My replies are sequential: each builds upon the previous reply. As such, they develop a continuous “argument.” However, I recognize that not everyone may wish to read through the entirety of the comments and responses. Therefore, I have attempted to make it possible to begin with any one of the four by developing the argument in such a way that the concepts discussed in earlier responses enriches these concepts as they appear in subsequent responses, but the later responses do not presuppose the earlier to be understood.

Sr. Ann Astell, in closing her beautiful and attentive reading of The Hurricane Notebook, refers to my editorial role in terms of “mediation.” This is an apt word, and I will dwell upon it. Mediation, like editorship, is a daunting task. It requires someone to present another’s message faithfully, yet also to adapt it in various ways for the intended recipient. It requires that one provide loving attention both to the speaker and to the recipient, and a third type of attention, a faithful attentiveness to the message itself. Mediation can be for the sake of reconciling two parties or for the sake of delivering what one party wholeheartedly wishes the other to know. It can be for the sake of freeing the second party from a false sense of what the first party is presumed to want or expect. Mediation can be for the sake of any of these things, and can be for the sake of reconciling the recipient with himself, for the sake of freeing him from false expectations he has placed upon himself. Loving attention presupposes that the object of attention is a mystery, and mysteries do indeed hide themselves even as they disclose themselves, but the mystery of another person is precious in a way that invites and warrants the loving attention required for him or her becoming known.

It will perhaps not be believed that Elizabeth M., or her message in The Hurricane Notebook, could be of this sort; for, the objector may think, even if she is real, she has hidden herself behind a poetic veil so thoroughly that even her traces may as well be illusions as truths. Hence it is impossible to be attentive to her—for she is either real or unreal; if unreal, she is a poetic illusion; and if real, she has left us only poetic illusion, a mystery that hides itself in disclosing itself, because here the “disclosure” and “concealment” are simultaneous, even identical. And if there is no author we can know, how can there be “mediation”? Without the first term, do we not simply have a pseudo-editor, a pseudo-mediator, who wants to take no responsibility for a message for which he really, after all, has full responsibility? In that case, would not “mediation” be awfully like the kind decried by Kierkegaard, the tacit and illicit presupposition of the “presuppositionless” philosophy of the Danish Hegelians: at best an empty process of thought thinking itself and getting nowhere fast, at worst a blank deception?

But perhaps no idea is more central to Elizabeth M.’s Hurricane Notebook than that of mediation and loving attention. Her drive to understand herself with “no lies” at times sends her spinning like a top, seeming to shift almost too rapidly for us to follow her, but like a dancer, she spins and keeps her balance because in her spinning she maintains a single object in her sights, which she takes in with each revolution: her guilt. But the rapid revolutions of her thought could equally be likened to the rotations of an apple being peeled, in which the blade of her guilt is being used to remove another strip of exteriority with each revolution until only the meat of the apple remains. There is no doubt that this type of stripping away of exteriority is exactly what Elizabeth M. aims for in her writing, and in her darker moments, she seems to hope to keep the process going to the point of stripping herself of all existence entirely—to strip away not only the peel, but the meat too, until there is nothing left but a core, or just a few seeds. In this sense, the revolutions cease in the discovery she makes in “Golden Slivers,” in the two memories—one of Sarah, one of Joshua—she presents in parallel columns.

Elizabeth does not explain her purpose in presenting the memories this way. Let me be the first to admit that her writing often raises questions I do not know how to answer. Yet here it seems to me that the form she has adopted and the idea she wishes to convey are one and mutually reinforcing: that she was the link, the knot, between the thread of Joshua’s life and the thread of Sarah’s life. What seemed nothing but an isolated episode—the end of an adolescent friendship—became much more than that because, in responding to that friendship’s failure and the failure of the concomitant self-making passion in the way that she did, she became a different sort of person, and this change, this alteration for the worse, reverberated through her other relationships, above all, her relationship with Sarah. The vibration of one knot’s being undone was carried on and undid another knot as well. Elizabeth’s guilt lay in her role as a “mediator” who conveyed her disappointment with Joshua, her sense of abandonment, all too faithfully to her sister, so that Sarah, too, felt abandoned, disappointed, unable even to articulate what she had lost or wanted, despised by the one to whom she had opened her soul. Why did this happen? The Elizabeth of “The Black Swan” seems to think about it this way: What links one thread to another is love. What love does is provide resilient connection with another person, in virtue of which every beloved person provides, ipso facto, a mediation of their own condition to those who love them and depend upon them. But our own condition is necessarily flawed, marked by freely chosen self-contradictions, self-contradictions that also place us in contradiction with each other. This self-war, this despair, is what we necessarily communicate, via love, with one another. What ties the great tapestry of humanity together with each other, love, is also what will cause that tapestry to disintegrate, allowing the flame consuming one thread to burn all the others until the entirety is reduced to ashes.

Niakani noticed the tragic failure of love to redeem in The Idiot. It could just as easily be applied to Tolstoy’s attempt to reconfigure Christianity solely around Christ’s Sermon on the Mount. This led him to an impossible impasse, the “cockroach’s problem,” where his dialectic could no longer advance against the objections that it raised against itself, just as Elizabeth’s own ideas led to the impossible philosophy of “The Black Swan.” We do not know precisely what ideas lay in the most recent developments of the Sacrum Arcanum, but my hypothesis—developed in footnote 82—is that there were at least two major strands of thought that she struggled to unite, one strand centered on the idea of the soul as a “mirror” of ideality, which it could concretize within itself, and the other strand focused on the idea of developing conscience through a series of simple, uncontroversial “either/or” binaries, through which she could pinpoint the precise nature of conscience and self-unraveling, but that these ideas ran afoul of each other.1 There are hints of these ideas in “The Black Swan,” in any case, where “the ideal” is treated in terms of “the music” that the dancer is to convert into idealized movement. For in dance the body is the mirror of the music, but instead of concretization, there is movement; and in dance she found, not the expression of conscience as the conjunction of a few simple properties but instead the idea of conscience as an ideal power laying at the furthest horizon of dance, something it cannot properly treat but can only presuppose, hiding it as it hides all things behind a veil of exaltation, and so she, too, accepts conscience and its judgments in all their idealism.

From a certain standpoint, what makes love so useless is its inability to modulate relative to sin—see, e.g., Katya’s love for Dmitry in The Brothers Karamazov, Sonya’s love for her father in Crime and Punishment, Prince Myshkin’s love for Nastasya in The Idiot—since it is difficult to see how a virtuous person may love a less virtuous person without sacrificing either love or virtue. In contemporary philosophical work, we see this same futility in Anne Jeffrey’s “Why Not to Stop in the Name of Love,” where she presents the example of a woman who discovers that her sister, an aspiring ballerina, is taking diet pills. In this case we are conflicted. Should she throw away her sister’s pills, showing love for the person but disrespect for her intentions and character? Or should she do nothing, and risk becoming complicit in her sister’s self-destructive behavior? Understood this way, the Elizabeth of the Sacrum Arcanum, who considered herself “hyper-virtuous” in Sr. Ann Astell’s well-chosen phrase, could not have helped Sarah because any interaction between them would have been premised on Elizabeth’s titanic, Hyperion-like pride and Sarah’s abasement before her sister. But the lesson of “The Black Swan” is that this dilemma is rooted in an earlier perplexity, in the impossibility of selfhood. Our relational natures—our essential function as mediators to one another—means that we communicate our self-contradictions to one another.

I once asked an Orthodox priest, who had served both in the Greek Orthodox Church and the Russian Orthodox Church, what he thought about certain ideas in Dostoevsky. (This is a profoundly helpful step, by the way, and I recommend it to all who find some of Dostoevsky’s religious language hard to interpret—one must know what is a completely ordinary thing for an Orthodox believer to say to know what in Dostoevsky is distinctive and in what way it is distinctively his own.) The priest mentioned that the Eastern Church was more focused upon “relationality” than the Western one was, and that whereas the Western Church has tended to focus on the communion of the individual soul with God, the Eastern Church’s view could be summarized in the proverbial saying, “Everyone goes to hell alone, but we go to heaven together.” One thinks of Dostoevsky’s Ivan’s characterization of the resurrection in terms of “universal harmony.” Another way of getting at this is that in discussing the imago Dei, the important idea that humanity is made in the image of God, the Western Church most often debates whether this is most exemplified in mind or in will, whereas the Eastern Church might want to say we should consider the Trinity in terms of God’s essentially relational nature, and understand ourselves as the image of that relationality.

