is always seamless. This is nothing mysterious: in the practice of our daily lives we often come across situations like this. It’s just that since the intuition of the body cannot be directly explained with analytical language, as its pattern is both hidden and deep, most people attribute to the realm of mystery a function that is the most universal for humankind. This mechanism is actually a mechanism of spontaneous deduction, and the things that it creates all have this characteristic of seamlessness.

Finally, why didn’t I divide this long novel into chapters? I wanted to convey the crowding together of life in the city and the strength of passion.

There seems to be mysterious communication among the readers who gather at the Pigeon Book Club, along with an intense atmosphere that people find extraordinary. Perhaps it’s that you are conveying an elevated literary state. As readers we are drawn in, but it’s very difficult to “solve the riddles.” Could you offer any more clues?

CX: Whenever stepping onto the “path” to the Pigeon Book Club, the characters seem to be escaping their worldly lives and entering into the essential life of the self (or we could call it the life of art). They all long for communication, and the conversations in the book club are essential communication. Every character at the book club enters into a state where the soul seems to leave the body. On the evenings of the book club meetings, their psyches are stirred, their souls intimately mingling and interacting. No matter what the other person says, another person knows what is intended, since these are conversations of self-consciousness with itself. And the source of this passionate discussion is the glorious book that everyone is enjoying together.

There’s an enchanting young man who says that while he is doing chores around the house he experiences “that kind of state.” After Xiao Sang hears him say this, she all at once experiences “that kind of state” with him. What kind is it? Naturally it’s a state of happiness. When people read glorious works of literature, then afterward devote themselves in a grounded way to life, to labor, that state draws near. It is the meaning of our everyday existence. Our world becomes beautiful because of reading—how can we not love a world that becomes so beautiful?

There is also Xiao Sang first attending the book club, when she immediately tells her new book friends about a journey her soul has taken, using the language of lust. She is always expressing herself spontaneously, without fully understanding herself what she is saying. At the beginning she worries that the book friends won’t understand, but she’s wrong. Her speech provokes a strong response in each of them, so everyone returns to “that book” and becomes immersed in it. As for Xiao Sang, she is wild with joy at the excellence of what she has said. She has spoken enchanting words that she could never have imagined and is elevated anew. This is the atmosphere of the Pigeon Book Club.

Can Xue is the pseudonym of the Chinese writer Deng Xiaohua (b. 1953). Formerly a tailor, she began writing fiction in 1983. Her works include Barefoot Doctor, I Live in the Slums, Love in the New Millennium, The Last Lover, and Five Spice Street. Annelise Finegan is academic director and clinical associate professor of translation at New York University.

The post The Enchanting Lives of Others: A Conversation with Can Xue appeared first on Yale University Press.

What led you to undertake the project of translating Heidegger’s Being and Time?

Cyril Welch: When, in the fall of 1961, I took on the daunting task of reading the original, I had already been captivated by Heidegger’s later works, and for two reasons:  first of all because they focused me on the “marriage of intellect and thing” (as Francis Bacon and Leibniz still called it), the prospects of which had originally inspired me to shift my studies from mathematics to philosophy, but also because his works helped me understand and venerate all those other works in philosophy that my teachers were requiring me to study. These others, too, intended to celebrate that marriage, which readers can hear and attend if only they can clear their ears of all the foreground noise.

That shift was crucial. Mathematics was the only discipline I pursued seriously as an undergraduate.  But to fill a requirement for my undergraduate degree at the University of Montana, I enrolled in a course taught by Henry Bugbee, from whom I learned (although he never stated it explicitly) the truth of Aristotle’s remarks about geometry and arithmetic being activities devoid of what we actually deal with daily:  it’s pure intellection, essentially (and marvelously!) above what we call, very roughly and very correctly, “things.” Then, in my Ph.D. dissertation (finished more than sixty years ago now, at The Pennsylvania State University), I tried to show that and how the thinghood at issue in Heidegger’s later works belonged with the selfhood elicited in his earlier works.

