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For our upcoming discussion, we’ll read a short passage from Nightwood<\/em> that challenges us to place ourselves and our emotional narratives in our surroundings:<\/p>\n We swoon with the thickness of our own tongue when we say, “I love you,” as in the eye of a child lost a long while will be found the contraction of that distance–a child going small in the claws of a beast, coming furiously up the furlongs of the iris. We are but skin about a wind, with muscles clenched against mortality. We sleep in a long reproachful dust against ourselves. We are full to the gorge with our own names for misery. Life, the pastures in which the night feeds and prunes the cud that nourishes us to despair. Life, the permission to know death. We were created that the earth might be made sensible of her inhuman taste; and love that the body might be so dear that even the earth should roar with it. Yes, we who are full to the gorge with misery should look well around, doubting everything seen, done spoken, precisely because we have a word for it, and not its alchemy.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n![\"barnes3\"](\"https:\/\/chaplaincy.tufts.edu\/humanist\/files\/barnes3-278x300.jpg\")
Djuna Barnes is an American modernist novelist, essayist, and poet whose work characterized new trends in English-language fiction in the first half of the twentieth century. Her novel Nightwood<\/em>–an intense exploration of love and loss told through a combination of prose and poetry, and one of the most seminal works of lesbian fiction to date–has been praised by many of Barnes’ contemporaries as one of the greatest works of American expatriate fiction of the century. Barnes never adopted religious or spiritual terminology in describing herself, and remarked on how poetry offered secular access to the sort of inspiration religious works provide to others.<\/p>\n