My First book ever selected and published by an independent press. I knew that one day I would have my own book published. It is not arrogance disguised as confidence. Writing has always been part of who I am.
The Glass and the Flame is a fugue of the heart, woven from multiple strands of longing and sorrow into a polyphony of eros and psyche. I have learned that you can write the felt without being met.
The axiom that “you are who you are” is not necessarily true in my writing. Rather, I am what I write.
In terms of Orwell’s reasons for writing, I write from aesthetic enthusiasm and sheer egoism. Neither political purpose nor historical impulse belongs to my work.
If you dare, walk with me in the garden where Eros freely roams with Psyche.
Two things stayed with me after reading Barry Schwabsky’s essay “In the Reckless Hour,” about the recent English translation of Cesare Pavese’s The Leucothea Dialogues—henceforth, the Dialogues. The first was an existential question: How do we ask mortal questions through stories about the immortals? But don’t let the question weigh on you more heavily than it should. We have always asked essentially the same questions in different ways.
The Dialogues are twenty-seven short dialogues that bring the Greek gods and goddesses back into the human condition—under law, mortality, and fate—and question why things are the way they are: unfair, absurd, and cruel. What makes the gods and goddesses so deeply engaged in human affairs, and so human that they alter human fates? If they cannot show their strength in the realm of Fate, are they truly superior? These Greek divinities could not care less about humans unless humans offer them satisfying sacrifices to feed their divine egos. Even Shakespeare’s Oberon and his wife are more sympathetic than their Greek counterparts. Free will is unthinkable because Fate takes precedence. Humans are toy soldiers manipulated by Fate and deployed by the gods. Are they worthy of being worshipped? If they are, it is only out of fear of punishment in the form of unfortunate events in human life: the gods play their war games with human lives as pawns to see who will prevail. They do not interfere with human affairs but govern them. Then we do not have to work so hard or hope for anything better if our fates are predetermined. John Calvin must have felt the same way I do—and perhaps Pavese did, too.
Regarding the translation of the Dialogues from Italian into English, Schwabsky is a strict examiner who questions whether the recent English version is a translation made without fully understanding the book. He also believes that its plain language lacks Pavese’s dark grandeur and the gravity of his language. Although I have not read the Dialogues yet, I can’t say whether I agree with his opinion. But I am a proponent of using plain language to make difficult themes and ideas accessible to general readers, so that knowledge can be shared and enrich their minds rather than remain exclusive to academics.
This essay is apposite to my current reading of Vergil’s The Aeneid, in which a man’s destination is already predetermined, while everything he does seem like an act in a script written by the divine. Then what is the meaning of being human, and what is the purpose of living? If some people are fated to suffer the most violent pain and cruel injustice, would our hopeful search for the meaning of life be merely another futile act of living?
I am reading The Aeneid by Virgil, translated by Robert Fagles. Today I set off for Italy as a ghost to find the faults of the man who was irresistible to women and to examine his fate: everything seems to exist to fulfill his destiny—to found a city that would one day lead to Rome, whose influence would last for thousands of years. But then I see the image of him carrying his old father on his back, with his young son Ascanius at his side and his wife Creusa behind him as they flee burning Troy. That is why I have always wanted to know more about him. Is he really an egoist or a victim of fate?
But first, I needed to know about the whys and wherefores of the man, Troy, and Italy. Reading the introduction was necessary. This was unusual for me because I usually skip introductions and read the book with a tabula rasa in order to form my own understanding of its content. Not the Aeneid. Not Virgil. Not Robert Fagles. For me, The Aeneid, Virgil, and Robert Fagles form a trinity. The epic has survived for two millennia. A second trinity shaped Aeneas’s identity—pietas (duty), gravitas (seriousness and moral weight), and auctoritas (authority earned through public service). It is even tattooed into his very identity as pius Aeneas—“pious Aeneas.” This is not solely religious but also conveys a sense of duty toward values deemed admirable and essential to being an admirable Roman man and soldier.
Knox told readers his own story about why the Sortes Virgilianae and Virgil’s work entranced him. He was also destined to become a reader and a soldier of Virgil, both literally and figuratively. As a U.S. Army captain during the Second World War, he and the Italian partisans marched through regions of Italy once crossed by the armies of Octavian and Mark Antony. King Charles I was no exception to the Virgilian way: during the civil war, he read Virgil and tried to discover his destiny by playing the Virgilian lottery. This involved picking a passage from The Aeneid at random and interpreting it in light of his own situation—a literary equivalent of bibliomancy. It was regarded not merely as superstition but as a guide to what might happen and what one should do. Of course Knox did it too.
Now that I am finally aboard the ship with Aeneas as I begin Book I, I want to decide whether to try the Virgilian lottery and join the king and the captain. But first, I want to see whether Aeneas deserves my accusation that he is a heartless man who, under the aegis of his sacred pietas, makes the women who loved him—his wife Creusa and Dido—face their fates.
I thought the heat had gone and had prepared for autumn clothes, but it was a vain hope. It was a trick of nature. The heat persists, and it is very hot. So, I have been staying in the living room with my cats because it is the coolest room and has an air conditioner. I hear that the heat wave has hit Italy, too. I hope you are okay.
