The Pure Lover: A Memoir of Grief by David Plante

Author:David Plante [Plante, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: General, Literary, Social Science, Literary Criticism, American, Biography & Autobiography, Biography, Family & Relationships, Personal Memoirs, Self-Help, Death; Grief; Bereavement, 20th Century
ISBN: 9780807006207
Publisher: Beacon Press
Published: 2009-01-02T00:00:00+00:00

playing piano duets with the last emperor of China, Henry Pu-Yi.) You were, he said, to inherit from him a bronze cockerel because you loved the hens he kept on the estate of his castle in Scotland.

I wanted him to love me as he loved you, but he looked away from me.

You commissioned Runciman to write a book on Mistra, the Byzantine city in the Peloponnese, the center from which the Byzantine philosopher George Gemistus Plethon taught, and I recalled an essay you wrote on Plethon when you were at Athens Col ege. So admired in Italy, Plethon was invited, in 1438, to Ferrara, and from Ferrara to Florence, where he gave lectures on Plato, and was called by Marsiglio Picino “the second Plato.” In Plethon’s honor, Cosimo de’ Medici founded the Academy at Florence.

When my first novel, The Ghost of Henry James, was published, you invited friends to a Greek taverna in London, where I smashed glasses against the floor. You paid the bill for all of us, and for the smashed glasses. In our apartment, kneeling before the toilet vomit-ing, I exclaimed, “I’m so happy!” but what I meant was that I knew you were happy for me, happy for me at a depth that you would never be happy for yourself.

And while you supported me in my writing, you wrote your poems and put them in a drawer of your desk, your longest called

“Pure Reason.” You also kept on translating the poetry of Constantine Cavafy, your translations both clear-minded and sensual, delicately clear-minded and delicately sensual, as if you translated him into yourself, making of his beautiful white flowers, his colored

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