So I came into Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit through the back door, so to speak: from where it was heading—where it intended to lead the reader.  And my translation fosters this intention, which was confirmed, by the way, in a conversation I had with him in June 1965, when he remarked, beaming, Selbstverständlich—ohne eigentliches Ding, kein eigentliches Selbst, und auch umgekehrt.“Of course—there’s no authentic self without authentic thing, and vice versa.”

Can you tell us about the most challenging aspects of getting Heidegger’s German into English?

CW: Well . . . Look at the effort to translate any great work into a tongue not its own. There are all these words, but if they at all succeed they issue from the matter itself and, so issuing, intend to take us somewhere, and finally they must (if the work is to work) enact the revelation. And now the task is to get all this to happen in another set of words. That’s how I understand the challenge, one raising the question about how language works most concretely.  Not, for instance, the challenge of translating neologisms.

There’s a reason the study of rhetoric figures so prominently in classical education:  the recognition of the central importance of drawing others into whatever was being discussed—and also of allowing oneself to be properly drawn in. There’s a theory of language here that can still prove helpful.

One version of the classical theory recognizes four levels of meaning: the literal, the analogical, the moral, and the anagogical. From this fourfold division we can discern four kinds of translation:  machinelike (currently quite developed in our digital-driven world), contextualizing in the field, committed (taking up the moral, what’s at issue), and reperformative.

On this understanding of our linguistic involvement, the translation of great works requires a fourfold expertise: one must know both tongues, each with its own manner; one must know what the work is about, on what it focuses attention; one must know what the work is driving at; and one must be able to recognize in the original work, and reenact in translation, the kind of wrap-up that makes a work unified and (for some, and at moments) anagogical.

Any translator must know the two tongues (the first requirement). But not all know the field adequately (and fall short of meeting the second): for instance, the translator of Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose had no idea of what “anagogical” meant, and botched several key passages. Also, the translator of Milan Kundera’s Testaments trahis did not know Heidegger’s work and so missed what Kundera was talking about when recalling Angst and Gerede, and made a mess out of some important thoughts beginning:  Il m’est difficile de prononcer les mots angoisse ou bavardage sans penser au sens que leur a donné Heidegger—which she renders as “It is difficult for me to say the words anguish or talk without thinking of the meaning Heidegger gave them”; one might debate how to translate Angst, but the whole point about Gerede (bavardage) lies in its contrast with talk (Rede).

The third requirement is crucial. In great works, there’s always a twist, a turn, an alternative that’s pending, urgent, “at issue,” and translators must find themselves caught up in this urgency, the source of the draw.  Blatant failures abound:  the Greek New Testament is a playground for moralists who “update” the Greek into gooey, often anachronistic messes (King James’ version remains the truest). I suspect what makes the 1962 translation of Being and Time so wooden is that the translators tried to avoid any interpretation at all.

The fourth requirement can be fully met only by translators fully artistic themselves. Here, where the challenge must be understood as the imperative to reperform, reenact:  the translator must in effect respond to the call of the original address, thereby keeping it operational (as in a good conversation)—neither pausing nor usurping it.

I assume that you are thinking of the common practice among jazz musicians to challenge one another to play the same riffs on different instruments.

CW: Exactly. And the problem is the same: each instrument has its own range of possibilities, so there’s going to be a lot of improvisation. But always with the same challenge.

But beginners first have to get into the work before they can play. Can you offer any advice to the well-intentioned student?

CW: Not really, or not here. I do that in the Preface to the work—that is, I there give the “poor students,” those open to refreshment, a bit of advice on how to proceed, and one or two signposts they might keep their eyes out for. As in every creative enterprise, though, only those who find themselves drawn into it will succeed. There’s no hope for anyone who stands on the sidelines waiting for someone else to show the way, let alone prove its potentiality in advance.

I must say, though, that the question you pose bothered me as a teacher, ever more so over the years.  When I was teaching Plato’s Republic—or any of the classics—I could say to myself that the work had already proved itself, and that the students just had to apply themselves.  But when it came to Heidegger . . . Well, in early 1967 (the first time I tried teaching Being and Time—at Antioch College, in Ohio) the work had not yet proved itself, at least not in North America. It was then that I first read the 1962 translation, along with the students, and I was doubly perplexed: first of all, because this was not the work that captivated me in 1961; and, secondly, I realized that I, as a teacher, would have to take the lead—just as Henry Bugbee had for me. But how? How else but by embodying the new line of thinking in my own talk?

