Where hedonism was once a short walk around the block from profound conversion (see Augustine of Hippo, Oscar Wilde, and Ève Lavallière, among many others), it is now, according to Eve Tushnet, a culturally-sanctioned and expected segue to secular bourgeois complacency.
An excerpt:
A woman who has sex with multiple partners (maybe hooking up a lot if
she’s at a more elite college), contracepting throughout and having at
least one abortion,
then cohabits, then marries in her early 30s if at all, might be a
hedonist or a relativist. In my experience she’s much more likely to be
trying to do everything right, finish her education and start climbing
the economic ladder and make good rather than hasty choices in her men.
Her mother usually supports or even pressures her in her decision to
abort, and many of the decisions I’ve described are made not in the
service of personal sexual liberation but as a means to preserve her
relationships. A lot of the time it doesn’t work–the marriage or
cohabitation she really hoped would be “the one” still breaks up–but she
sees all the alternative choices as even riskier, and therefore
irresponsible.
Read the rest of Eve's provocative and important piece. It may not square with what you've come to assume if you've been raised in a more traditional environment and have always striven towards a traditional adulthood achieved by means of a traditional morality, but in my experience, and in the experience of so many women I've known, she is absolutely right.
Showing posts with label ève lavallière. Show all posts
Showing posts with label ève lavallière. Show all posts
Tuesday, November 13, 2012
Saturday, July 3, 2010
One of the Gayest at Montmartre
Eugénia Fenoglio was born in 1866 in Toulon, France. Her father, an alcoholic tailor, battered his wife, who often fled with the children to seek shelter with relatives. The day came that her mother left her abusive husband for good, but not long after, he sought the family at their new residence and killed his wife and then himself in front of their daughter.
As a child, Eugénia had loved theatrics, and had written, directed, acted in, and even designed the sets for plays she staged with her friends. Not long after her parents' murder-suicide, she made her way to the capitol, where, encouraged by a lover, she tried her luck on the stage and met with phenomenal success there. She took the name Ève Lavallière, after a mistress of Louis XIV who, incidentally, had become a penitent and had died a Carmelite nun.
According to CatholicIreland.net:
"The sudden death of one of the leading actresses of the theatre became the opportunity for Ève and she did not disappoint. Her voice was exceptional and she was able to use it to convey every sort of emotion - from silence to violence, from authority to disgust.
"Listening to Ève conveyed the audience into the very heart of the tragedy or comedy . . . she was playing. Even the great contemporary actress, Sarah Bernhardt, told her, 'What you do is innate: you create - you do not copy the characters. You give birth to them from within yourself. It is very beautiful.'"
La Lavallière became the most popular and successful actress-singer of the Belle Époque. She was fabulously wealthy and a critical success. At the same time, her personal life grew more and more chaotic and disorderly. Before achieving fame onstage, Ève had supported herself as a Parisian courtesan; after, she was the mistress at one time or another of an assortment of prominent men, and bore a child out of wedlock -- a daughter, who would cause her mother great despair as an adult by living openly in a lesbian relationship.
During the First World War, on holiday in a small village while preparing for a tour of the United States with the Théatre des Variétés, Lavallière experienced a dramatic conversion after meeting a local priest and mentioning to him lightly that she had sold her soul to the devil in order to maintain her youth. The priest, at first outraged, lent her a book about St. Mary Magdalene, which she read in a state of gradual awakening to the reality of her life of sin, and in a spirit of deepening penitence. She cancelled her participation in the American tour and retreated to the countryside with her dresser from the theater, Leona, who accompanied her conversion with every step. Lavallière applied for entrance as a Carmelite postulant, but was denied on account of her poor health (and perhaps too because her fame both as an actress and as a libertine had penetrated even into the cloister of the Carmel). Instead she became a Franciscan tertiary, and after an attempt at missionary work in Tunisia, spent the rest of her life in solitary prayer and penance.
Some years after Lavallière's abrupt renunciation of the stage, a French reporter managed to track her down. The New York Times published a story about this encounter in 1921: "Once talk of Paris, Actress is Recluse," proclaimed the headline. "One of the Gayest in Montmartre . . . Lives Apart from the World Except for Village Poor." The article, which can be downloaded here, mentions that the reporter asked Lavallière's maid if the former actress "ever [thought] or [talked] about the past."