Elizabeth rejects the idea of being saved through our relational nature, as I mentioned, because of the doctrine contained in “The Black Swan.” However, she rejects it because, qua idea, it possesses no saving power. Perhaps the weakest aspect of Pete’s hypothetical Christianity is that it seems very likely that the Christian way is, according to his model, more beautiful only if it is true, something at odds with the “beautiful wager”; it is not more beautiful for the fish to try to enact their original patterns in their current condition. It is only possible for them to live this new way if the sacrifice has indeed been made and the fire seeds have indeed been spread through the bloody and painful process of piercing and restoration. The idea of relationality is not itself a relationship through which one can receive the piercing; it is the thought thinking itself, the empty mediation, a dream of salvation that Elizabeth might justly fear would lead only to further self-deception and self-enclosure. The divine does not break in through the idea of it breaking in; when the divine breaks in, one may well assume it does so with thunder and lightning, with a crack, with the breaking of the heart, not as a pleasant, melancholy imagination. The word of grace that comes to us from without is qualitatively distinct, possesses a wholly different nature, from a word of grace we offer ourselves.

Yet this, like many of Elizabeth’s rejections, has to be considered in a certain way. Her rejections have a specific character. She rejects the opportunity to understand herself in light of a certain theory, and she does so when she senses that doing so cannot be reconciled with what she knows of herself and her guilt. Perhaps if she did create the Notebook as a “poetic illusion” this was because it was the only way she could think the thought of her guilt purely, by temporarily placing it within a poetic frame, without, however, losing sight of the fact that she had to face her guilt in actuality and reconcile it there—not in her Notebook. For no scribbling could erase the guilt she had over Sarah. Elizabeth M. is not Briony Tallis, the brilliantly conceived narrator of Ian McEwan’s Atonement. Elizabeth M. knew that poetic speech-things have no saving power. Gripped by despair, she possessed no power to retell her own story without it going awry again—that was what she meant in saying that despair empties not only the future but the past of possibility. So she rejected the opportunity of understanding herself in light of these ideas.

Now what I think we have to say is that Elizabeth clearly encountered something other than an idea, and it was this encounter, rather than any of the ideas she examined, that prompted her transformation from the self-gnawing bitterness of “I have always felt profoundly alone” to the awakening expressed in “Oh Sarah. I want to live.” What a self-consuming, self-gnawing person needs is something interposed between them and themselves, something that would remove their jaws from their leg, so to speak. Whatever she encountered, and it was not an idea, provided that interposition. No longer did she see herself in a mirror, whether glassy or formula-laden; she saw instead—what? The only way I can interpret “The Rose Garden” is to say that she had a profound encounter with divine grace. That encounter was mediated by creaturely existence and, although this made it ambiguous, its concreteness gave it undeniable power. Perhaps she also lacked the power to articulate what she encountered in that moment; at least, she could not articulate it in the form of an idea, a set of propositions, or the conclusion of an argument. Perhaps the only form in which she could articulate it was the Notebook. In this way, then, the Notebook became her attempt to stand as mediator herself, to “mediate” what was mediated to her, not in the form of an idea, but in the form of a crisis and an encounter, which she could provide to others. She would, then, have the opportunity to reverse the painful realization of “Golden Slivers”: just as through her self-forgetting she was a mediator of pain and betrayal, so through her Notebook she could mediate the power of that grace which she encountered.

Similarly, as editor, I have taken it as my task to provide access to this encounter, despite its ambiguity and difficulty; I hope that those who read Elizabeth’s words will find some kind of grace there as well.

In John Davenport, Niakani seems to have found the sympathetic ear for which he wished. Davenport rightly emphasizes “self-making passion” and puts his finger on the difficulty neither Niakani nor Elizabeth seem able to solve: the fact that the “right infinite passion, i.e., one that is right for us individually, must still be able to point a way forward when the more particular objects or subjects of our devotions collapse or become inaccessible.” He analyzes the reason this poses a problem for Niakani and Elizabeth and then proposes, through a fascinating reading of Stephen R. Donaldson’s The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, a possible way of solving the dilemma.

Donaldson is, as Davenport mentions, heavily influenced by Wagner. This provides a fruitful network of connections among authors and influences. Wagner’s primary philosophical influence was Schopenhauer. Of Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard said that Schopenhauer “astonished” and “interested” him, despite their considerable differences.1 He considered him a “significant author”2 and regarded his writings as a “counter-poison” that the theology students of his day ought to take each day to cure them of “nonsensical optimism” and “Danish Epicureanism.”3 Schopenhauer’s ethic of compassion and recommendation of asceticism bore much resemblance to Kierkegaard’s “Religiousness A,” but Kierkegaard strongly objected to the fact that Schopenhauer recommended what he did not practice—he always regarded as a failure if an ethical teacher could not practice what he taught—and Kierkegaard connected this with the fact that Schopenhauer, who wanted to scorn the “Thou shalt” and the eternal punishments associated with Christianity, yet “always praised” Brahminism. “But those ascetics,” Kierkegaard points out, “he himself must admit, are determined by a consideration of eternity . . . and it presents itself to them as a religious duty.”4 That is, Kierkegaard believed that Schopenhauer, in trying to purify Eastern philosophies into a secular ethic, had robbed these of something essential to their life-power.

On the other hand, beginning again with Wagner, we find that Wagner in turn influenced the Russian composer Tchaikovsky. The latter despised Wagner for his pomposity and self-regard, but could not help admiring and being influenced by his music. This influence is on full display in Swan Lake, which, of course, holds an important place in the thought of Elizabeth M., defining her “doctrine of sin.” One of Wagner’s principal ideas is the conviction that in opera, music is meant to display inward pathos. It is meant to portray the reality behind the appearances, the psychological, existential life of the characters. The reason he can, and must, slow down the action and events of his “music dramas” as much as possible is to allow himself space to fully portray the emotions and inward movements he finds within his characters. Everything ordinarily termed “dramatic” is dropped for the sake of portraying inward life. The idea of using music to portray the truth hidden by words and appearances is not new; in one form or another, it was the common faith of opera from the Florentine Camerata up to Wagner’s own time. What was distinctive about Wagner’s approach was the degree to which he emphasized and insisted upon this element at the expense of all others, aiming not only at psychological depiction but at something more like psychological “Truth.”

Tchaikovsky was receptive to such ideas, but no fanatic; and we can learn many interesting things about Swan Lake if we approach it not only from the standpoint of the drama, but also from the standpoint of the music. It is interesting that Elizabeth does what so few do, and interprets Swan Lake from the standpoint of the heroine; this move should be obvious, since we know that Tchaikovsky consistently identified most strongly with his heroines and invested them with the psychological weight necessary to form the center of his ballets and operas.5 This allows her to see Odette/Odile with the same doubled vision with which Tchaikovsky saw himself, and to view herself in the same light, as both betrayer and betrayed, sinking into the moral ambiguity of being fated to fall—fated, and therefore not responsible, yet by choice, and therefore responsible, for allowing oneself to be loved in the selfish, vain hope that one might yet escape the cycle of destruction. Yet Elizabeth does not think very much about music—she feels it and loves it, clearly, but there is no hint that she has a musical education. Otherwise, she might have highlighted the way that Tchaikovsky organizes his music around the Circle of Fifths in order to express the duplicity of Swan Lake.

Musical keys are considered “close” the closer their key signatures—their pattern of naturals, flats, and sharps—are to each other on the circle, and “distant” the more differences there are between these key signatures. Thus, even a rudimentary analysis along these lines reveals the disturbing fact that Odette’s theme, played both at her arrival and death, is in A minor, which has the same key signature as C major, Von Rothbart’s “owl” theme. Similarly, we find that Siegfried’s melancholy is expressed in A♭ major, which shares its key signature with F minor, one of the principal keys used for Von Rothbart and Odile in Act 3. Less disturbing, but still interesting, directly opposite A♭ major lies D major, the key used for Siegfried’s birthday party. Tchaikovsky’s use of opposite key signatures to characterize a single personality—similar to Dostoevsky’s customary pairing of apparently contradictory traits in his characters—allows Tchaikovsky to communicate Siegfried’s psychological depth and complexity, along with his inwardness and detachment from his external environment. But D major shares its key signature with the B minor “Swan Theme.” Thus one comes to associate Siegfried’s coming of age with his going hunting for the swans with his birthday present, the crossbow; yet since Siegfried’s life occupies two opposite keys he is just as closely associated with the enchanter as Odette is, that is, his inner melancholy, not his outward environment, is inextricably tied to Von Rothbart, whereas with Odette it is just the opposite. Her second theme—the theme of her solo—is expressed in E major, a key with no obvious connections, either of closeness or of opposition, to any of Von Rothbart’s or Siegfried’s themes. But the “love theme” between Siegfried and Odette is expressed in G♭ major, a key lying directly opposite the main Von Rothbart theme in C major, but therefore also opposite the first Odette theme.

