Lucía’s Reviews > The Great Believers > Status Update

She wanted to call Claire over, (...) , try to explain, or to try to start to explain, what her life had been. How this show might begin to convey it all, the palimpsest that was her heart, the way things could be written over but never erased. She was simply never going to be a blank slate.

The whole play is about Hamlet trying to avenge his father’s death, trying to tell the truth, right? And then when he dies, he hands it all to Horatio. In this harsh world draw thy breath in pain, to tell my story. See, I’d have made a great Hamlet! But what a burden. To be Horatio. To be the one with the memory.

As he got sicker, it was more and more often how he thought of people—of Charlie, certainly, and of everyone else here or gone: not as the sum of all the disappointments, but as every beginning they’d ever represented, every promise.

it was an artifact of love. Well—of a hopeless, doomed, selfish, ridiculous love, but what other kind had ever existed?

In the years since Yale had seen the pieces, they’d taken on the aura of famous works of art. Important because you’d seen them before, and your brain already had a slot for them. An old friend met years later on the street corner. Your high school history textbook found again and, through its distant familiarity, made holy.

That’s the difference between optimism and naivety. No one in this room is naive. Naive people haven’t been through real trials yet, so they think it could never happen to them. Optimists have been through it already, and we keep getting up each day because we believe we can keep it from happening again. Or we trick ourselves into thinking it.

It’s always a matter, isn’t it, of waiting for the world to come unraveled? When things hold together, it’s always only temporary.

It struck Yale that day how they both had a way of interacting with the world that was simultaneously selfish and generous—grabbing at beauty and reflecting beauty back. The benches and fire hydrants and manhole covers Nico and Richard stopped to photograph were made more beautiful by their noticing. They were left more beautiful, once they walked away.

He sat there like it wasn’t the least bit unusual, the sun glinting off him. I wanted to paint him, that was my first thought, but the next instant I was smitten. I’d never understood it before, how artists fall for their muses. I thought it was just a bunch of men who couldn’t keep it in their pants. But there was something about the need to paint him and the need to possess him—they were the same impulse.

Well, here it was, then: longing, missing. The most useless kind of love.