Axel

Everyone is napping again. When they all sleep like this, I think that family is the best thing I know. I feel bad about any earlier crabbiness. I think that I should have more children, and encourage more relationships in my life. I start scheming about ways to get elderly friends over for dinner. I make lists of people I haven't emailed for a while.

But I am grateful for the quiet, and the chance to read and reflect a little. At least one other creature in our house is still awake. It's Ai, our fawn Abyssinian cat. She's always awake and interested in doing whatever I am doing.

I've been reading Villiers de L'Isle-Adam's Axel. It's a play with fascinating imagery. Here is a description of the interior of Axel's castle.

A great hall with a high oaken ceiling; an iron chandelier hangs from the center of the intersecting beams. At the back, a large main door opening onto a vestibule. Over the door, the Auersperg coat of arms supported by its large golden sphinxes.

To the left, a large gothic window, disclosing vast,misty forests on the horizon.

To the right, a stone stairway built into the wall; at the top of the stairway, and arched door leading to one of the towers.

Twilight, already quite dark.

The depth of the hall is such that it suggest a gigantic structure dating back to the very early Middle Ages. To the right, a huge fireplace with a blazing fire that lights up up the stage. On the wide mantelpiece is a pile of dusty folios. Set out on adjoining black wooden workbenches are alembics, astral globes, ancient clay laps, enormous bones from extinct species of animals, and dried herbs.

Axel, with his aristocratic haughtiness, his refusal of the earth that has become an illusion, and his metaphysical narcissism, lead him to discover that the only true Infinite is the pure interiority of the soul - is the first great embodiment of a whole family of symbolic characters who, according to Edmond Wilson, "drop out of the common life" and choose the often tragic way of realizing the Spirit within themselves.

Axel reminds me of one of my favorite Proust characters, Saint-Loup. I would like to write more on that later.