Catherine House

I've spent my whole life reading beautiful books and watching beautiful movies, dreaming that there was some real place out there where I would fit and be beautiful, too.

I don’t know. I’m scared that out there, someday I’ll look around and realize forty years have passed and no one can see me. That I’m gone.

You are in the house and the house in the woods. The woods are in the house. The stairs are in the house. Down the stairs is the hallway, and at the end of the hallway is the ballroom. You are in the ballroom. The ballroom is in the house. You are in the house and the house is in you. The house is in the woods. You are in the woods. You can be good. In the house. You are in the house and the house is in today. Today is not a moment. Today is not a point. Today is an infinite area. Today is forever. Everything that has happened and will happen is now. Everything that has been and will be is here. And everything is good. Everything is fine. You are not sad. You are not afraid. You are not hateful. Because you are here. You are here. You are inside. And you are ready. You are here. You are in. And doesn’t it feel good? You are in the house and the house is in the woods. You are in the house and the house is in you.

But that wasn’t right. Her life wasn’t a story, and it didn’t have to end this way. She was a girl. She was real. It was true.

I wondered if I would remember this feeling after Catherine. The feeling of seeing a friend—someone I knew and who knew me, too, someone who cared about me—walking in through a door or waving from across a hall or bending to whisper in another friend’s ear. Of being inside, so inside, such an intimacy, and at the same time seeing it from outside. A feeling of being seen, beautiful and young, seated at a mythic table.

On bad days, I could feel the whole year swinging underneath me like a dead thing.

And you have suffered through your own selves—your own critical eyes, your own standards, your own minds. Your spirits are beautiful, but they are not easy.

I’m scared that out there, someday I’ll look around and realize forty years have passed and no one can see me. That I’m gone.

read through your tutorial essay draft. Sixty pages describing an off-white canvas. Indecipherable.” She shook her head. “It’s as if you never learned the most basic analytical habits, so you never had to unlearn them.

I couldn't be here anymore. I couldn't be in me. But I couldn't be anywhere else, either. I had nowhere else to go.

I wasn’t afraid of the dark. I was afraid of the light—the future.

I studied the photo of the boy, the one who had died six years ago, and wished I were dead. Dead people didn’t have to do homework.

The Surrealism movement, our professor explained, was inspired by Freud’s concept of the uncanny, the dreadful double. According to Freud, doubling creates meaning. Doubling turns sounds into words; a baby first speaks by turning ma into mama, pa into papa. But when a double appears uninvited—the buried object returns—it brings us into the realm of the uncanny. We watch dead things wake up. And we are afraid.

You are trying to run away, as you have always run. You have run from your mother, your friends, your lovers, and the law, and now you want to run from Catherine. But my dear—where are you going? You dream of beautiful adventures, of traveling across continents and overseas, as if you might find joy on some distant island. But you won’t. Because you are miserable. You are a miserable girl, Ines.

Futurist sculpture creates ideal new forms by using motion to break down the barrier between an object and its surroundings. To join the object’s exterior plastic infinity to its interior plastic infinity.

I listened to her with my head in my arms and looked out the window at the whirling starry sky. The Greeks had used those same stars to conquer the world. We were like them - gods and heroes.

Tonight, we celebrate the precious quiet of wintertime,' she said. 'And how lovely is this time of silence and work and anticipation and decay?' She looked up. 'Here at Catherine, we know not to fear death. Because even in death, there is life. Death is not the black night, but its white moon. The honeyed egg of rebirth.' Her voice was low. She had a slight unplaceable accent. 'So please,' she said, 'let us praise tonight, this room, and each other. Let us feast and be glad in the darkest of times.' She raised her glass. 'To winter,' she said, 'and to tonight.

One untitled Agnes Martin painting had been hanging in the gallery since October. I would go there in the morning and stare at it. Every day at around nine o’clock, pale sunlight radiated on the painting just so, and its surface would glow, weightless and pale and supernatural as sea-foam. When I looked at the painting then, I thought: This is it. It wasn’t gold that was the sublime material, the magic matter; it was the surface itself. The stuff in between. The birth of the world. I’d found it. It was here.