Figuring

by Maria Popova

I chose this single star From out the wide night’s numbers— Sue—forevermore!

wrong, and that God will punish me by taking you away;

What kind of “God,” she seems to be asking, would make wrong a love of such infinite sweetness?

guess I’m made with nothing but a hard heart of stone, for it don’t break any, and dear Susie, if mine is stony, yours is stone, upon stone, for you never yield, any, where I seem quite beflown. Are we going to ossify always, say Susie—how will it be?

“Loved One, thou knowest!”—an

Now, farewell, Susie…I add a kiss, shyly, lest there is somebody there! Don’t let them see, will you Susie?

Again and again, she would tell all the truth but tell it slant,

so that two versions of these poems exist: the earlier addressed to a female beloved, the later to a male.

Or perhaps Emily had always misdivined the contents of Susan’s heart, inferring an illusory symmetry of feeling on the basis not of evidence but of willfully blind hope.

Few things are more wounding than the confounding moment of discovering an asymmetry of affections where

mutuality had been presumed.

times, so I won’t injure you.

That summer, Emily Dickinson cut off her auburn hair.

lifelong attachment, her “Only Woman in the World.”

by 1853, Sue imposed an artificial finitude. Increasingly unnerved by Emily’s unslakable intensity, she put a soft but deliberate distance between them.

Susan didn’t respond. “Your absence insanes me so,” Emily entreated. Seized with self-doubt over the flaming directness of her previous letter, she implored:

She hadn’t yet fathomed the noonday of Austin’s ardor for Susan.

approximation: to remain in the Dickinson household, at Emily’s side, as her brother’s wife.

at the age of thirty-one, she grieved for him intensely. But it was likely a double-edged grief—for the loss of her mentor to death and for the loss of her fantasy life with Susan to distancing and

Thanksgiving dinner that year. We never know we go—when we are going We jest and shut the door— Fate following behind us bolts it And we accost no more.

Some loves lodge themselves in the tissue of being like mercury, pervading every synapse and sinew to remain there, sometimes dormant, sometimes tortuously restive, with a half-life that exceeds a lifetime.

to suffer with the terror of abandonment:

Evergreens as she did on less peopled nights, with lantern in hand—“I am out with lanterns, looking for myself,” she had written to a friend the previous year—for

“Susan knows she is a Siren—and that at a word from her, Emily would forfeit Righteousness—”

Struggling to reconcile her unusual interiority with the outward demands of her time, she chose simply not to try—she shut herself in her bedroom and came out into the world only as discarnate verses strung together with breathless dashes.

“After all, when a thought takes one’s breath away, a lesson on grammar seems an impertinence.”

Fuller’s translation of Die Günderode, Bettina Brentano’s novel about an intense romantic friendship between two women.

The stories we tell about our own lives, to others but especially to ourselves, we tell in order to make our lives livable.

You ask of my Companions Hills—Sir—and the Sundown—and a Dog—large

myself, that my Father bought me—They are better than Beings—because they know—but do not tell….I

I…am small, like the Wren, and my Hair is bold, like the Chestnut Bur—and my eyes, like the Sherry in the Glass, that the Guest leaves.

And then she promptly sent him four more poems, unheeding of his editorial suggestions.

“There is always one thing to be grateful for—that one is one’s self & not somebody else,” she would tell him.

Kate severed the relationship without explanation, dealing a blow Dickinson would experience as deathly and furnishing the raw material for much of her mournful poetry.

“Twice have I stood a beggar / Before the door of God!” Two great casualties of the heart—first Susan, now Kate.

“There are women to whom a female friendship is indispensable, and cannot be supplied by any companion of the other sex.”

Dear, dear Sue, I have loved you always, since the first night you were “monitress,” and I hardly knew you, but kissed your dear face simply because I could not help it! Your sweet eyes looked into mine, and I could never forget them!

Such are the stages of affect as infatuation festers into unrequited love, then rots into rejection: Drunk on blind devotion, we hope for a while that our feelings will be matched.

Then, unable to sustain this fast and famished for reciprocity, we finally confront the terror of rejection—for even a love partially returned is a rejection of the wholeness hungered for—but still some part of us remains aglow with the hope of a future reunion.

“Give too much love to the dearest and fairest and oh! what sad dissatisfaction,” he anguished in his journal. But he kept writing to William for years: “Still, O changing child, out of the depths of my charity I still believe in you and out of the depths of my heart I still love you.”

friend with passion—and for him my love had no bounds—all that my natural fastidiousness and cautious reserve kept from others I poured on him; to say that I would have died for him was nothing. I lived for him.”

siren cry, as the source of the terror through which she lived. It was the atmosphere of dread, of losses anticipatory and actual, that fomented the bone-trembling horror of it.

“the grief we grow ourselves divine by overcoming with mere hope and most prosaic patience,”

“We tell a Hurt to cool

dear—: ….You must give if you expect to receive—give happiness, friendship, love, joy, and you will find them floating back to you. Sometimes you will give more than you receive. We all do that in some of our relations, but it is as true a pleasure often to give without return as life can afford us. We must not make bargains with the heart, as we would with the butcher for his meat. Our business is to give what we have to give—what we can get to give. The return we have nothing to do with….One will not give us what we give them—others will more than we can or do give them—and so the accounts will balance themselves. It is so with my loves and friendships—it is so with everybody’s.

“My Business is Circumference.”

editorial relationship that would last until Dickinson’s death. “If I read a book which makes my whole body so cold no fire ever can warm me,” she told him, “I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry.”

Can any author ever imagine just how far literature reaches into unfathomed horizons of culture, what it transforms and whom it liberates?

Within two years, she would wish Susan dead. A year and eleven days after her arrival, Mabel would become Austin Dickinson’s lover and would remain so until his death two decades later—a

how external physical parameters influence our interior states—indicating that large open spaces and rooms with high ceilings enhance creativity,