"Never," was the maid's answer. "When she gets letters from her old friends she sometimes smiles, for she has no bitterness about the past, but she doesn't think about it. She thinks only of the present and the future."
I first learned of Ève Lavallière five years ago, while doing my dissertation research on music and penitence. Raïssa Maritain had written of her friend that, after her conversion, Lavallière's eyes were always wet with the tears of contrition. I remember reading at the time that Pope John Paul II had beatified her, but have not been able to confirm this on the web. Nonetheless, I have decided to start a home-made novena to her in advance of the anniversary of her death, July 10. I am closing each day with a prayer written by Lavallière herself:
Oh my beloved Master, by Thy hands nailed to the Cross, I beseech Thee to wipe away all of the sins committed by my criminal hands. My sweet Jesus, by the painful fatigue endured by Thy blessed feet, by the divine wounds They suffered when They were pierced, wipe away the filth left by my guilty feet. Finally, Oh my Master, Oh my Creator, Oh my Savior, by the dignity and innocence of Thy life, by the holiness and purity which characterized it, wash away all of the stains of my impure life. May that abominable life exist no more in me, may the ardor of Thy love hold me entirely, for Thou art, Oh my King, the sole refuge of my soul; grant that I may be unceasingly consumed with the ardor of Thy charity. Give me, my Redeemer, above all, Holy Humility.
For more on Lavallière, go here.
Sunday, March 28, 2010
The Uses of Memory (re-post from April 10, 2009)
My recent trip to New York has moved me to re-post this entry from almost a year ago, since, having returned, I am struck all over again by the fact that
New York is a city that is layered over and over again with the personal histories of its denizens. Certain corners are redolent, even overripe, with memory; certain neighborhoods become forbidden zones because of the heartbreaks to which they played host. And when one has tried to change one's life in a place that was the site of so much crash-and-burn, one occasionally feels as if it might be easier to do it elsewhere, and is tempted to take flight from the snares of memory.
So far, after a year and a half in a very, very different place, however, I still feel as if I'm in exile, and it's become no easier. Ironically, I've found that one can become a new person in New York City simply by moving to a different neighborhood, far more easily than one can by taking on the trappings of a very different way of life in a small town. And the snares of memory are tighter now than ever after a visit back. I miss my friends; I miss the beautiful people of the city of New York. And I miss the end of summer, when the bark of the plane trees in playgrounds from the Bronx to the Lower East Side becomes mottled, and the acrid stench of summer has started to give way to the clear skies and the faint smell of burning in the air that presage autumn. And spring in New York, when people pour out of tenements to sit on their stoops and play radios, and children dance on the sidewalks out in front. And the hum of quiet that descends over even the noisiest streets once or twice today, like a passage of angels. And being able just to go down to the corner and have a drink or a cup of halfway-decent coffee. And many, many other things.
So here's the re-post:
The Uses of Memory
Take, O Lord, and receive all my liberty, my memory, my understanding, and all my will, all I have and possess; you have given it me; to you, Lord, I return it; all is yours, dispose of it entirely according to your will. Give me your love and grace, because that is enough for me.
-- Saint Ignatius of Loyola
If you have been reading this blog for a while, you will probably know certain things about me, its anonymous author: for instance, that I had a dramatic conversion several years ago, which led to gradual changes in my life and reasoning process from one way to its near-complete opposite; and that I consider myself a penitent. Having gone from espousing and living a self-absorbed, promiscuous, bohemian ethos that caused a great deal of harm to myself and others, to striving to espouse and live a Christian life, has been no easy transition. I struggle daily with the discipline and humility needed to shoulder the cross of my mundane responsibilities, and the past is always beckoning to me over that shoulder -- not so much the events of the past, which mostly ended in heartbreak and failure, but the sensations that accompanied and illustrated them.
I recall the way the light rallied bravely on a post-industrial street in early March in my old city; the taste of the coffee at a Puerto Rican lunch counter by the subway; the green glass bottles arranged on the window sill in a friend's apartment. The lime-green haze of the new leaves, like a diaphanous scarf caught in the black branches of the trees on Riverside Drive. The impossibly warm, nostalgic sound of my voice teacher's Bechstein. The buzzing haze of the city in summer, and the marvelously strange way that a hush would descend at certain moments over even the busiest street. The weeds that heliotroped and bloomed through chicken-wire fencing on a strip of auto-body repair shops in the Bronx. The playing cards I would often find on the street (I found a tarot card, "The Lovers," once). And the many, many goodbyes. While Rome is a city that is layered over with the history of Western civilization, New York is a city that is layered over and over again with the personal histories of its denizens. Certain corners are redolent, even overripe, with memory; certain neighborhoods become forbidden zones because of the heartbreaks to which they played host. And when one has tried to change one's life in a place that was the site of so much crash-and-burn, one occasionally feels as if it might be easier to do it elsewhere, and is tempted to take flight from the snares of memory.
