often than any other, more often than his own wife. But when I look at the paintings I don’t always recognise her as beautiful right away. Her beauty is something I have to search for, requiring some interpretive work, some intellectual or abstract work, and maybe that’s what Manet found so fascinating about it – but then again maybe not. For six years Morisot came to his studio, chaperoned by her mother, and he painted her, always clothed. Several of her own paintings hang in the museum too. Two girls sharing a park bench in the Bois de Boulogne, one in a white dress, wearing a broad straw hat, bending her head forward over her lap, maybe she’s reading, the other girl in a dark dress, her long fair hair tied back with a black ribbon, showing to the viewer her white neck and ear. Behind them all the lush vague greenery of the public park. But Morisot never painted Manet. Six years after she met him, and apparently at his suggestion, she married his brother. He painted her just once more, wedding ring glittering dark on her delicate hand, and then never again. Don’t you think that’s a love story? It reminds me of you and Simon. And to give myself away even further, I duly add: thank God he has no brothers!
The problem with museums like the d’Orsay, by the way and just totally incidentally, is that there’s far too much art, so that no matter how well you plan your route or how noble your intentions, you will always find yourself walking irritably past priceless works of profound genius looking for the bathrooms. And you feel slightly cheapened afterwards, like you’ve let yourself down – at least I do. I bet you never look for the bathrooms in museums, Eileen. I bet as soon as you enter the hallowed halls of Europe’s great galleries, you simply leave such corporeal practicalities behind you – if indeed they ever plague you in the first place. One doesn’t think of you as a corporeal
being really, but as a beam of pure intellect. And how I wish I had a little more of your radiance illuminating my life at the moment.
Yesterday afternoon I gave three interviews and did an hour-long photoshoot, and between two of the interviews, my father called me to tell me that he had a fall and he’s back in hospital getting an x-ray. His voice sounded thin and his speech was quite garbled. I received the call while standing in the corridor of my publisher’s office building in Montparnasse. In front of me was an entrance to the ladies’ toilets, and beside that a large poster for a bestselling paperback by a French writer. I asked him what time the x-ray was scheduled but he had no idea – I’m not even sure how he managed to place the call. When we hung up, I went straight back down the corridor and into an office room, where a nice female journalist in her forties proceeded to conduct an hour-long interview with me about my influences and literary style. The photoshoot afterwards took place on the street. Several passers-by stopped to watch, perhaps curious as to who I was and why my photograph was being taken, while the photographer gave instructions such as: ‘Relax your face’, and ‘Try to look more your normal self.’ At eight p.m., a car took me to an event space in Montmartre, where I gave a public reading and answered audience questions, sipping intermittently from a tiny plastic bottle of lukewarm water.
This morning, tired and disorientated, I wandered down the street near my hotel and eventually found and entered an empty church. There I sat for about twenty minutes bathed in the slow serious air of sanctity and cried a few picturesque tears about the nobility of Jesus. This is all by way of explaining to you my interest in Christianity –
put simply, I am fascinated and touched by the ‘personality’ of Jesus, in rather a
sentimental, arguably even maudlin way. Everything about the way he lived moves me.
On the one hand, I feel toward him a kind of personal attraction and closeness that is most reminiscent of my feeling for certain beloved fictional characters – which makes sense, considering that I’ve encountered him through exactly the same means, i.e. by reading about him in books. On the other hand, I feel humbled and impressed by him in a different way. He seems to me to embody a kind of moral beauty, and my admiration for that beauty even makes me want to say that I ‘love’ him, though I’m well aware how ridiculous that sounds. But, Eileen, I do love him, and I can’t even pretend that it’s only the same love I feel for Prince Myshkin, or for Charles Swann, or for Isabel Archer. It is actually something different, a different feeling. And while I don’t, as such, really
‘believe’ that Jesus was resurrected after his death, it’s also true to say that some of the most moving scenes in the Gospels, and some of those to which I return most frequently, take place after the resurrection. I find it hard to separate the Jesus who appears after the resurrection from the man who appears before; they seem to me to be all of one being. I suppose what I mean is that in his resurrected form, he goes on saying the kind of things that ‘only he’ could say, that I can’t imagine emanating from any other consciousness. But that’s as close as I get to thinking about his divinity. I have a strong liking and affection for him and I feel moved when I contemplate his life and death. That’s all.
Rather than filling me with spiritual peace, however, the example set by Jesus only makes my existence seem trivial and shallow in comparison. In public I’m always talking about care ethics and the value of human community, but in my real life I don’t take on the work of caring for anyone except myself. Who in the world relies on me for anything? No one. I can blame myself, and I do, but I also think the failure is general.
People our age used to get married and have children and conduct love affairs, and now everyone is still single at thirty and lives with housemates they never see. Traditional marriage was obviously not fit for purpose, and almost ubiquitously ended in one kind of failure or another, but at least it was an effort at something, and not just a sad sterile foreclosure on the possibility of life. Of course if we all stay alone and practise celibacy and carefully police our personal boundaries, many problems will be avoided, but it seems we will also have almost nothing left that makes life worthwhile. I guess you could say the old ways of being together were wrong – they were! – and that we didn’t want to repeat old mistakes – we didn’t. But when we tore down what confined us, what did we have in mind to replace it? I offer no defence of coercive heterosexual monogamy, except that it was at least a way of doing things, a way of seeing life through. What do we have now? Instead? Nothing. And we hate people for making mistakes so much more than we love them for doing good that the easiest way to live is to do nothing, say nothing, and love no one.