The most discomposing thing about people capable of monstrous acts is that they too enjoy art, they too read to their children, they too can be moved to tears by music. The dissident poet Joseph Brodsky captured this as he contemplated the greatest antidote to evil, observing that “no matter how evil your enemy is, the crucial thing is that he is human.” Little Prince author Antoine de Saint-Exupéry experienced it first-hand when a smile and a cigarette exchanged with an enemy saved his life while captive as a prisoner of war.

In the spring of 1935, traveling through Nazi-occupied Europe, Virginia Woolf and her Jewish husband Leonard came face to face with this haunting paradox of human nature — an experience both sinister and strangely hopeful.

Leonard and Virginia Woolf

After a week of savoring Rembrandts and Vermeers and fine weather in Holland, the Woolfs reached the German border. Ahead of them, trucks with swastikas were passing through. They stopped. Leonard disappeared into the customs house. Virginia stayed in the car, trying to read D.H. Lawrence while shuddering at the passing minutes — it was taking much longer than at the Dutch border. She busied herself writing in her diary:

Sitting in the sun outside the German Customs. A car with the swastika on the back window has just passed through the barrier into Germany. L. is in the Customs. I am nibbling at Aaron’s Rod. Ought I to go in and see what is happening? A fine dry windy morning. The Dutch Customs took 10 seconds. This has taken 10 minutes already. The windows are barred.

Just then, as Virginia watched a little boy open his bag at the barrier with a Heil Hitler salute, the German officer — a “grim man” — came out and issued a jolly laugh upon seeing Mitz — the sickly pet marmoset the Woolfs had taken along on a whim, now perched on Leonard’s shoulder.

The Nazi, still laughing, let them through.

Virginia grew giddy with relief, then immediately horrified by the grisly incongruity of evil and delight:

We become obsequious — delighted that is when the officer smiles at Mitzi — the first stoop in our back.

Marmoset. (Photograph: Carol M. Highsmith, 1946. Library of Congress.)

The Woolfs continued through Germany. In Cologne, they were awed by the majestic Gothic cathedral. In Bonn, they made a pilgrimage to Beethoven’s childhood home. But when they tried to cross the Rhine, they found themselves trapped in a Nazi procession along a street lined with armed Nazi officers and adorned with banners that read THE JEW IS OUR ENEMY. All around them uniformed schoolchildren — hundreds of them — were singing and waving red swastika flags.

As the car crawled through the frenzied mob with the top rolled down, Mitz once again became their ticket to safety.

In her improbable and charming book Mitz: The Marmoset of Bloomsbury (public library), Sigrid Nunez paints a vivid vignette:

Came a man in black uniform, face very red. He threw up his hands, he shook his fists, he lifted one knee and then the other and stamped his feet. He was a swastika himself, all angles, twisted, black and red. He bore down on the car. Leonard felt for the letter in his pocket. Mitz, excited by the noise and the flags and now this amusing fellow, leapt onto the steering wheel and screeched. The man stopped in his tracks. Surprise, then puzzlement, then tenderness showed in his face. “Ah — oh — ah!” he cried. He clapped his hands like a child. “Das liebe kleine Ding!”

It was as if the Woolfs had vanished. The storm trooper had eyes only for Mitz. He leaned into the car, and Leonard inhaled a mixture of beer, onion, leather, pomade, and sweat. The man wagged a finger at Mitz, and Virginia closed her eyes and sent up a prayer that Mitz would not bite it. Bite it she did, though — but this seemed only to increase his delight. He burbled and cooed, offering wurst fingers to Mitz, one by one. And what was the sweet little creature’s name? When he heard it he laughed and repeated it several times, slapping his thigh. He loved it — loved it! At last he stepped back from the car, clicked his heels together, and raised his arm. “Heil Hitler!”

They were let through. As they continued on, the scene was repeated again and again along the German roads. Leonard himself recounted in his autobiography:

When they saw Mitz, the crowd shrieked with delight. Mile after mile I drove between the two lines of corybantic Germans, and the whole way they shouted “Heil Hitler! Heil Hitler!” to Mitz and gave her (and secondarily Virginia and me) the Hitler salute with outstretched arm.

Shining a sidewise gleam on the paradoxes of human nature, he added wryly:

It was obvious to the most anti-Semitic stormtrooper that no one who had on his shoulder such a ‘dear little thing’ could be a Jew.

Marmoset by George Edwards, 1758. (Available as a print.)

Soon, Virginia was writing to a friend:

Did we tell you how the marmoset saved us from Hitler?

Emerging from it all is a chilling testament to how arbitrary the things are that humanize or dehumanize a person, and how banal — exquisite evidence for what Hannah Arendt so memorably termed “the banality of evil.”

Emerging also is the recognition that, for all of our foibles, all of our vulnerability to ideological manipulation, all of our capacity for cruelty, it is tenderness we most long for, tenderness that is our deepest nature.

The challenge is how to live with the knowledge that what steers us one way or another, toward terror or tenderness, can be the faintest and most random ripple in the surface of consciousness — just a “wave in the mind,” to borrow Virginia’s own lovely phrase.

“There is no insurmountable solitude,” Pablo Neruda asserted in his stirring Nobel Prize acceptance speech. “All paths lead to the same goal: to convey to others what we are. And we must pass through solitude and difficulty, isolation and silence in order to reach forth to the enchanted place where we can dance our clumsy dance.”

The self-permission to dance into our authenticity, however clumsily, however lonesomely, may be the supreme achievement of life.

A bright celebration of that self-permission, and its profound rewards, comes in Doris (public library) by Sarah Jacoby.

