It was the kind of liberated mood that, in my case, often builds toward a state of mild euphoria, feeding on any stimulus that strays into its orbit. The burned-out beauty of the Indian Summer with its rustling bracts and burrs, its sweet, pervasive scent of dried grasses and leaf mould, became a part of it, as did the dawning realization that Caitlin and I were not after all going to be spending all our days and nights grieving for our departed children. Even my work fed into it. I’d put Mallarmé’s Afternoon of a Faun back on the syllabus for the literature seminar I was teaching, and remembering my conversation with Marco earlier in the year, I’d tracked down a film of Nijinsky’s 1912 ballet based on the poem. The ancient footage was grainy, ghostly—fragmented to a point of near abstraction, with phosphorescent images of the faun and nymphs flickering in and out of focus. It was hard to follow, even knowing the story of the faun’s dreamlike encounters with the nymphs. But purely as spectacle it captured some quality of delight that made a powerful impression on me: ­Nijinsky in his dappled skin, moving like a reclusive forest animal; his gestures, at once cryptic and familiar as some language one had always known but never heard spoken, seeming to arise out of a wellspring of elemental joy. I remembered something D. H. ­Lawrence, that maligned genius, had written about the figure of the faun. It was in his book on the ancient Etruscans, an account of a civilization dedicated to a celebratory vision of life, utterly unlike that of the lugubrious Romans who supplanted them. I looked it up: “They can’t survive, the faun-faced men, with their pure outlines and their strange non-moral calm. Only the deflowered faces survive . . .”