Since Tchaikovsky did none of this by accident, clearly he saw human life, and the human heart, as filled with contradictions and reversals that were difficult, perhaps insuperable, obstacles to overcome. We cannot know what conclusions Elizabeth would have reached had she thought along these lines in writing her “doctrine of sin.” Perhaps finding the contradictions in the music itself would have robbed her of the ability to express the idea she did express there; she may have found, in the musical relationships of the ballet, an even deeper duplicity than the one she described, a duplicity in the music. Hence, if dance is the mirror of the music, then we arrive back at Elizabeth’s problem, but are we one step too soon? Did the duplicity lie in the dancer’s failure of self-transcendence, or in the composer, that is, in the first and primary author of the work? (And Tchaikovsky may be the first composer of ballet music of which this may be said; certainly before Tchaikovsky choreographers rarely felt the need to re-choreograph the dance so as to match the music more intimately, rather than vice versa, which is what Lev Ivanov did in 1895 when he modified Petipa’s original choreography in order to provide us with the elegant, beautiful delicacy of the swan dances in Acts 2 and 4.) She verges upon this topic in the opening of “The Analysts,” in her discussion of Petipa’s habit of designing choreography upon a chessboard, using this to compare the debates of “Gnothi Seauton” to a dancer who has no way of detecting that she has been set to dance in such a way as to avoid a particular square of floor, but she does not again take up this idea. Perhaps this would have led to a new charge against her author, but Elizabeth, I think, would not have wished to do so. This idea would be similar to the thought she rejects in “Gnothi Seauton,” the thought of a creator who has created us so that we will inevitably go wrong so that we will deserve punishment. Her one certainty is her guilt, and from that standpoint, to accuse God is merely avoiding accusing oneself.

Tchaikovsky and Wagner represent an opposition within the common ground of “operatic psychology.” Someone might profitably pursue a sustained analysis of this difference in terms of a pairing of Swan Lake with Tristan und Isolde and a second pairing of Sleeping Beauty with Parsifal. I, unfortunately, cannot pursue such an analysis here; I am not well enough equipped in the discipline of music to make more than a few desultory remarks. Being, however, more bold than prudent, I will here set these forth in a series of remarks and let the reader judge what it might be worth to pursue these thoughts further. Tchaikovsky and Wagner consider human existence to be haunted by melancholy or yearning of some kind, themes developed at length especially in relation to Siegfried in Swan Lake and in relation to Tristan in Tristan und Isolde.6 Melancholy yearning meets its object in love, but love itself is ambiguous, promises the end of yearning while also being so mixed with sensuality that even the purest love seems to combine in itself both redemption and temptation. Tchaikovsky and Wagner then boldly seize both possibilities at once: Swan Lake and Tristan und Isolde possess tragic structures, but their tragic conclusions express the hopeful expectation that the lovers now finally have what they dreamed of and are finally united without the veil of sensuous distraction to separate them from each other.

Parsifal and Sleeping Beauty, instead of beginning with yearning and internal division, begin with the unity possessed by an innocent, self-sufficient protagonist. This innocent then, at a decisive moment, falls into temptation and danger. By the end, these innocents are redeemed and restored, and their restoration spreads out from them to their kingdoms. This surface similarity however belies their different visions of the human condition. In Parsifal, sin forms the thematic backdrop to the story. The Grail King, Amfortas, suffers from a wound that will not heal. Amfortas has lost one of the sacred relics of the Grail Knights, the spear that the Roman soldier had once used to pierce the side of Christ. In a fight with Klingsor, an evil sorcerer and former Grail Knight, he was tempted by Kundry, a sorceress that Klingsor makes do his bidding through his own more powerful enchantments. Amfortas’s failure to resist Kundry’s temptation provided Klingsor with the opportunity to steal the spear and strike Amfortas with it. Only by regaining the spear and finding a pure innocent can Amfortas—and the order of the Grail Knights—be saved. When the “innocent fool” Percival blunders into the lands of the Grail King, he shoots a forbidden swan with his bow. Percival’s error is excused by his extreme ignorance and lack of worldly knowledge—and the hope that this might be the pure innocent they are waiting for. Yet when he is brought into the Grail Castle, he understands nothing of what passes there—for, being innocent, he has no understanding of sin, and that is what Amfortas’s wound is: the unhealing wound of sin—and he is expelled. This innocent failure is followed by a second failure, a felix culpa that eventually leads to redemption, when Percival wanders into the lands of the evil sorcerer Klingsor. He is initially so innocent he cannot even understand the temptations offered him, unable to grasp what is meant when a temptress asks him if he would like to “play” with her. Kundry, made to do Klingsor’s bidding once more, is more crafty; she approaches Percival with a tale of sorrow, appealing to his sympathy, before finally eliciting from him a single kiss—but in that moment, three things appear to happen: Percival experiences passion; he suddenly perceives what sin is; and he recoils from it—understanding, finally, that he is the one who can save Amfortas. He recovers the spear and destroys Klingsor, but it is many years’ wandering before he again finds the Grail Castle. When he does, he is made leader of the Grail Knights, redeems Kundry, and saves Amfortas—thereby also saving the Order of the Grail.

What is the difference between Tristan and Percival? Tristan cannot separate the “yearning” of existence from his passion for Isolde. He believes that somehow he can fulfill this yearning in, or through, Isolde—by possessing her in a physical sense. Percival, however, has purified this yearning, freeing it from passion and desire. When he kisses Kundry the second time, during Act III, the kiss symbolizes forgiveness and compassion only. He has learned not to desire. Wagner made the fact that the Grail Castle cannot be found by any who desire to find it into a symbol of the ascetic ideal.

The Grail Theme, an unevenly ascending scale that sounds like nothing so much as a heavenly ascent out of physical existence and into the heavenly Empyrean, perfectly expresses the essence of Percival’s purity and salvation.

The Grail Theme:

The Tristan chord:

The “Yearning” Theme from Tristan:

Nothing could be more different from the famous Tristan chord and the associated “yearning” theme, which introduces a double dissonance and then, in place of a resolution, resolves only one dissonance, leaving the listener in continued tension until they finally found the consummation of their yearning in the darkness of death. The music of Tristan communicates the agony of unbearable longing. The music of Parsifal communicates an unbearable purity of joy.

Love has been cleaved into passion and compassion. Compassion for each living being endures; physical passion is abandoned.

Let us compare this with Tchaikovsky’s tale of redemption, Sleeping Beauty. Most are familiar with some version of this tale: the king and queen, after much delay, finally have a daughter; they invite “everyone” to celebrate the birth, but this “everyone” neglects some evil fairy or spirit who makes her appearance at the celebration—performing a curse so that by her sixteenth birthday the princess will prick her finger on a spindle and die. Another fairy or spirit uses her gift to change the curse: rather than dying, the princess, and the whole kingdom, will fall asleep instead, to be awakened when the prince will arrive whose kiss can save the princess from the curse. The sixteenth birthday arrives. Alas, so does the spindle. The princess’s finger is pricked—the evil fairy laughs in triumph, and the kingdom falls asleep. In the fullness of time, the destined prince arrives—he kisses the princess—and the kingdom is saved.

Tchaikovsky’s ballet follows the main line of this familiar outline. Let me focus upon three distinctive scenes of his ballet, the features of which display substantial insight.

First, during the giving of the gifts in the Prologue, the six good fairies each provide the princess Aurora with some distinctive component of talent and personality, such as musicality, beauty, or curiosity. Multiple interpretations have developed so that the precise list of gifts varies. Each fairy has a distinctive dance and it is part of the genius of the ballet’s choreography that Aurora’s dance manifests a combination of each dance within a more complex form. Within the language of Kierkegaard, the fairies represent Aurora’s finitude, her defined features, the elements or ingredients she will need to “cook up” in the recipe of the self; her ability to unite them all in a single dance is her “positing” the synthesis of herself.

