A Plea for Eros

militarism of the Black Panthers, the violence of the Weathermen, the shallowness of Guerilla Theater all alienated me. I remember listening to Russell Means, a leader of AIM, one winter afternoon in Minneapolis as he expounded on the superiority of American Indian culture as if it were a monolith and thinking to myself that his polemic distorted the vast differences among tribes to a degree that was nothing short of preposterous. I began to understand that ideologies necessarily push, pull, and tug at reality to make it fit the system. Even when they are committed in the service of a noble cause, lies inevitably make me recoil.
    By the time I entered St. Olaf College as a freshman in the fall of 1973, the historical period into which I had been swept had more or less ended. I vividly remember a discussion I had with a sociology professor my first week as a student. He was a former priest who had been a civil rights activist and had marched in Selma. We discussed “the fall of the New Left.”
    I
am sitting at the bottom of a row of white steps in a narrow hallway. There is a door with a glass window that leads to the street. I am sobbing. I was sixteen then and had fallen in love with a tall, handsome political agitator five years older than I was. He had ended it. The young women are crouching on the floor trying to comfort me. It is strange that I don’t remember where this took place
—
except that it must have been Minneapolis
—
or who the two people in front of me were. They weren’t close friends, but you would think I could come up with names or at least what they looked like. I also don’t remember how the romance ended. It seems to me that he had written to me, but I have no memory of a letter being delivered to that place. I have repressed it and can’t bring it back, no matter how hard I try. I do know that sitting on those steps, I was inconsolable. My chest heaved. I snorted, honked, and wailed, and the sheer power of my emotion impressed the two hapless witnesses to my heartbreak. I could see it in their astonished faces, the features of which are now lost.
    At that moment I was all wound. First loves are often terrible, probably because they are first and there is no conscious history into which they may be absorbed. And yet, the truth is I cried
like a baby,
without inhibition or a shred of dignity to hold me up, and I can’t help but feel awed by that weeper on the stairs. When faced with separation from a person I loved, I traveled backward into the far reaches of my infancy. I would fall in love again, and I would suffer separations again, and I would cry again, but I would never allow myself to sob with such full-throated, unbridled freedom ever again.
    I mourned for a year—the year I again found myself in Bergen. I was a student at the venerable Katedral Skolen, founded in the year 1153, and lived outside the city with my aunt and uncle. My parents had arranged it. Although I didn’t talk much about my sorrow to them, they were deeply aware of it, and they understood that I needed to be a world away. In that rainy city of mountains on the western coast of Norway, I nursed my broken heart, visited my beloved grandmother every day, read hundreds of books, wrote bad poetry, and smoked innumerable cigarettes. I was a seventeen-year-old intellectual hermit, and I think it did me good. Not long after I returned to the United States, the old love object appeared at my door. I rejected him, and to this day the memory of turning him away is sweet.
    In college I retreated to the library. I have always loved libraries—the quiet, the smell, the expectation of imminent discovery. In the next book I will find it—some unspeakable pleasure or startling revelation or extraordinary nuance I had never felt or thought of before. I sat in the library every day for hours and was happy there, but I hadn’t left home. I attended the college where my father was a professor and where he gave many hours of his time to the Norwegian American Historical Association as executive secretary. The association’s office was in the college library, and my mother worked in the periodical department of that same library. Two years later, my sister Liv was also studying in that library, and three years after that, my sister Ingrid arrived. Only the third sister, Asti, went away for college to work in another library in another town.
    One afternoon, I left my carrel to talk to a male friend who was having a sad bout