Cover

Dedication

For Virginia Tynes
and for Rafael Campo

Epigraph

Where is your Self to be found? Always in the deepest enchantment that you have experienced.

Hugo von Hofmannsthal

PRELUDE

Perspective Box

It seems a sort of peculiar toy at first, this elaborate painted box: a curiosity, almost ugly—what is this weird antique? I’ve been walking through room after room of paintings hung against the museum walls’ deep silks, rainy afternoon light filtering down through the skylights above, galleries full of splendid things. But somehow it’s this dim little side chamber—where a spotlight shines on this unwieldy object, right in the center—which I can’t seem to leave.

Perspective Box with Views of a Dutch Interior was made in the middle years of the seventeenth century, in Antwerp or Amsterdam, by one Samuel Von Hoogstraten, Dutch painter, aficionado of perspective, connoisseur of the complicated effects of light. A man who loved the eye’s involvement in the world. A man who lied with pigment; painting, he wrote, “deceives in a permissible, pleasurable, and praiseworthy manner.”

I’ve been thinking about praise, and the praiseworthy, all day—or rather, trying not to think about them. I’m entirely, irremediably nervous. I’ve come to London because I am among the finalists for a literary award, meeting British poets and publishers, doing some interviews with the press and BBC radio. The event’s surrounded by a hoopla no American poetry award would ever generate; the Independent, reporting on the reading last night, where each finalist read a poem or two, described me as “a whispery beanpole.” I am behaving as though I am a calm and more-or-less balanced adult, but in fact I’m reduced to something distinctly adolescent by the whole thing. Of course I’d like to win the prize, but can’t quite let myself imagine that; I don’t like to imagine the alternative either. Both options make my self-doubt flare, since to win would seem the strangest of flukes, an honor I couldn’t possibly merit, and to lose would confirm my own restless doubts. This is the terrible dilemma of prizes: we cannot believe we deserve them, and we cannot quite believe we don’t.

I am a believer in self-doubt, in my better moments; there’s nothing like an appropriate amount of it to keep us humane, clearheaded, level. But under these circumstances I have no perspective on my doubts, which seem to be mounting and vibrating, slapping against me like the waves I stirred up this morning, swimming furious laps in a public pool in Soho.

Wandering the National Gallery’s cool and formal chambers, I am trying to get as far from myself and my anticipation of the evening as I can get, and perhaps that’s what this strange wooden contraption promises.