A second notable feature of the Prologue is that the Lilac Fairy, which was to give her gift sixth, is forced to delay her gift by the arrival of Carabosse, the evil fairy. The original gift of the Lilac Fairy would have been wisdom. Because of the curse, the Lilac Fairy has to change her gift, and now instead provides the possibility of rebirth or resurrection.

What is odd is that it does not seem as if wisdom could be an element of finitude. It is not something that can be given at birth, and since it includes the ability to manage finitude well, for it to be one of those elements is confusing. Yet we also see that it is not given. Perhaps indeed it could not have been given—perhaps the Lilac Fairy knew that Carabosse would intervene, the curse would be laid on the princess, and that the required gift would be not wisdom but resurrection. Whether the Lilac Fairy knew this or not, Tchaikovsky did; and his meaning seems to be that, unlike Jesus, we do not become wise the same way we become tall.7

Now we turn to Act I. It is the Princess Aurora’s birthday. Suitors have arrived. The scene in which Aurora greets the suitors is quite stunning when done well. The ballerina is called upon to balance on pointe in arabesque in such a way (rotating in pique) as to show that she does not need to “lean” upon any of the suitors. The arabesque position itself communicates wholeness and her balancing upon the toe of one foot throughout the entire scene displays her self-sufficiency. This serves to emphasize that when she falls victim to the curse, it is not because she lacks anything or possesses some tragic imbalance within her finitude that she has failed to rectify within her finished personality. Rather, it reinforces the distinctive element of the Act: it is Aurora’s birthday; the theme is temporality; and why is the sixteenth birthday important? It is arbitrary—but what non-arbitrary event does it represent and stand in for? An individual’s coming of age, a person’s coming into possession of her own personality and “self.” The fact that she pricks her finger on a spindle—a symbol of time—reinforces that the key element in Aurora’s curse is temporality. As a temporal being, she acquires a self in time. Elizabeth M. of course would nod. We are back in the world of “The Black Swan.” Even the perfect Aurora cannot complete the transition to adulthood successfully! Is this fact peculiar to just cursed princesses, or to all of us? The whole kingdom falls asleep; the fate is universal.

Finally, let me skip over Act 2 and the kiss—a kiss that is like neither Parsifal and Kundry’s first kiss nor their second—and instead come to Act 3, the wedding. This scene seems over-full, overly abundant with fairy tale characters and dances. The whole world of fairy tale characters seems to have been invited here. Isn’t this rather silly, after all? Once again we can imagine Elizabeth M. saying that the silliness is just the point—the real fate of humanity is to fall victim to the curse, and to die. The sleep is only a pious delusion. Yet in this scene one particular moment really catches the eye—the dance between Red Riding Hood and the Wolf. In the realm of fairy tales, this is the lion lying down with the lamb. This wedding, apparently, represents a cosmic union, and the new kingdom will, apparently, represent a total transformation of the world as we know it—a global harmony of the kind for which Dostoevsky has Ivan returning his ticket.

In Tchaikovsky’s view, then, the fatal element in human love is not desire, but some mystery of temporality; and the solution is a cosmic renewal that would invade from some kingdom beyond our borders and usher in a radical harmony of all creatures. Love is not split apart into passion and compassion; no, the prince’s kiss is a saving kiss, but it is also a wooing kiss, both compassionate and passionate. Tchaikovsky’s envisioned salvation is opposite Wagner’s.

Elizabeth M.’s conception of sin is based on Swan Lake and not Tristan; would she agree with the solution offered in The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant? The answer to this question is elusive. Both Elizabeth and Covenant are oppressed by the conviction that they bring harm with them and therefore will not allow themselves to love. Both of them are remade by grief and the sacrifice of another bringing them to see the futility of resisting love and, finally, choosing life, and love, again. Finally, it is clear that Niakani and Elizabeth’s accounts of love and selfhood need supplementation of some kind to provide the resources necessary to enable rebirth. Simon’s idea about loss of self is one such form of supplementation. Donaldson’s idea of “the figure of Lena” is another. Possibly each of these are incomplete or themselves in need of supplementation. The Tristan doctrine of sin, as I will call it, suggests that a primordial compassion and response to beauty can be derailed by the desire for (sensuous) possession and consumption of beauty; that this desire is itself based in a root yearning in human nature for completion in another; and that the false step of pursuing beauty for the sake of possession and consumption can be corrected by allowing the seed that this selfsame beauty plants within the human heart to grow and come to fruition. The Swan Lake and Sleeping Beauty doctrine of sin, on the other hand, posits temporality and finitude rather than possessiveness per se as the root of human troubles.

We pause to note here that this difference goes all the way back to differences between the Eastern and Western Churches; traditionally the Western Church has often attributed sin to concupiscence, the Eastern Church to our finitude. They need not conflict, but they are different. What the Swan Lake and Sleeping Beauty conceptions of sin require is a way of rolling back time, “undoing” temporality by undoing a specific moment when one went wrong. Thomas Covenant would surely agree—and he would agree that he needs not just a way of going back and “undoing” the rape, but undoing the self-making he had done that made him the sort of person who would commit the rape. Yet when the rolling back is done, one retains the need for a new, positive motivational factor that will allow one to move forward in a new direction—what is the point of reversing the moment if one follows the same path? As Sal would say: If the self is freely unfolded necessity, what is the point of stepping back to that moment when you went wrong? For “time present and time past / point to one end / which is always present.” But then we see the problem: if the person went wrong even in possession of the ideal—“the figure of Lena”—the first time, then why expect a new result the second time?

Yet here perhaps is where “the figure of Lena” shows its strength. Simon added grief as an essential element both for recovering the self and as the necessary ground of believing one could posit a better self, created in profound awareness of one’s sin. If “the figure of Lena,” Lena precisely as the betrayed one, is a permanent factor within the person, motivationally attractive yet grief-laden then it can perform two simultaneous functions: it can guide the person in forming the self properly both by revealing the self that the person ought to be in the loveliness of its devotion, and by revealing temptation to mar the self for what it is in its absolute ugliness—thus simultaneously providing both appropriate attraction and appropriate aversion. “The figure of Beatrice” does play both roles for Dante, though not perhaps in quite the way described here. A more significant difference is that the figure of Beatrice draws Dante toward heavenly existence, but does not connect him with earthly existence. In Kierkegaard, Dostoevsky, and Niakani’s conception, at least, this was an essential function of the self-making passion—that it provide a person with a concrete self that was involved with the world. The figure of Lena, by way of contrast, does provide Thomas with precisely this kind of concrete involvement, viz., by causing him to love and preserve the land.

How must the transfigured self-making passion be related to the original figure or object through which it was awakened? That is, how must it be related to Lena, to Sarah or Joshua, to those through whom we learned how to be and to love? The reader might think that this relation will be essentially the same as the infinite resignation described by Johannes de Silentio, in which a person’s object of passion is transfigured into an idea or ideal, a spiritualized figure that unifies the individual at the cost of giving up “finitude,” that is, a concrete relation to concrete existence. There may be some real similarity; but there is a significant difference: here, the relation to concrete existence is preserved through the eternal consciousness of guilt, and the guilt is held not against the idealized figure, but the actual object of passion. Covenant’s guilt was not against “the figure of Lena” but against Lena, and it is this guilt that “the figure of Lena” must always remind him of. Therefore we have here something different from infinite resignation, yet complementary to it, a completion of it that leads to reengagement rather than retreat from the world.

Now, in saying this much I think we remain within the area established by Parsifal. The second kiss Percival shares with Kundry expresses purified, redemptive passion. What remains to be said from the side of Tchaikovsky? I think two things. The first is that surely we hope for more than Percival and Kundry’s second kiss; we hope for Aurora’s kiss: a kiss that initiates the world of wonder that we glimpsed and for which we yearned when we first loved, a kiss that announces “Behold, the Kingdom of God has come upon you!”8 The purity of the Grail Theme is wonderful, but don’t we long not just for purification, but for resurrection?