I just finished reading Elizabeth Taylor’s A View of the Harbour. It is about an English coastal village called Newby, where people’s lives are interwoven through weakness, treachery, and misunderstanding, for which they pay with loss and departures. It is written in the third person—an omniscient point of view that sees all and knows all. The perspective often shifts to that of the elderly, bedridden Mrs. Bracey, who watches people as if she were watching a television soap opera. But she can’t see the stories behind the people she watches, and, in fact, she doesn’t care. I wonder if God would be like her. He sees us from above but doesn’t want to interfere with our affairs, even when we want him to, because God couldn’t care less about them unless they relate to his worship.
It seems that the sea always provokes the passion smoldering beneath conventions and norms, stirring the urge to let the flame ride the crest of the waves, clash furiously against wave upon wave, and then become one with the deep blue. In this regard, the sea alters none of it: human instinct, desire, the primitive id. The harbour is the superego because we know what we should and shouldn’t do under the community’s safe-harbor rule. Seen from the sea, the harbour is prudence.
These are the things that came to mind after reading the book. I suspect that this multiplicity of interpretations is what Taylor wanted. In the post–Second World War era, people had lost their collective values and systems of belief, leaving them in an existential dilemma. But the sea doesn’t know it. The harbour keeps all of it inside, like a graceful swan with her legs paddling frantically beneath the water to preserve her poise.
What do you think? Do you want to read the whole book? If you do, you will feel as though you are watching a British television drama, with various characters who seem ordinary yet harbor extraordinary secrets, and stories that unfold without ostentatious romance, extravagant affairs, or dashing bravado. For me, it’s viewable because it is relatable.
Are you coming to California after the heat has subsided on both sides of the ocean? Let me know, and we can plan something together, like Prudence and Geoffrey in the book.
“Can intellectual recognition itself become desire?”
Will an intellectual man fall in love with a woman of equal or greater intelligence? The question has become so entangled with sexism that it seems to invite textbook answers such as, “Beauty is only skin-deep.” But this is not about feminism or social activism. It is an intimate question: “Can you love me even if I am smart but not so pretty?” Waldman’s disappointmentpromptss her to ask about her existential value as a woman, not merely as a writer or intellectual, because the personal stakes are toohighg to ignore.
Seeing her ex-boyfriend with a beautiful woman is painful enough to prick the pride of an intellectual woman who is supposed to believe that real love resides not in looks but in the mind. Or so it seems. Waldman extends the existential question into the erotic hedonism of The Professor of Desire, whose protagonist seems to vacillate between a whore and a virgin but never reconciles himself to the truth, always yielding to the pleasures of the senses. While I understand Waldman’s disappointment at seeing a smart man fall for a bimbo, she seems to explain his gorgeous new girlfriend as the result of animal instinct: Eros alone, without marrying Eros to Psyche.
Call it the male subconscious urge to prove sexual prowess. Or immaturity. To me, a man’s intelligence or cultural refinement does not necessarily equate to his moral fitness. Think of the ancient Greek symposium and its beautiful and intelligent courtesans. Men, I think, are often more readily stimulated by the visual than women are. I remember reading that Updike had a voracious sexual appetite and engaged in sexual excesses. And that’s not the end. Arthur Miller’s marriage to Marilyn Monroe—even though she was herself intelligent, read books, and took literature classes at night—and his novella Plain Girl: A Life tell us that intellect does not necessarily determine physical attraction. After all, the plain girl finds her soulmate in a blind musician who loves her not with his eyes but with his mind.
I know how Waldman felt when she saw him with such a beautiful woman. I think Waldman wants to believe that she is right: that a woman’s intellect can stand equal to beauty—par pari. I think Shakespeare is great because he recognized this human nature in everyone, including the rivalries of love:
“Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind; And therefore is winged Cupid painted blind.”
But remember: Cupid is blindfolded. He does not know whom his arrow will strike.
Reading Day — Thursday, August 20, 2026 On D. H. Lawrence’s “The Thorn in the Flesh”
Lawrence must have hated the military. Well, more exactly, the rigid discipline used to tame the naturally untamed. It is against nature, against free will: the controlled mindset that conditions you to believe that if you fail, you are a loser to be put in the pillory. Not a man. Not man enough.
Is that really so? Lawrence asks. No. A man is a man when he witnesses his desire being reciprocated in the body of his lover. Virility is true manhood because it requires no weapon of killing.
The young German soldier in this story recovered his lost confidence through sensual passion, which collapsed the wall between institutional dehumanization and being fully alive. Naked with his lover, the soldier felt no shame in wanting and loving her. The erection of sexual passion restored physical vulnerability.
We know Lawrence for his controversial Lady Chatterley’s Lover. So, it may be convenient to call him a sensationalist whose agenda was to challenge religious doctrine and restrictive social norms. Instead, he was a writer who stood at the heart of humanity and showed us the beauty of being human in the expression of passion, in wanting and being wanted.
The Thorn in the Flesh is Lawrence’s version of Dostoevsky’s “Only beauty can save the world.”
Flame, Glass and Ink are Poems, essays, and reading notes by Stefania Joori Suh 
You must be logged in to post a comment.