They told me about the lady philosopher who was almost forgotten, whose name I can’t remember, but who inspired the big woman and all her little people. She lived a long, long time ago, in the medieval times, I think. Margot, maybe. I’m awfully bad at remembering names. I’ll have to ask Ethan about her when I see him again. But the important fact is this: While I was down on my knees looking at the little figure of Harry, it started to glow. I swear. It glowed purple. I was seeing its energy. It had an electromagnetic field — that little thing did. I was very quiet then. We walked around and looked at some of the other pieces of art, and then, when we were just about to go through the door, I turned around to take one last look at Harry’s artworks, and then I saw their auras blazing out all around them. I took a big breath in and held it for a few seconds. They weren’t people, after all. They were just things a person had made. For the first time, I really had the understanding of why the master taught that there were artists on the higher plane living on Sirius. It was because they had given their spirits and energies into what they made. They must have had a lot of extra energy to give away. Anyway, I swear the whole room was lit by those shivering rainbows.
Ethan and Maisie must have seen that something had happened to me, because they asked me what the matter was, but I said nothing was the matter. I said I was fine, which I was. If I had told them about the lights and the colors, they would’ve given me more funny looks, even though they meant well and were really kindhearted. Both of them were. I closed my eyes. I opened them again, and I just stood there smiling because the colors were still there — reds and oranges and yellows and greens and blues and violets — blazing hot and bright in that big room where Harry used to work, and I knew for certain that each and every one of those wild, nutty, sad things Harry had made was alive with the spirit. For a second there, I could almost hear them breathing.
About the Author
Siri Hustvedt was born in 1955 in Northfield, Minnesota. She has a PhD from Columbia University in English and is the internationally acclaimed author of five novels, The Blindfold, The Enchantment of Lily Dahl, What I Loved, The Sorrows of an American, and The Summer Without Men, as well as a growing body of nonfiction, including A Plea for Eros; Mysteries of the Rectangle ; Essays on Painting ; Living, Thinking, Looking ; and an interdisciplinary investigation of the mind-body problem, The Shaking Woman or A History of My Nerves. She has given lectures on artists and theories of art at the Prado in Madrid, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich. She has also lectured at international conferences on neuropsychoanalysis, neuroethics, and neurophysiology. In 2011, she delivered the thiry-eighth annual Sigmund Freud Lecture in Vienna. In 2012, she was a Gutenberg Fellow at Gutenberg University in Mainz, Germany. The same year she won the International Gabarron Prize for Thought and Humanities.