But if there is a “third kiss,” a resurrection kiss, then that kiss must have a supernatural character. What the Sleeping Beauty ballet expresses is hope, or longing, for the coming of a kingdom other than the earthly one to which we belong. It doesn’t summon us to a new, ethereal realm, it promises no darkness within which we consummate our love; instead it promises the renewal of this earth, this kingdom, and the restoration of our entire finitude within a new harmony of the world. There is no movement we can make to bring about that kiss, however. For it we must merely wait, with faith and hope that there is indeed a love transcending our own governing the world.

Now, when I said in response to Sr. Astell that Elizabeth’s theme was love and mediation, I hope it will be understood what I meant: Surely there was some word she could not communicate, and if she poeticized herself, if she volatilized everything to such an extent that the essence of every detail became confused in the steam of her poetics, then it was for sake of “mediating” the incommunicable word that she did this. What is this word? What, but something like “Oh! That supernatural kiss”—words one may very well say, yet without saying anything at all.

Aaron Simmons begins with a reflection on Socrates and the relationship between philosophy and writing, asking why we write, and thus also why Elizabeth M. wrote. He especially notes that Elizabeth, in the volitilization effected through poeticizing herself, has also made herself universal. It was especially for this reason that, in my introduction to the work, I suggested that Elizabeth had learned the lesson that Kierkegaard mentions in his literary review of the Baroness Thomasine Christine Gyllembourg-Ehrensvärd’s final novel, Two Ages. She published all of her works anonymously, and he praises her literary ability in terms that also reflect upon how he understood himself as a writer:

Anyone who experiences anything primitively also experiences in ideality the possibilities of the same thing and the possibility of the opposite. These possibilities are his legitimate literary property. His own personal actuality, however, is not. His speaking and his producing are, in fact, born of silence.1

What Kierkegaard praised was Baroness Gyllembourg-Ehrensvärd’s ability to both grasp the “primitive” elements of her experience and to present these in the form of “possibilities” that had been stripped of her personal actuality. The “universality” of Elizabeth M. depends, I surmise, upon the fact that she has attempted to do the same, and perhaps because authentic self-knowledge depends upon knowing oneself precisely in this way, distilling one’s primitive experiences and knowing how to return with them to one’s actuality.

Did Elizabeth M. write only for the sake of acquiring self-knowledge, however? I think it will be worth looking a bit more closely at what Socrates says in the Phaedrus to see how Elizabeth might understand herself in relation to what Socrates reports about the Egyptian king Ammon’s criticism of writing:

SOCRATES: Well, then, those who think they can leave written instructions for an art, as well as those who accept them, thinking that writing can yield results that are clear or certain, must be quite naive and truly ignorant of Ammon’s prophetic judgment: otherwise, how could they possibly think that words that have been written down can do more than remind those who already know what the writing is about? (275c–d)

The best way to understand this claim, I suggest, is to begin with the word “remind” (ὑπομνῆσαι, hypomnesai). Socrates says that written words can only remind someone of that which they know (εἰδότα, eidota) about the word’s subject. The word for “know” is cognate to the word for “form” (εἰδός, eidos). Indeed, Socrates has just explained to Phaedrus that Eros has a similar value: the beloved’s beauty of body and soul reminds the lover of divine objects of which they are replicas. Phaedrus is a bit slow on the uptake in this exchange, not catching Socrates’s drift; but here we see Plato simultaneously critiquing and defending writing. What is the value of writing? Its power to remind someone of what is already known. That is, the right kind of writing can stimulate recollection. Recollection, in the Platonic sense, however, is a power for recovering knowledge of the highest things, divine things, the eternal Forms that are the true objects of all knowledge. Thus the right kind of writing—Plato’s sort of writing—is nothing at which to scoff. A piece of writing focused upon disclosing someone’s accidental “actuality,” in the sense that a diary might—“Monday: Ate lunch at M.— / Tuesday: Thought about going skiing / Wednesday: Was briefly melancholy, listened to a sad song on the radio / . . .”—would indeed be incapable of reminding someone of anything worthwhile. Accumulating knowledge of such writings would be a useless enterprise. Yet writing that was attentive to the primitive possibilities of life could enable a reader to recollect things that were fundamental and important to their life. Thus, far from indicting writing, Socrates here seems to ascribe it a peculiarly significant power.

This comment is followed immediately by another critique:

SOCRATES: You know, Phaedrus, writing shares a strange feature with painting. The offsprings of painting stand there as if they are alive, but if anyone asks them anything, they remain most solemnly silent. The same is true of written words. You’d think they were speaking as if they had some understanding, but if you question anything that has been said because you want to learn more, it continues to signify just that very same thing forever. When it has once been written down, every discourse roams about everywhere, reaching indiscriminately those with understanding no less than those who have no business with it, and it doesn’t know to whom it should speak and to whom it should not. And when it is faulted and attacked unfairly, it always needs its father’s support; alone, it can neither defend itself nor come to its own support. (275d–e)

Socrates here again speaks against writing, yet his attack is again peculiar; on the surface, it is indeed a defect of writing that it cannot explain itself as an individual engaged in discussion can. Instead, it “continues to signify just that very same thing forever.” But this means that writing shares an important quality with the Forms, objects that—unlike material beings—also go on being the same things forever; material objects “become.” The Forms “are.” Written words are material objects that, somehow, share in the immortality of the immaterial Forms of which they also function to remind readers.

The second criticism, that written words reach everyone, likewise seems ambiguous. That is, if it is characteristic of material objects to exist for only a limited period of time, and only within a limited space, then words seem uncommonly enduring but also uncommonly non-localized in space. Now, Socrates does not criticize this divorce from spatial locality itself, but the fact that the words end up in the hands of those who do not know what to do with them and mistreat them. Written words are orphaned words. They cannot defend themselves against misinterpretation or mistaken attacks. However, the very form of Socrates’s discourse might make us wonder: is the Phaedrus itself—is the philosophical dialogue—subject to the critique just as it stands? The dialogue form presents ideas precisely in the context of being challenged, defended, questioned, and explained.

Jesus said, “Cast not your pearls before swine” (Matt 7:6). In this way he explained his use of parables to express lessons. He could express his message in public in a form that was striking and memorable, yet also resistant to the misappropriation of his words by others. Plato’s use of the dialogue form functions similarly. What are Plato’s views? It is notorious that Plato does not appear within his own dialogues, and it has therefore always been possible to question whether he has expressed any of his own views. The Phaedrus includes a passage in which Socrates and Phaedrus sit down under a “lofty plane tree,” a species of tree that in Greek was named for its exceeding broad crown; “broad” in Greek being rendered by the stem “plat-,” this is a “ὑψηλοτάτην πλάτανον”—a lofty Plato tree, a detail that is as suggestive as it is deniable. Was Plato trying to say that he was about to deliver his own thoughts, that Plato would soon deliver a wisdom of his own? Or is this just an accident, a coincidence? Something in between—for they are going to sit in the tree’s shadow? The tantalizing ambiguity hangs over the dialogue, shaping the mood in which we receive its rich panoply of images and arguments. Plato’s words are orphaned in a more profound sense; one cannot attack them as Plato’s words, because one does not know which of them, if any, he means and intends. Nor does his character, Socrates, clearly stand by his words; he constantly claims to be ignorant and to be stating only what seems to him to have the best case, and to be approximately true, or at least the most truth his interlocutor can handle; in the passage under discussion, he is introducing his view via a manifestly fictional account of an interview between an Egyptian king and the god Thuth, a point even Phaedrus notices, saying, “Socrates, you’re very good at making up stories from Egypt or wherever else you want!” (275b). In criticizing writing, Plato indirectly emphasizes the benefits of the dialogue form in general, and especially those benefits that follow his particular type of dialogue—one in which the dialectic springs, as it were, from nowhere, the “author” is a constantly retreating presence, and the reader is left with the task of recollection.

The dialectic, then, is an airy presence, “volatilized” as Kierkegaard’s Silentio would put it,2 arising from fictional situations penned by an author whose most noteworthy form of presence is his absence. Those who would attach themselves to “Plato” find themselves instead drawn to his character, his teacher, Socrates. Plato clearly means for his readers to fall in love with Socrates, Socrates the model questioner rather than Socrates the exponent of some particular view, and many do. But the dialectic spurs recollection and therefore, if successful, the discourse lives on in the soul of the reader—or as Socrates says, “It is a discourse that is written down, with knowledge, in the soul of the listener; it can defend itself, and it knows for whom it should speak and for whom it should remain silent.” He then goes on to speak of a man who knows what is “just, noble, and good” using writing as a way of “amusing himself” and “storing up reminders for himself” and “for everyone who wants to follow in his footsteps” (276d). That is, while supposedly denigrating writing, Socrates moves from a trivial application of writing (amusement) to progressively more serious ones (reminders to oneself regarding the Forms, reminders to anyone following in his footsteps). Writing, it seems, or at least the right kind of writing, writing that can indirectly spur recollection, will be useful indeed.