Now I am elsewhere, with none of the sensations of my beloved city around me. And sometimes I mourn for the sights, sounds, and smells of the past, the beautiful fragments of a mostly unlovely life that shimmer even more in the refracted light of memory. And I wonder what God wants me to do with my memory. Must I ask Him to sever it from me? I suppose I would be happier and better-adjusted if I could forget the past. And these sense memories inevitably incur regret, because they suggest the past, which, since I cannot change it, leads to grief, and even depression. If God has forgotten my sins, must I remember them?
The quandary of conversion is that it must always be rooted in penitence. Can one be penitent and not mourn constantly? Saint Peter, according to legend, had furrows in his cheeks, gouged there by his incessant weeping for having denied Christ. And, according to Raïssa Maritain, the eyes of Blessed Ève Lavallière, a French actress and convert, were, after her conversion, always wet with tears of contrition for her past sins. Saint Ephrem the Syrian is said to have written:
The soul is dead through sin. It requires sadness, weeping, tears, mourning and bitter moaning over the iniquity which has cast it down . . . Howl, weep and moan, and bring it back to God. . . . Your soul is dead through vice; shed tears and raise it up again!
And yet, as Brother Roger of Taizé has noted:
It may be impossible to repent without feeling some regret. But the difference between the two is enormous. Repentance is a gift from God, a hidden activity of the Holy Spirit that draws a person to God. I do not need God to regret my mistakes; I can do that by myself. Regret keeps us focused on ourselves. When I repent, however, I turn towards God, forgetting myself and surrendering myself to him. Regret makes no amends for the wrong done, but God, when I come to him in repentance, "dispels my sins like the morning mist" (Isaiah 44:22).
What, then, is the place of memory in the penitential consciousness? Is it possible to mine the memory for beauty, and to use the beauty as a palliative for others? Is it the responsibility of those who are conscious of beauty to nurture it, wherever it is found, even in ugliness? Or must that beauty be left behind, even buried?
I recently had the opportunity to go back to New York to see the Bonnard exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum (the image above, "Work Table," is the poster for the show). Retrospectives of Bonnard's work are rare -- the last one in New York was in 1998 -- and I enthusiastically recommend this show, which closes on April 19, to anyone who can go. It is wonderful. Bonnard is an artist who has always been important to me personally, and in fact, in his late paintings, there is an apparent attempt to come to terms with painful memory. He paints mundane domestic objects with luminous, even joyful, intensity, and yet the shadowy human figures who cling to the edges of his canvases hint at a tragic personal situation that caused great damage in his life and the lives of those around him in the mid-1920s, several years before he began producing this prodigious later corpus.
Were the dreadful events in Bonnard's life, then, somehow salutary for the rest of us? The beauty of his late paintings give the viewer great joy.
My fondest hope is that, out of the dreadful turmoil of my own past, some small healing for others might also be brought forth.
Happy Easter (and Passover) and many blessings to all my readers.
New York is a city that is layered over and over again with the personal histories of its denizens. Certain corners are redolent, even overripe, with memory; certain neighborhoods become forbidden zones because of the heartbreaks to which they played host. And when one has tried to change one's life in a place that was the site of so much crash-and-burn, one occasionally feels as if it might be easier to do it elsewhere, and is tempted to take flight from the snares of memory.
So far, after a year and a half in a very, very different place, however, I still feel as if I'm in exile, and it's become no easier. Ironically, I've found that one can become a new person in New York City simply by moving to a different neighborhood, far more easily than one can by taking on the trappings of a very different way of life in a small town. And the snares of memory are tighter now than ever after a visit back. I miss my friends; I miss the beautiful people of the city of New York. And I miss the end of summer, when the bark of the plane trees in playgrounds from the Bronx to the Lower East Side becomes mottled, and the acrid stench of summer has started to give way to the clear skies and the faint smell of burning in the air that presage autumn. And spring in New York, when people pour out of tenements to sit on their stoops and play radios, and children dance on the sidewalks out in front. And the hum of quiet that descends over even the noisiest streets once or twice today, like a passage of angels. And being able just to go down to the corner and have a drink or a cup of halfway-decent coffee. And many, many other things.