It was not until the academic year 1973 to 1974, when I tried teaching Being and Time again (at Mount Allison University, here in Canada), that I succeeded to some extent in talking a way through the 1962 translation. (Interestingly, after more than fifty years I still have contact with three of the students in that seminar.)

However, I kept finding the 1962 translation so out of tune with my own understanding of the original that in subsequent decades I began translating the text myself and handing out the results as the weeks went by. Two incidental factors helped me in this project: first, the year-long courses at the time (no rush, I had twenty-six weeks!), and, second, Mount Allison still retained the old-fashioned tenet that “teachers know best” and allowed me to admit into my seminars on Being and Time only those students who had demonstrated that they were in fact drawn by the questions it poses. Very exclusionary!

Can you be more specific about any preparation readers will need?

CW: Except perhaps for geniuses, readers of Being and Time will need to have sharpened their teeth on both the analytic and the anagogical literature of our tradition: Being and Time is, in a way, preparing you for a healthy reassessment of these works. On anagogy in particular, it would certainly be helpful to have taken seriously both Augustine and Kierkegaard, perhaps also Meister Eckhart. On analysis, Plato’s Republic, Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, ideally also Kant’s three Critiques.

Then, too, in my own seminars on Heidegger, I very seldom had any student who had not completed at least one year of logical study with me; many had also completed the second year as well, which concentrated exclusively on the mathematical version. Of those who had not done the first year of logical study, the performance was generally more or less disastrous.

How could that possibly be? Heidegger himself is highly critical of logic . . .

CW: Well. . . It’s the way I taught it, of course. And the way I wrote it up in all its detail, starting with the earliest Greek versions.  Studied in both their literary and cultural contexts, the Greek versions cohere in keeping with the Greek fascination with Eros. Then, in modern developments, logic took the form advanced by both Francis Bacon and Leibniz: that of Aphrodite—of connubio. Descartes’s famous exhortation to make ourselves “masters and possessors of nature” can be understood maritally, as part of the larger Enlightenment injunction to regularize our secular affairs into a comfortable (and that meant productive) and above all, lasting marriage.

That many logicians, and still more mere followers, betray the erotic or connubial origins of the field should come as no surprise, at least as we get older: everything great gets repeatedly betrayed, remains ever in need of rehabilitation.

As a translator, you certainly have a wide range of interests.

CW: Actually, I don’t consider myself a translator. I will of course be pleased if others find themselves in the swing of my translation; but changing times will bring changing tongues, and there will be other translations. Not least because people learn by doing it.

For me, translating is chiefly a tool of study:  I find that, if I really want to talk with great book, I first have to hear what it says, and to hear this I must listen carefully to every word.  In this way I aspire first and foremost to be a logician, and any lasting contribution I might make to lie in the field of logic—not indeed for professionals, but for what Thoreau calls “poor students.”

Additional Reading

Where Bacon and Leibniz talk about connubio: My essay “Reconsidering Francis Bacon” cites and discusses the passages

Where the reader can review the four levels of meaning (and Umberto Eco’s novel): The essay “Laughing” in my book Reading, Talking, Writing (see Note 3 on p. 96)

Where Greek tradition interrelates Eros and Aphrodite: Hesiod’s Theogony (discussed in my essay “Zeno, Newton and . . .” pp. 30 ff.)

Where the reader can review Heidegger’s own preferred “courtship” literature: My essay “Heidegger’s Reading List”

Where the reader can consider my interrelating of Heidegger and logic: My essay “Why Heidegger and Logic?”

Where the reader can consider why Heidegger is difficult to talk about: My essay “Talking about Heidegger” (though first watch here the clip analyzed in the essay)

Where the reader can undertake the arduous study of logic itself: My book Logic Ancient and Modern

Cyril Welch is professor emeritus of philosophy at Mount Allison University, New Brunswick, Canada.

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