In Philosophical Fragments, Kierkegaard’s Johannes Climacus famously asked whether there was a knowledge beyond recollection. He used “recollection” as a paradigm for philosophical knowledge in general, since philosophical knowledge has the essential property of being accessible to “all” in some important sense of “all,” whether that means Platonic recollection, innate ideas, the common features of empirical experience, etc. He concluded that if there was such a knowledge, it would be because we were resistant to truth, because we were in “untruth” and opposed to knowing the truth. Now it is clear that Elizabeth M. has a similar problem in mind, for she asks what would have happened if Socrates had discovered that he was complicit in a monstrous crime, specifying “not ignorantly complicit,” a qualification that makes sense only on the assumption that the crime has been disguised through self-deception—otherwise one cannot speak of Socrates both discovering his complicity and yet not being ignorant of it. Elizabeth, of course, is speaking of herself; despite seeming so “hyper-virtuous” to herself, she has found herself complicit in a crime she knew, but did not know, she had committed. Ordinary recollection will not be enough to draw out such knowledge. Neither, perhaps, would even the Platonic dialogue be capable of exposing it—for such knowledge is too inward. Even describing it would require a character to be inwardly invested and to express themselves in the form of a soliloquy, diary, or journal.

Such a writing—Elizabeth M.’s writing—would necessarily gravitate toward and revolve around a decisive moment in the person’s life, that decisive moment in which untruth was broken by Truth. Simmons says, “Whatever we write will only stand as a reflection of a particular moment in that becoming” and that “no written text will ever be adequate to the lived experience itself,” and this is true, and doubly true for an experience of truth breaking untruth. For even if it is true that we are all in untruth, or have been in untruth, it does not follow that we will be reminded of it by another’s writings or be capable of recollecting Truth if we are in a state resistant to its recollection. Such can, of course, still sometimes provide the function of spurring recollection—at least for the author—but if Climacus is right about the limits of philosophical knowledge, then no narrative of someone’s discovery of their own condition of untruth can free another from that condition. For recollection, ex hypothesi, lacks that power. In that case, we would have to say that such writing could only act as a witness, not a teacher, of the profound experience it indirectly mediated to the reader.

I too have often wondered what the person out over 70,000 fathoms of water is supposed to be hanging on to, or floating upon. Perhaps Sarah wished for a surfboard, but did not find it—a way of remaining above the depths, skimming eternity’s surface; and Elizabeth would have wished to stand an observer upon the shore, behind glassy windows or perched high in a tree, as if to absorb infinity within a single eye, but instead found herself compelled to act—and so, we hope, dove. No one can be “suspended above 70,000 fathoms” for another person, since the image presupposes that the individual is out upon the water alone, but each person can, if they have experienced this, stand witness to what they experienced. Neither Elizabeth M. nor anyone else—not Socrates, or Plato, or Kierkegaard—can dive into the depths for us; and neither can they spur a recollection in the reader’s soul “reminding” them of such diving, for by hypothesis, that would require crossing the wall of self-deception that separates truth from untruth, a power that recollection lacks. What Elizabeth M. then seems to have endeavored was, by poeticizing herself into universality, or universal possibility, to create the conditions in which she could mediate as much of her experience as could be recollected and then, finally, to stand not as reminder but as witness of the final, decisive moment—the moment of the divine kiss and the dive into the waters, with an outcome known to none perhaps but her and God alone.

Megan Fritts observed, in her introduction to The Hurricane Notebook, that while Elizabeth M.’s notebook bore a resemblance to works in several genres—philosophical dialogue, Greek tragedy, Southern Gothic—it might be best to describe it in terms of a new genre, “philosophical gothic.” Sylwia Wilczewska provides a further apt characterization of the Notebook: it “invents a new form in order to resurrect an old one.” That is, Elizabeth M. could be said to have invented the philosophical gothic genre form in order to resuscitate and reinvigorate the philosophical dialogue form, a literary form whose fortunes have waxed and waned but whose last significant period of usage seems to have been the Enlightenment, when David Hume (in his Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion) and Denis Diderot (his youthful The Skeptic’s Walk and the two great works written in his maturity, Rameau’s Nephew and the three dialogues grouped together as D’Alembert’s Dream) both used the form for the sake of exploring difficult and explosive ideas in the realm of religion and morals. When surveying the contemporary philosophical scene, the dialogue form seems to have been relegated to a form of textbook in which interlocutors are, for the most part, meant to do little more than illustrate various ideas and points of view—positions that have been developed in the ordinary realm of articles and monographs—and to rehearse what the author regards as the best current arguments and objections for those positions. These works do not, for the most part, even rise to the level of such minor dialogues as Schleiermacher’s Christmas Eve: A Dialogue on the Incarnation, a dialogue that does not break much new ground, but which allows its seven characters to have personalities and idiosyncrasies and to do more than just act as houses for conflicting points of view. Christmas Eve is content to allow these different characters to have their say and, after attempting to persuade each other of their points of view, different ways that individuals might relate to the unfathomable mystery of the incarnation—it allows these positions to remain present for the reader as un-negated possibilities.

I take it that it is because Elizabeth M. does not allow her opponent’s positions—especially Sal’s—to remain as such possibilities that Wilczewska criticizes the Notebook, or perhaps the philosophical gothic form. For if Elizabeth M.’s purpose in creating the new, philosophical gothic form was to resurrect the dialogue form, then the degree of closure she progressively develops—a momentum of closure as possibilities are negated again and again, until finally even Sal’s rival philosophy, never refuted, comes to appear diabolical, or even an expression of a monstrous, Satanic pride—serves to undermine literary norms it ought to preserve. One thinks also of Kierkegaard’s statement, quoted both in my own introduction to the Notebook and again in my response to Simmons, that an author’s “legitimate literary property” consists of “possibilities” borne of primitive experience.1 The literary work, then, leaving behind the hard and harsh particularities of actuality, becomes invested with the soft, diffused glow of possibilities.

Wilczewska connects this to the fact that literature is governed, not by the earnest strictures of the Ethical and the Religious, but by the different laws of the Aesthetic. She further interprets the Notebook as displaying a Kierkegaardian progression in Elizabeth’s life from the Aesthetic through the Ethical to the Religious existence sphere. One worry I have about this line of interpretation is that it is not obvious to me that Kierkegaard is, as Wilczewska argues, Elizabeth M.’s favorite philosopher. She represents herself as learning about Kierkegaard only rather late, via Niakani and then Simon, for whom it may fairly be said that Kierkegaard is indeed his most significant philosophical influence. Elizabeth’s most decisive influences, on the other hand, seem to be philosophers of earnestness and the ideal like Plato, Pascal, and Schiller. She represents the fortuitous or providential discovery of Kierkegaardian ideas as a corrective to her own native tendency toward such other-worldly idealism.

Does pre-crisis Elizabeth inhabit the Aesthetic existence sphere? Would Kierkegaard assign that pre-crisis Elizabeth to that sphere? Would the Elizabeth of “Jouska” and “Macrina” assign herself to that sphere? I think the answer to that question is not obvious; operatic archetypes such as Don Giovanni and Kierkegaardian pseudonyms like A, Johannes the Seducer, and Constantine Constantius are “pure” personalities, who fully occupy a single existence sphere and illuminate our own psychological life possibilities by casting light upon extreme possibilities that actually existing individuals would at most only partially occupy. Is Elizabeth similarly “pure”? It seems to me ambiguous whether the Elizabeth of the Sacrum Arcanum is an example of an aesthete or of ethical earnestness. One could easily tally as many signs of the one as of the other, and this goes along with Kierkegaard’s general sense that among the Greeks these spheres are regularly confused, as evidence by the fact that the highest ideal was the kalon, a single, powerful word indicating both the beautiful and the noble. Was her development of the Sacrum Arcanum a bold and decisive decision, a choice embracing the sharp cutting power of an either/or, aut/aut in Judge Wilhelm’s sense, or something more like a retreat into her own most comfortable pastures, a move from dangerous actuality to comfortable fantasy? I do not know whether there is a clear answer on this score, and the answer may depend upon what we make of Elizabeth’s later development; for the sense of self from which she acted later was the self she forged in that decisive moment.