So here's the re-post:
The Uses of Memory
Take, O Lord, and receive all my liberty, my memory, my understanding, and all my will, all I have and possess; you have given it me; to you, Lord, I return it; all is yours, dispose of it entirely according to your will. Give me your love and grace, because that is enough for me.
-- Saint Ignatius of Loyola
If you have been reading this blog for a while, you will probably know certain things about me, its anonymous author: for instance, that I had a dramatic conversion several years ago, which led to gradual changes in my life and reasoning process from one way to its near-complete opposite; and that I consider myself a penitent. Having gone from espousing and living a self-absorbed, promiscuous, bohemian ethos that caused a great deal of harm to myself and others, to striving to espouse and live a Christian life, has been no easy transition. I struggle daily with the discipline and humility needed to shoulder the cross of my mundane responsibilities, and the past is always beckoning to me over that shoulder -- not so much the events of the past, which mostly ended in heartbreak and failure, but the sensations that accompanied and illustrated them.
I recall the way the light rallied bravely on a post-industrial street in early March in my old city; the taste of the coffee at a Puerto Rican lunch counter by the subway; the green glass bottles arranged on the window sill in a friend's apartment. The lime-green haze of the new leaves, like a diaphanous scarf caught in the black branches of the trees on Riverside Drive. The impossibly warm, nostalgic sound of my voice teacher's Bechstein. The buzzing haze of the city in summer, and the marvelously strange way that a hush would descend at certain moments over even the busiest street. The weeds that heliotroped and bloomed through chicken-wire fencing on a strip of auto-body repair shops in the Bronx. The playing cards I would often find on the street (I found a tarot card, "The Lovers," once). And the many, many goodbyes. While Rome is a city that is layered over with the history of Western civilization, New York is a city that is layered over and over again with the personal histories of its denizens. Certain corners are redolent, even overripe, with memory; certain neighborhoods become forbidden zones because of the heartbreaks to which they played host. And when one has tried to change one's life in a place that was the site of so much crash-and-burn, one occasionally feels as if it might be easier to do it elsewhere, and is tempted to take flight from the snares of memory.
Now I am elsewhere, with none of the sensations of my beloved city around me. And sometimes I mourn for the sights, sounds, and smells of the past, the beautiful fragments of a mostly unlovely life that shimmer even more in the refracted light of memory. And I wonder what God wants me to do with my memory. Must I ask Him to sever it from me? I suppose I would be happier and better-adjusted if I could forget the past. And these sense memories inevitably incur regret, because they suggest the past, which, since I cannot change it, leads to grief, and even depression. If God has forgotten my sins, must I remember them?
The quandary of conversion is that it must always be rooted in penitence. Can one be penitent and not mourn constantly? Saint Peter, according to legend, had furrows in his cheeks, gouged there by his incessant weeping for having denied Christ. And, according to Raïssa Maritain, the eyes of Blessed Ève Lavallière, a French actress and convert, were, after her conversion, always wet with tears of contrition for her past sins. Saint Ephrem the Syrian is said to have written:
The soul is dead through sin. It requires sadness, weeping, tears, mourning and bitter moaning over the iniquity which has cast it down . . . Howl, weep and moan, and bring it back to God. . . . Your soul is dead through vice; shed tears and raise it up again!
And yet, as Brother Roger of Taizé has noted:
It may be impossible to repent without feeling some regret. But the difference between the two is enormous. Repentance is a gift from God, a hidden activity of the Holy Spirit that draws a person to God. I do not need God to regret my mistakes; I can do that by myself. Regret keeps us focused on ourselves. When I repent, however, I turn towards God, forgetting myself and surrendering myself to him. Regret makes no amends for the wrong done, but God, when I come to him in repentance, "dispels my sins like the morning mist" (Isaiah 44:22).
What, then, is the place of memory in the penitential consciousness? Is it possible to mine the memory for beauty, and to use the beauty as a palliative for others? Is it the responsibility of those who are conscious of beauty to nurture it, wherever it is found, even in ugliness? Or must that beauty be left behind, even buried?
