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A Love Letter to The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt

Every so often, the world changes minutely when a person makes a split-second decision. A lost key, a cracked cell phone, a leaf skittering over a sidewalk. Broken hearts and kept promises. A lifetime of difference, wrought by a momentary lapse in — or revival of — judgement. Just as a person ducking back home to wear a different tie to office does not know they just missed a road accident, so too was I oblivious to the fact that when my attention was snagged by Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch one Monday afternoon, I had inadvertently changed the trajectory of my life.

I read The Secret History when I was fifteen years old and freshly enraptured by the world of art. There, nestled between picturesque horror and sheer absurdity, shone three words: beauty is terror. And, heart open and aching for fullness, I lapped them up. I was drawn to the book’s languor and aesthetic, delighted by its opulent barbarity. I watched the characters lie, obsess, fanaticize, love each other and kill each other and die in each other’s arms. I felt nothing for them save some abject amusement, and a bit of hatred.

Naturally, then, when I picked up The Goldfinch, I expected something similar. I anticipated pretty words and morbid delight, death and deception and lies. To say that that is not what I found would be untrue, but it would be worse still to say that that is all I found. Because there was also so, so much more.

It started, as promised, with the painting of a little bird. A little golden bird, chained to a little whitewashed perch. It started also with a museum, and a girl with a violin, and an Isn’t it always the inappropriate thing, the thing that doesn’t quite work, that’s oddly the dearest? A canvas, not painted over, but instead woven into a tapestry of everything and everything. Home: the loss of it, the search for it, the realization of where it can be found. Life: the ache for it, the hatred towards it, the peace of it.

And, above all, love. Love, all alone in a foreign land, in the middle of a desert with flashing lights and stars that spell out your name. Love, in split knuckles and split lips, stolen pennies and stolen smiles. Love, in the leaving, in the returning, in the never coming back. A broken Polish lullaby translated stiltedly into English, A-a-a, a-a-a, there once were two small kittens…

There, too, was childhood, slipping away; friendship, broken and mended and more, more; an overwhelming sense of history, of centuries superimposed, 1940s by way of 1640s. There was sitting on the stoop of a home you didn’t know you had, stargazing with her but having eyes only for the moon. There was Conversational Russian, and The Idiot, and the last four digits of his phone number, because you missed your best friend. Ships passing, but also, coincidence is God’s way of staying anonymous.

(Theo: I think this goes more to the idea of ‘relentless irony’ than ‘divine providence’.

Boris: Yes — but why give it a name? Can’t they both be the same thing?)

This tapestry-canvas was woven through with golden thread, and this golden thread was that little yellow bird on that little whitewashed perch. It was chained to a blank wall, imprisoned for eternity with a few strokes of a brush. One prisoner looking at another. And what did it mean? Nothing, and everything. The length of its shackle was the same as the space between letters that separate two words, and the space between a person’s lungs and a person’s ribs, and the space which things crawl under and inhabit and make magnificent. An individual heart shock. Theo is an echo caught on a breeze, a quiet note of laughter, and I had the epiphany that laughter was light, and light was laughter, and that was the secret of the universe.

And beneath it all ran an undercurrent of beauty. In words, in silences, in the minute hand of a clock. Playground laughter, hotel room smiles. We’ll be eating breakfast in the cornfields when the sun comes up. Not terror, but not not terror. Terror, accompanied by happiness, and misery, and hope. Because, between ‘reality’ on the one hand, and the point where the mind strikes reality, there’s a middle zone, a rainbow edge where beauty comes into being, where two very different surfaces mingle and blur to provide what life does not: and it is this space where all art exists, and all magic.

Beauty is in the knowledge that the finch Fabritius painted was unique, and in the conviction that if Theo could go back in time and see the bird first, he would set it free in a heartbeat. It is in Theo finally flipping to the final page of the book and watching the ink dry, adding his own love to the history of people who have loved beautiful things, and looked out for them, and pulled them from the fire, and sought them when they were lost, and tried to preserve them and save them while passing them along literally from hand to hand, singing out brilliantly from the wreck of time to the next generation of lovers, and the next.

Beauty can't be terror, or at least, not just terror—after all, "beauty alters the grain of reality."

A Love Letter to History

(if you could call it that)

On a cold January morning in 1914, James Joyce published the first part of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. In that very part, on a similarly cold morning just after Christmas Break, Stephen Dedalus stood huddled with other Clongowes students and watched the snow moulding itself around their boots, wondering what made Simon Moonan and Tusker Boyle, in all their ordinariness, kiss in the square.

Napoleon Bonaparte was not born Napoleon Bonaparte. He was born Napoleon Buonaparte. Napoleon Buonaparte was not born in France, but he was born French enough. Of course, they’ve forgotten that by now. They often aren’t allowed to remind themselves, either.

There is very little to say about Fahrenheit 451 that it has not already said about itself. Any review of it is only ever a paraphrasing of some chapter or other, intentionally or otherwise. In the past twenty years, it has been banned at least ten times in the US alone. I imagine censoring a book about censorship gave many people the opportunity to pat themselves on the back. Unfortunately, their intentions, however malevolent, are misplaced. In the book, the people are on the side of banning books. There is no oppression, and no need for revolution. The bars caging a mind are not so easy to topple. The guillotine falls over an empty basket, and symbolism overflows from an empty cup. There is nothing to overthrow when the fault lies with time.

History. What a heavy word.