The form of The Hurricane Notebook is accelerating disintegration yielding decision—and it is the nature of the moment of decision to exclude what is not chosen. However, it is worthwhile to examine the Notebook in comparison with an extremely sophisticated contrary model of such openness in the genre that Elizabeth sought to resurrect, namely, Plato’s Symposium. In the Symposium, seven speeches are given in praise of love. These can be divided into three groups: two groups of three and one outlier. The first three speeches each seem rather one-dimensional. Those in the second set of three are more sophisticated; first comes Plato’s brilliant send-up of Aristophanes, then we get Agathon’s beautiful but empty praise of love, and finally Socrates delivers his speech, in which—characteristically—not Socrates, but another figure, the priestess Diotima, instructs a young Socrates in a very otherworldly account of love as an ascent to “the Beautiful itself.” Yet Socrates is not the last to speak; instead that honor goes to Alcibiades, who speaks of his love for Socrates. Formally, the dialogue is unusual for a Socratic dialogue, in that it features a series of speeches, rather than featuring Socrates’s cross-examination of one, two, or three interlocutors. Yet the speech that Socrates gives allows him to reconstruct his favored context by beginning with his cross-examination of Agathon and then proceeding to Diotima’s cross-examination of Socrates. Diotima’s account of love includes elements of each previous speech and integrates these into a new and sophisticated account of love. Then comes Alcibiades, entering “You must not flinch, but drink,” he says, “and if I advance anything untrue . . . please interrupt me, and convict me of misrepresentation, for I would never willingly speak falsely” (213e, 214e).

The dialogue flirts with becoming a bit too neat when it sets up the simple idea of one speech containing all of the others. Alcibiades’s entrance reopens possibility and confronts the reader anew with two fundamentally different ideas about love, one strongly universalist and the other strongly particularist. Does Diotima’s account of love actually capture the aspect of love as devotion precisely to this individual—an element that Aristophanes’s account (in which lovers each form half of a single original whole) had already emphasized even before Alcibiades’s drunken entrance? Alcibiades speaks not of “love” in the abstract but of his particular love for a particular person, Socrates, which pushes this element to the fore. His entrance also shifts the geometry of the speeches. What had been two sets of three, or five and one, now forms a set of seven, with Aristophanes—thanks to his sneezing fit—occupying the enviable middle position. On the whole, Alcibiades’s entrance is so disruptive that the reader may, as Simmias does at the end of the Phaedo, admit to “some private misgivings” regarding Socrates’s argument. Socrates affirms this response, stating that “our first hypotheses require clearer examination” (107a–b).

Even this too brief accounting for one of the most perfect philosophical dialogues we possess raises several questions about Elizabeth’s procedure in The Hurricane Notebook. Her work has a shadowy likeness to the former dialogue, a likeness that can fade in and out of focus and make it unclear whether she did, after all, intend to “rewrite” the Symposium or echo it in some way. It, too, can be forced into a structure with two sets of three and a seventh outlier (Morgan, Will, and Harper; Niakani, Rufus, and Pete; then finally Simon), but let me highlight two important interpretive facts: first, despite the momentum of rejection that Elizabeth creates, is it in fact clear that she disproves the viewpoints of those she cross-examines? To take one example, is Morgan’s conviction that God is capable of finding and actualizing the one infinitely unlikely possibility in which he wins a person’s love actually ruled out? Second, no matter how we analyze this structure, it reveals how important Sal’s philosophy is: Sal is not an interlocutor like the others. What he offers is not “material” for Elizabeth to synthesize as the others do, but a rival synthesis.

In labeling Elizabeth “Hyperion,” the Titan of light, Sal suggests that he himself found Elizabeth ambiguous. No doubt his suspicious eye, always eager to spy signs of despair, fracture, or hidden darkness in others, was on the lookout for such signs in Elizabeth; calling her “Hyperion” seems to indicate that he both found no such signs and yet also predicted her downfall precisely in her embrace of the light, perhaps in the titanic pride associated with that sun-like fire she possessed, a pride he certainly identified with. One could indeed construct a fascinating portrait of Elizabeth and her problem by isolating her encounters with Sal and then reconstructing both his philosophy and what seems to be his implicit interpretation of Elizabeth and her problem. It may of course end up that what one finds is that too much of Sal remains mysterious for this to be fully accomplished.

Completing an analysis of this kind would require more space than even the generous allowance I have made myself in this space. Let me restrict myself to the first two encounters with Sal described by Elizabeth, both in “Gnothi Seauton.” The first of these is an encounter upon the Riverwalk. In it we find that Sal valued Elizabeth for the competition she provided him in chess competitions. It is unclear whether he values competition more than competing with her, specifically, or the reverse. He is inwardly preoccupied and communicates that winning, without opposition, is valueless, dull. He craves a different, more exciting, form of experience. He ceases self-preoccupation only when Elizabeth mentions that she has neglected chess for the sake of investigating evil and discovering how to overcome it. This simultaneously arouses his interest and causes him pain, and it is this revelation on Elizabeth’s part that leads him to both reveal his preferred “name” for Elizabeth—Hyperion—and his epigrammatic adaptation of Camus’s “Sisyphus happy” as a favored name for his own philosophy, “Ahab happy.”

The second appearance in “Gnothi” occurs during Elizabeth’s conversation with Harper. Here, we find that Elizabeth is the one who, struck by the possibility of forgiveness and redemption from hell—a hell in which she does not even know whether she believes—is simultaneously pained and interested. She remembers her sister and is reminded of a conversation with Sal during a “very strange” party at his house. He singles Elizabeth out to engage her in what seems to be a confession of sort, that the party is an excuse to pursue “science,” which seems to involve carefully and minutely observing his guests and gauging their responses to various stimuli (perhaps in comparison with some kind of control, his knowledge of their behavior under ordinary circumstances?—there is no explanation). He is convinced that human beings are more complex than ordinarily admitted and possess so many motives and desires wrapped up in one another that even the “brutes” possess some exceedingly fine and noble desires among their “brutish” ones. Left unsaid is the reverse, what he must think of Elizabeth herself: that even someone with as fine and noble of tastes as “Hyperion” must have a darker, more brutish side, some secret spot in her soul, the spot of “yin” at the heart of her so very “yang” existence. But what draws his interest this time is her answer to his question, “Name one thing you would never part with”—to which she responds, “Myself.” When Elizabeth expands on this and seems to agree with his idea of “knotted beings,” Sal again shows his distinctive grimace/smile, his happy sorrow, his grieving happiness. Sal seems particularly pleased that, in Elizabeth’s glossing of the “knotted being” idea, she treats the difficulty as involving not only the conflict between “brutish” and “lofty” desires, but another conflict between our yearning for self-sufficiency and our necessary rootedness in society. (This duality is even present in the duality of Elizabeth’s favored literary form, the combination of first-person journal entries with philosophical dialogue.)

But Sal becomes disappointed when he detects a certain naïveté in Elizabeth’s answers to his questions regarding sin and freedom. For he wanted to know whether, for example, a monster is born that way, or becomes that way; and Elizabeth thought it was a matter of freely making something from your materials, whereas Sal argued for a self as “freely unfolded necessity,” a necessity and freedom that can be fully actualized by grief.2 That is, Sal thought that opportunities for action were opportunities for actualizing what was already present in the self, not for imposing a new form arising from who knows where. Or perhaps he worried, and was particularly competitive with Elizabeth, precisely because she represented, for him, the opposite possibility: the possibility of a pure creativity that did not owe its power, not even to the smallest degree, to some dark root.