I recently had the opportunity to go back to New York to see the Bonnard exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum (the image above, "Work Table," is the poster for the show). Retrospectives of Bonnard's work are rare -- the last one in New York was in 1998 -- and I enthusiastically recommend this show, which closes on April 19, to anyone who can go. It is wonderful. Bonnard is an artist who has always been important to me personally, and in fact, in his late paintings, there is an apparent attempt to come to terms with painful memory. He paints mundane domestic objects with luminous, even joyful, intensity, and yet the shadowy human figures who cling to the edges of his canvases hint at a tragic personal situation that caused great damage in his life and the lives of those around him in the mid-1920s, several years before he began producing this prodigious later corpus.
Were the dreadful events in Bonnard's life, then, somehow salutary for the rest of us? The beauty of his late paintings give the viewer great joy.
My fondest hope is that, out of the dreadful turmoil of my own past, some small healing for others might also be brought forth.
Happy Easter (and Passover) and many blessings to all my readers.
Thursday, June 18, 2009
On Compunction
My friend Betty Duffy has a thoughtful post up about what she sees as the deficiencies of modern Catholic writing and the corresponding conundrum that Catholic writers often find themselves in. A quote:
As anyone who has been Catholic for longer than the duration of a weekend retreat knows, for many of us, initial conversion is exactly where a lot of our problems begin. We have family members who don't understand, relationships torn asunder, or worse, relationships are no longer possible with certain people. There are moral conflicts with jobs, temptations, and times when we fail to live up to our creed . . .
As writers, we want to attract people to our faith by blatantly evangelizing readers or presenting a pretty picture. But when we fail to give up the conflicts that comprise our Orthodox Catholic lives, we also give up the stories that are uniquely ours . . .
The best Catholic authors seem to say, "Yes, God is present, but you will have to find your own way to him." They can give you hints, weave a little story that enigmatically points to God, a lamb in wolf's clothing, but stop short of saying, "I'll take you to him."
While I am by no means a professional "Catholic writer," this is an unabashedly Catholic blog. As such, it's been faulted by some professed Catholic readers for failing to describe a conversion with a "happy ending," and for instead providing what one commenter called a "destructive witness" in my position as a penitent who continues to mourn for my sins. I think of this criticism as being particularly rooted in this time and place, that is, in a Calvinist culture which embraces across creeds the myth that if you do the right things you will get what you want. This may be true insofar as what you want is heaven, but, as for temporal happiness, not so much. The compunction that is a big part of my life is actually a fruit of my conversion, and it began in the early days with the gift of tears at the Consecration (I know from my Orthodox friends that the gift of tears is quite common in the Eastern church). I'm still trying to work out how to understand compunction in light of St. Paul's exhortation to "rejoice in the Lord always." I believe some people can best serve the Lord when they are happy, but that others, like Blessed Ève Lavallière, seem to serve him best in contrition. Where I am on that spectrum I do not yet know for certain.
Today, however, is the feast day of Saint Ephrem the Syrian (above), the great doctor of the Church, who wrote eloquently and extensively about the need for and uses of compunction:
The soul is dead through sin. It requires sadness, weeping, tears, mourning and bitter moaning over the iniquity which has cast it down . . . Howl, weep and moan, and bring it back to God. . . . Your soul is dead through vice; shed tears and raise it up again! . . . . Behold, Mercy waits for your eyes to shed tears, to purify and renew the image of the disfigured soul. . . . Weep over your soul, sinner, shed tears and raise it up again. Its resurrection depends on your eye, and its return to life on your heart.
He is also said to have written:
Be kind to everyone you meet, for everyone is fighting a great battle.
May Saint Ephrem the Syrian pray for us in our daily struggle for true conversion.
Friday, April 10, 2009
The Uses of Memory
Take, O Lord, and receive all my liberty, my memory, my understanding, and all my will, all I have and possess; you have given it me; to you, Lord, I return it; all is yours, dispose of it entirely according to your will. Give me your love and grace, because that is enough for me.
-- Saint Ignatius of Loyola
If you have been reading this blog for a while, you will probably know certain things about me, its anonymous author: for instance, that I had a dramatic conversion several years ago, which led to gradual changes in my life and reasoning process from one way to its near-complete opposite; and that I consider myself a penitent. Having gone from espousing and living a self-absorbed, promiscuous, bohemian ethos that caused a great deal of harm to myself and others, to striving to espouse and live a Christian life, has been no easy transition. I struggle daily with the discipline and humility needed to shoulder the cross of my mundane responsibilities, and the past is always beckoning to me over that shoulder -- not so much the events of the past, which mostly ended in heartbreak and failure, but the sensations that accompanied and illustrated them.
