Loving Frank

by Nancy Horan

Maybe I can tell my story in a way that is useful to someone else.

“I’m like the trunk of a cactus, I suppose,” she told him. “I take in a dose of culture and time with friends, then I retreat and go live on it for a while until I get thirsty again. It’s not good to live so much inside oneself. It’s a self-imposed exile, really. It makes you different.”

I couldn’t think of anything more noble than making a beautiful home.

I fell under the spell of that line out there. It was so simple: a huge block of blue on top of a block of gold prairie, and the quiet line between heaven and earth stretching endlessly. It felt like freedom itself to look at the horizon.

I have been standing on the side of life, watching it float by. I want to swim in the river. I want to feel the current.

I want to talk to you today about the noblest type of love—the kind that joins the spiritual with the erotic. When both lovers yearn to become entirely one being, to free each other and to develop each other to the greatest perfection, this is the highest form of love possible between a man and a woman of the same moral and intellectual level.

To live dishonestly seemed a cowardly way to use up one’s time.

There was deep vein of goodness in her, but she kept most people at arm’s length.

Sentences appeared on the paper so fast it was as if they had been waiting inside her fingers to trail out.

It was comforting to help people fling their hopes out into the ether on the long chance that something good would come back.

Dawn was just breaking, the sun pushing pink veins through a sky that wanted to rain. Watching the light come up, she felt oddly hopeful. She was sick to death of uncertainty, weary of fear and remorse.

What could be more expressive of the American ideal than a home where a person could feel sheltered and free at the same time?

I believe we can’t be useful to the progress of society without a stubborn selfhood…. I wanted to be honestly myself first and take care of everything else afterward.

It will be a misfortune if the world decides not to receive what I have to give.

Look at the fine time Ellen’s having being a famous intellectual. She dines with heads of state. Corresponds with some of the most famous people in the world. She mourns her bad luck in love because it kept her from having babies. But my goodness. She’s had a rather glorious career for herself—a career she wouldn’t have had if she’d been the kind of full-time mother she glorifies.”

I speak not of her. No, what is true and what is false, she herself has spoken all.

In Ibsen’s view, Key went on, the proof of a person’s greatness is “the power to stand alone; to be able, in every individual case, to make his own choice; in action to write anew his own law, choose his own sacrifices, run his own dangers, win his own freedom, venture his own destruction, choose his own happiness.”