Christopher Marlow was excommunicated by the Church, and so was one of Shakespeare’s daughters. It is claimed that he based Ophelia off of his wife. I wonder why.

Five years after that day in the square, Stephen Dedalus refused to back down from his claim of Byron’s brilliance. Words like 'blasphemous' and 'irreligious' pooled around his feet. He cupped his hands in the water and lapped it up. Everything I write now contains some shred of Stephen’s name. I wonder why.

Why is a muse called a muse? To muse is to think, to think deeply. Is a muse’s job to be a conductor of thought? Must all thought be equivalent to love? Why does the word smell like the thickest honey? Why does it sit so heavily on my tongue?

Icarus never meant to fall. If he raced toward the sun, it was only to prove that he could. And he was never on fire. Oh, he burned, alright — the melting wax made sure of it. Did he grasp at the feathers as they came free from the harness? Did he watch them drifting towards the sea? Did he notice anything happening at all? For a moment, a brief, shining moment, the sun was neither hope nor doom, but triumph.

I never could write anything on either the 31st or the 1st. There is something about endings, and something about beginnings. The sun dawned the same on New Year’s Day, but at the stroke of midnight, my phone sang like I lived my whole life before the first light.

Fifteen years after that day in the square, Stephen Dedalus parted with Cranly, unafraid of being alone,

“— and not have any one person who would more than a friend, more even than the noblest and truest friend a man ever had.”

“Of whom are you speaking?” Stephen asked at length.

Cranly did not answer.

They met again, and sixteen years after Oscar’s death, James Joyce retraced his name in “Wilde’s love that dare not speak its name” in a book I have yet to read.

It’s funny how they ban books written centuries ago. Congratulations, Ronald, a pre-industrialization schoolmaster had a broader mind than yours. A clod of dirt shifts as Shakespeare turns in his grave.

History. What a heavy word. I used to think we owed it something.

iii.

There is a song I think you would like. Do you want to hear it? I haven’t written it yet. It lives in my limbs and in the corners of your eyes. It touches the back of your palm and entangles itself with my veins.

Why does poetry love veins better than arteries? It’s arteries in which our blood flows the fastest, arteries that branch into each individual cell of our body and pump life into it. Perhaps it’s because veins are safer. (But was love ever safe?)

Where am I going with this? I don’t know. I know that your eyes are an ocean, and I leapt into them without testing the waters first. I know that I am storm-tossed, ship-wrecked, clinging onto a piece of wood for dear life. I know you are lightning, a rainstorm, the sea longing to cradle me at its pit. I know I am clawing my way up for a gulp of air, but finding only the sweet ache of rainwater, slipping through my lips like ambrosia.

You are a whisper that never leaves my throat. You are a secret, a memory, a forest fire. Everything and everything. You are a metaphor lodged somewhere behind my eyes, curled into my lashes and nestled in my teardrops.

I don’t think I’ll ever read poetry as lovely as you.

ii.

Beloved, do you remember the day we met? You would, I suppose. I know I do. No, not in vivid detail, not like it was yesterday. But like it was a very long time ago, and I didn’t know well enough back then to replay it in endless loops in my head, so the details unspooled and slipped away. Like the broader bits got caught in my fingers, and my hands knew well enough to hold on tight. Like I’ve recounted it so many times that the memories have spread and contracted, until they were sitting in clumps in my thoughts: a smile, two smiles, a laugh. Your hair in the sun.

The other day, I wrote a poem. The “you” in it was you. (It’s always you.) I was Icarus, you were the sun. I reached for you and was claimed by the sea. And for a moment, for a glorious, shining moment, your rays touched my fingertips and my world was painted gold.

Why do I compare us to tragedies? Why, because there is love in them, of course. They wouldn’t be tragedies if there wasn’t. In order to suffer, you need to have something to lose.

(Sometimes, beloved, I wish love was more than loss. Sometimes, I wish you could know what something meant to you without the torment of imagining a world without it in it.)

i.

I want to write. I love writing, so I want to write. But I want to write about you. And I don’t know how.

I used to think that anything could be put into words—lives, minds, entire worlds. Now, I’m not so sure. Whenever I begin describing you, whenever I try to write about your laugh or your smile or your eyes, I write… nothing. Because there are no words to describe how your hand in mine makes me feel. It’s isn’t like in the movies, you see. There are no sparks, there is no fire. Because home doesn’t burn. And you are home.

The closest words I can find for you are ‘l’appel du vide’. The call of the void. And you are my void. I am drawn to you, and I can never escape. I can never even wish to, because of the nagging, hopeful voice asking if I might be your void, too.

Everything reminds me of you. The trees, the smog, the spattering drops of rain, they all seem to whisper your name, to echo the cadence of your laugh. I talk about your laugh a lot. Maybe it’s the sweetest sound I’ve ever heard. Maybe I love it. Maybe I love you. And maybe I don’t know what to do with that knowledge, because it’s frightening, it’s terrifying, and I wouldn’t have it any other way.

Because you are my void, and I am a solitary star, and I can’t help but lose myself in you.

Hi! I’m Gia, and I’m writing a book! It’s a collection of love letters, and I’m going to be posting those love letters here with as much regularity as I can. I’m going to use this blog both as an archive and as motivation to actually finish this book.

Some things about me: I love James Joyce, Nora Sakavic, and Hozier, and I love sunlight, words, and love. What can you expect to see here? Well, if you like love, this is for you; if you like writing that isn’t exactly poetry but also isn’t exactly prose, this is for you; and if you enjoy reading about yearning, this is for you!