Told in tender watercolors luminous with life, it is the story of a horse named Doris who grows up “under the warm spotlight,” performing for praise, until one day she begins to feel the pull of something “out there” — something wilder, freer, and more private.

As she ventures toward it — “wandering, springing, spinning out of step” — Doris discovers a whole new world: a forest world of darkness and moonlight, of magical twinkling that beckons her to skip and clop and pirouette, until she finds herself “totally, utterly, and undeniably dizzy with moonness.”

But as she dances into her own wildness, Doris begins to feel achingly alone among the silent shadows — that haunting existential loneliness that befalls anyone fully alive and awake to their own nature.

Just as Doris begins to tremble with self-doubt, she is startled by the arrival of a small brown pony, dancing its own wild dance out of the shadows.

And so they begin to dance together — each entirely their own creature, yet united in their longing for wildness, as if to affirm Octavio Paz’s lovely definition of love as “a knot made of two intertwined freedoms”; as if to remind us that the price of being entirely oneself need not be loneliness and isolation, for there is no richer connection than that between two unselfconscious authenticities.

To be a complete human being, to fully inhabit your own vitality, is to live undivided within your own nature. No part of us is more habitually exiled, caged, and crushed under the weight of millennia of cultural baggage than Eros — the part that includes sexuality but transcends it to also include our capacity for spontaneity and playfulness, our tolerance for uncertainty, our unselfconscious creative energy.

W.H. Auden understood the centrality of Eros when he looked up at the stars that made us and realized how we too are “composed like them of Eros and of dust, beleaguered by the same negation and despair.” Audre Lorde (February 18, 1934–November 17, 1992) understood it with singular clarity of vision in a paper she delivered at the Fourth Berkshire Conference on the History of Women at Mount Holyoke College on August 25, 1978, titled “Uses of the Erotic,” later adapted as an essay in the altogether indispensable Lorde collection Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (public library).

Audre Lorde

She writes:

There are many kinds of power, used and unused, acknowledged or otherwise. The erotic is a resource within each of us that lies in a deeply female and spiritual plane, firmly rooted in the power of our unexpressed or unrecognized feeling… We have been taught to suspect this resource, vilified, abused, and devalued within western society… It is a short step from there to the false belief that only by the suppression of the erotic within our lives and consciousness can women be truly strong. But that strength is illusory, for it is fashioned within the context of male models of power.

[…]

The erotic offers a well of replenishing and provocative force to the woman who does not fear its revelation.

She offers an expansive definition of Eros:

The erotic is a measure between the beginnings of our sense of self and the chaos of our strongest feelings. It is an internal sense of satisfaction to which, once we have experienced it, we know we can aspire. For having experienced the fullness of this depth of feeling and recognizing its power, in honor and self-respect we can require no less of ourselves.

[…]

The very word erotic comes from the Greek word eros, the personification of love in all its aspects — born of Chaos, and personifying creative power and harmony. When I speak of the erotic, then, I speak of it as an assertion of the lifeforce of women; of that creative energy empowered, the knowledge and use of which we are now reclaiming in our language, our history, our dancing, our loving, our work, our lives.

Eros, she observes, springs from our capacity to feel — a capacity that demands of us the difficult courage of authenticity, for, as E.E. Cummings knew, “whenever you think or you believe or you know, you’re a lot of other people: but the moment you feel, you’re nobody-but-yourself.”

Observing that “we have been raised to fear the yes within ourselves, our deepest cravings,” Lorde writes:

The erotic is not a question only of what we do; it is a question of how acutely and fully we can feel in the doing. Once we know the extent to which we are capable of feeling that sense of satisfaction and completion, we can then observe which of our various life endeavors bring us closest to that fullness.

Art by Dorothy Lathrop, 1922. (Available as a print.)

In consonance with the existential psychologist Rollo May’s insight that eros “elicits in us the capacity to reach out… to preform and mold the future,” Lorde argues that “recognizing the power of the erotic within our lives can give us the energy to pursue genuine change within our world,” and writes:

When we begin to live from within outward, in touch with the power of the erotic within ourselves, and allowing that power to inform and illuminate our actions upon the world around us, then we begin to be responsible to ourselves in the deepest sense. For as we begin to recognize our deepest feelings, we begin to give up, of necessity, being satisfied with suffering and self-negation, and with the numbness which so often seems like their only alternative in our society.

Out of this refusal of self-negation arises raw creative vitality, irradiating every aspect of life:

There is, for me, no difference between writing a good poem and moving into sunlight against the body of a woman I love.

Indeed, Lorde insists that a fundamental function of erotic connection is to serve as “the open and fearless underlining” of our capacity for joy. In a sentiment the poet Ross Gay would echo a generation later in contemplating connection as the broadest portal to joy, she writes:

The sharing of joy, whether physical, emotional, psychic, or intellectual, forms a bridge between the sharers which can be the basis for understanding much of what is not shared between them, and lessens the threat of their difference.

[…]

That self-connection shared is a measure of the joy which I know myself to be capable of feeling, a reminder of my capacity for feeling. And that deep and irreplaceable knowledge of my capacity for joy comes to demand from all of my life that it be lived within the knowledge that such satisfaction is possible, and does not have to be called marriage, nor god, nor an afterlife.

This is one reason why the erotic is so feared, and so often relegated to the bedroom alone, when it is recognized at all. For once we begin to feel deeply all the aspects of our lives, we begin to demand from ourselves and from our life-pursuits that they feel in accordance with that joy which we know ourselves to be capable of.

Complement with Rilke on the relationship between sexuality and creativity, then revisit Lorde on feeling as an antidote to fear, turning fear into fire for creative work, and her poignant poem “The Bees.”

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