A Plea for Eros

 

    A PLEA FOR EROS. Copyright © 2006 by Siri Hustvedt.
“Living with Strangers” © 2002 by The New York Times Co.
Photograph of Franklin Pangborn courtesy of the Museum of Modern Art Film Stills Archive. Reprinted with permission.
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    “A Plea for Eros” in
Brick,
1997, reprinted in
The Art of the Essay: The Best of 1999,
edited by Philip Lopate, Random House, 1999; “Gatsby’s
Glasses”
in
Tributes: American Writers on American Writers, Conjunctions: 29,
1997; “Franklin Pangborn: An Apologia” in
O.K. You Mugs: Writers on Movie Actors,
edited by Luc Sante and Melissa Pierson, Granta Books, 1999; “Eight Days in a Corset” in
Allure,
1996; “Living with Strangers” in the City Section of
The New York Times,
2002;
“The Bostonians:
Personal and Impersonal Words” is an introduction to Barnes and Noble Classics edition of
The Bostonians,
2005; “Being a Man” in
Two Kingdoms: The Dualism Issues, Conjunctions: 41,
2003; “One Year Later” (an earlier version) in
The Observer
(London), 2002, and in
Die Zeit
(Germany), 2002; “Extracts from a Story of the Wounded Self” in
Samliden
(Norway), 2004; “A Plea for Eros,” “Yonder,” and “Gatsby’s
Glasses”
were published in an earlier essay collection,
Yonder,
Henry Holt, 1998.
    Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
    Hustvedt, Siri.
    A plea for Eros : essays / Siri Hustvedt.—1st Picador pbk. ed.
    p. cm.
    ISBN 0-312-42553-8
    EAN 978-0-312-42553-1
    I. Title.
    PS3558.U813P58 2006
    814’.54—dc22
    2005044616
    First Edition: January 2006
    10 987654321

For my mother,
    Ester Vegan Hustvedt

A PLEA FOR EROS

Yonder

1
    MY FATHER ONCE ASKED ME IF I KNEW WHERE YONDER WAS. I said I thought
yonder
was another word for
there.
He smiled and said, “No, yonder is between here and there.” This little story has stayed with me for years as an example of linguistic magic: It identified a new space—a middle region that was neither here nor there—a place that simply didn’t exist for me until it was given a name. During my father’s brief explanation of the meaning of
yonder,
and every time I’ve thought of it since, a landscape appears in my mind: I am standing at the crest of a small hill looking down into an open valley where there is a single tree, and beyond it lies the horizon defined by a series of low mountains or hills. This dull but serviceable image returns when I think of
yonder,
one of those wonderful words I later discovered linguists call “shifters”—words distinct from others because they are animated by the speaker and move accordingly. In linguistic terms this means that you can never really find yourself
yonder.
Once you arrive at yonder tree, it becomes
here
and recedes forever into that imaginary horizon. Words that wobble attract me. The fact that
here
and
there
slide and slip depending on where I am is some-how poignant, revealing both the tenuous relation between words and things and the miraculous flexibility of language.
    The truth is that what fascinates me is not so much being in a place as
not
being there: how places live in the mind once you have left them, how they are imagined before you arrive, or how they are seemingly called out of nothing to illustrate a thought or story like my tree down yonder. These mental spaces map our inner lives more fully than any “real” map, delineating the borders of here and there that also shape what we see in the present. My private geography, like most people’s, excludes huge portions of the world. I have my own version of the famous Saul Steinberg map of the United States that shows a towering Manhattan; a shrunken, nearly invisible Midwest, South, and West; and ends in a more prominent California featuring Los Angeles. There have been only three important places in my life: Northfield, Minnesota, where I was born and grew up with my parents and three younger