I recall the way the light rallied bravely on a post-industrial street in early March in my old city; the taste of the coffee at a Puerto Rican lunch counter by the subway; the green glass bottles arranged on the window sill in a friend's apartment. The lime-green haze of the new leaves, like a diaphanous scarf caught in the black branches of the trees on Riverside Drive. The impossibly warm, nostalgic sound of my voice teacher's Bechstein. The buzzing haze of the city in summer, and the marvelously strange way that a hush would descend at certain moments over even the busiest street. The weeds that heliotroped and bloomed through chicken-wire fencing on a strip of auto-body repair shops in the Bronx. The playing cards I would often find on the street (I found a tarot card, "The Lovers," once). And the many, many goodbyes. While Rome is a city that is layered over with the history of Western civilization, New York is a city that is layered over and over again with the personal histories of its denizens. Certain corners are redolent, even overripe, with memory; certain neighborhoods become forbidden zones because of the heartbreaks to which they played host. And when one has tried to change one's life in a place that was the site of so much crash-and-burn, one occasionally feels as if it might be easier to do it elsewhere, and is tempted to take flight from the snares of memory.
Now I am elsewhere, with none of the sensations of my beloved city around me. And sometimes I mourn for the sights, sounds, and smells of the past, the beautiful fragments of a mostly unlovely life that shimmer even more in the refracted light of memory. And I wonder what God wants me to do with my memory. Must I ask Him to sever it from me? I suppose I would be happier and better-adjusted if I could forget the past. And these sense memories inevitably incur regret, because they suggest the past, which, since I cannot change it, leads to grief, and even depression. If God has forgotten my sins, must I remember them?
The quandary of conversion is that it must always be rooted in penitence. Can one be penitent and not mourn constantly? Saint Peter, according to legend, had furrows in his cheeks, gouged there by his incessant weeping for having denied Christ. And, according to Raïssa Maritain, the eyes of Blessed Ève Lavallière, a French actress and convert, were, after her conversion, always wet with tears of contrition for her past sins. Saint Ephrem the Syrian is said to have written:
The soul is dead through sin. It requires sadness, weeping, tears, mourning and bitter moaning over the iniquity which has cast it down . . . Howl, weep and moan, and bring it back to God. . . . Your soul is dead through vice; shed tears and raise it up again!
And yet, as Brother Roger of Taizé has noted:
It may be impossible to repent without feeling some regret. But the difference between the two is enormous. Repentance is a gift from God, a hidden activity of the Holy Spirit that draws a person to God. I do not need God to regret my mistakes; I can do that by myself. Regret keeps us focused on ourselves. When I repent, however, I turn towards God, forgetting myself and surrendering myself to him. Regret makes no amends for the wrong done, but God, when I come to him in repentance, "dispels my sins like the morning mist" (Isaiah 44:22).
What, then, is the place of memory in the penitential consciousness? Is it possible to mine the memory for beauty, and to use the beauty as a palliative for others? Is it the responsibility of those who are conscious of beauty to nurture it, wherever it is found, even in ugliness? Or must that beauty be left behind, even buried?
I recently had the opportunity to go back to New York to see the Bonnard exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum (the image above, "Work Table," is the poster for the show). Retrospectives of Bonnard's work are rare -- the last one in New York was in 1998 -- and I enthusiastically recommend this show, which closes on April 19, to anyone who can go. It is wonderful. Bonnard is an artist who has always been important to me personally, and in fact, in his late paintings, there is an apparent attempt to come to terms with painful memory. He paints mundane domestic objects with luminous, even joyful, intensity, and yet the shadowy human figures who cling to the edges of his canvases hint at a tragic personal situation that caused great damage in his life and the lives of those around him in the mid-1920s, several years before he began producing this prodigious later corpus.
Were the dreadful events in Bonnard's life, then, somehow salutary for the rest of us? The beauty of his late paintings give the viewer great joy.
My fondest hope is that, out of the dreadful turmoil of my own past, some small healing for others might also be brought forth.
Happy Easter (and Passover) and many blessings to all my readers.
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