Why did Sal gravitate toward Ahab? And why imagine “Ahab happy?” Moby-Dick is dominated by the analogy of “sea and land.” This analogy is a replacement, among other things, for Plato’s allegory of the cave. The land is the realm of human conventions, as the cave is likewise. The sea, free and infinite, is the realm of reality, corresponding to the world outside Plato’s cave. The sun represents in both images an ultimate knowledge of the Good, a knowledge which would, it seems, permit someone to know how the world hung together and to return to the land with the true names for things, but more importantly, with an accurate understanding of how he, himself, fit into the whole. The whaler is a model of the philosopher, someone who makes his living from the sea and returns to land only to provide “oil,” that is, the source of the artificial light animating the land. Ahab is the greatest of the whalers and in his determination and wholehearted pursuit of truth is a disturbing mix of Plato’s portrait of the philosopher in Republic VI and VII, who is made whole and complete by his one love for wisdom, and his contrary portrait of the tyrannical soul in Republic IX, a soul that is destroyed by its complete devotion to a lawless desire. Moby Dick, who symbolizes everything and nothing, also symbolizes that which stands between Ahab and that ultimate knowledge that the philosopher desires, a figure whose indefinability and resistance to interpretation poses a final, tantalizing torment to anyone who, like the philosophers, looks for an ultimate answer, a Logos or Tao that would answer and explain everything. Ahab, contemplating the gold doubloon he had earlier nailed to the mast, observed:

There’s something ever egotistical in mountain-tops and towers, and all other grand and lofty things; look here,—three peaks as proud as Lucifer. The firm tower, that is Ahab; the volcano, that is Ahab; the courageous, the undaunted, and victorious fowl, that, too, is Ahab; all are Ahab; and this round gold is but the image of the rounder globe, which, like a magician’s glass, to each and every man in turn but mirrors back his own mysterious self. Great pains, small gains for those who ask the world to solve them; it cannot solve itself. Methinks now this coined sun wears a ruddy face; but see! aye, he enters the sign of storms, the equinox! and but six months before he wheeled out of a former equinox at Aries! From storm to storm! So be it, then. Born in throes, ’tis fit that man should live in pains and die in pangs! So be it, then! Here’s stout stuff for woe to work on. So be it, then.3

In Melville’s treatment, Ahab becomes a diabolical figure, a characterization confirmed when he “baptizes” his harpoons in the blood of pagans, solemnized in a ceremonial mockery of the baptismal formula in which the name of God is replaced with the name of the devil: Ahab shouts out, “Ego non baptizo te in nomine patris, sed in nomine diaboli!”4 This is because he rebels against the sun, which he understands precisely in Plato’s sense, because of how it torments him with its unknowability and its indifference or malignity toward him. Sperm whales turn their head toward the sun when they die, and observing this one day, Ahab observes to himself, “life dies sunwards full of faith; but see! no sooner dead, than death whirls round the corpse, and it heads some other way.”5 A little later, he rejects the “sun” as embodied in science and the too-small knowledge afforded by the quadrant:

Science! Curse thee, thou vain toy; and cursed be all the things that cast man’s eyes aloft to that heaven, whose live vividness but scorches him, as these old eyes are even now scorched with thy light, O sun! Level by nature to this earth’s horizon are the glances of man’s eyes; not shot from the crown of his head, as if God had meant him to gaze on his firmament.6

Ishmael rejects the “unity” project that defined Ahab. He acquired a pragmatic flexibility of mood that did not insist upon answers to ultimate questions. Sal must have rejected Ishmael’s solution, that is, Melville’s solution. We might imagine him thinking: “If the Pequod must go down with an archangelic shriek, then let me utter the heaven-rending shriek.”7 He similarly rejected what we might call Nietzsche’s solution, which requires rejecting the sun altogether; once the sun is gone, gone also is the obstruction provided by Moby Dick; now there is only the free, infinite sea, to be defined as one sees fit, to the limit of one’s strength. Why did he reject Nietzsche? I hypothesize that he saw this as a rejection of what pleased him in Elizabeth’s answer, namely, that we cannot escape our yearning for the infinite horizon, but nor can we escape our rootedness at home; likewise, insofar as there is no escape from our brutish and lofty desires, there is no escape from that which defines them thus, which is not our will, but some power beyond our will, some external, unknowable standard—the sun, object of ever imperfect recollection. And what does one find when one is alone out upon the water with the sun?8 Here we see Melville’s tale of poor Pip, who, in one of the accidents “common in that fishery,” is cast overboard in the midst of the boats’ combat with some whales:

It was a beautiful, bounteous, blue day; the spangled sea calm and cool, and flatly stretching away, all round, to the horizon, like gold-beater’s skin hammered out to the extremest. Bobbing up and down in that sea, Pip’s ebon head showed like a head of cloves. . . . Stubb’s inexorable back was turned upon him; and the whale was winged. In three minutes, a whole mile of shoreless ocean was between Pip and Stubb. Out from the centre of the sea, poor Pip turned his crisp, curling, black head to the sun, another lonely castaway, though the loftiest and the brightest.

Now, in calm weather, to swim in the open ocean is as easy to the practised swimmer as to ride in a spring-carriage ashore. But the awful lonesomeness is intolerable. The intense concentration of self in the middle of such a heartless immensity, my God! who can tell it? Mark, how when sailors in a dead calm bathe in the open sea—mark how closely they hug their ship and only coast along her sides.

But had Stubb really abandoned the poor little negro to his fate? No; he did not mean to, at least. Because there were two boats in his wake, and he supposed, no doubt, that they would of course come up to Pip very quickly, and pick him up. . . .

But it so happened, that those boats, without seeing Pip, suddenly spying whales close to them on one side, turned, and gave chase; and Stubb’s boat was now so far away, and he and all his crew so intent upon his fish, that Pip’s ringed horizon began to expand around him miserably. By the merest chance the ship itself at last rescued him; but from that hour the little negro went about the deck an idiot; such, at least, they said he was. The sea had jeeringly kept his finite body up, but drowned the infinite of his soul. Not drowned entirely, though. Rather carried down alive to wondrous depths, where strange shapes of the unwarped primal world glided to and fro before his passive eyes; and the miser-merman, Wisdom, revealed his hoarded heaps; and among the joyous, heartless, ever-juvenile eternities, Pip saw the multitudinous, God-omnipresent, coral insects, that out of the firmament of waters heaved the colossal orbs. He saw God’s foot upon the treadle of the loom, and spoke it; and therefore his shipmates called him mad. So man’s insanity is heaven’s sense; and wandering from all mortal reason, man comes at last to that celestial thought, which, to reason, is absurd and frantic; and weal or woe, feels then uncompromised, indifferent as his God.

Sal seems to have accepted the premise of Melville’s and Nietzsche’s perspectivism—the claim that all knowledge occurs via interpretations that are infected by an eradicable egoism that makes knowledge both of oneself and of the world impossible—but rejects the idea that we can escape from the recollected sun or the yearning for the infinite. He therefore came to view Ishmael and Nietzsche as each offering a contrary, too easy simplification that was incompatible with human nature as it revealed itself to him in his studies—these “studies” being, however, I think only for the sake of finding out whether others were like him or not. For surely the original basis for his quest was some disturbance he discovered in his own soul, some dissonant resonance or restlessness that recurred no matter how often he tried to cleanse himself of it.

Sal thus seems to have concluded that we are all Ahab, potentially or actually, and self-knowledge and knowledge of the ultimate correspond as knowledge of our awful essence and our impossible fate. The only thing left to us is to pursue the impossible quest, knowing its impossibility will destroy us, yet happy anyway—knowing it will destroy those on the quest with us, yet still, after all, happy—but what he means by “happy” is by no means clear, so I do not mean to have taken myself to have elucidated that final point. I, no more than Elizabeth, do not know what he meant by that point, and I am inclined to agree with her that even he did not know what “happiness” in such existence means. Perhaps he meant that actualization of the self is itself a sort of happiness, even if that actualization reveals the awful essence in its ambiguous glory and horror, even if that actualization always costs us what we value most.

It is up to Sal to write some better account of his philosophy if he wishes it to be presented more fairly and completely than this, or than the account given it by Elizabeth M. I think it is fair to say that Elizabeth, given her experience of the divine kiss, Aurora’s kiss, did not find his synthesis compelling—and even found it diabolical. Yet, as I argued above in response to Simmons, the kiss that breaks untruth cannot itself be the subject of recollection, and though she is its witness, she cannot mediate it to the reader in the strict sense. It is therefore important to note that, whereas Elizabeth’s interlocutors are refuted even though many of their ideas inform or at least are not ruled out by her final position as it seems to stand in “Macrina,” with Sal it is the reverse: her decision rules out his philosophy, but he himself is never refuted.