A

Jane went to visit the church four times.

The first time was briefly, as part of the field trip her freshman seminar, "Material Culture of the Gilded Age," took. Most of the tour was spent on the grounds of Kykuit, the John D. Rockefeller estate. But then they had a 20 minute stop at the little church. down the hill. Their professor gave a little talk about Abby Rockefeller as a patroness of the arts, and about the stained glass windows of Marc Chagall.

What Jane remembered later is being overwhelmed by the quietness of the space, even with 30 college students doing their best to not be still. She wanted nothing more than to sit in the middle of the space, away from the aisles and the other students, and take it in. The smell was that dusty cool smell churches have, part library, part wood. The old wood timbers in the roof, the bright glass, but the strange sense of claustrophobia and lightness. She turned and looked at the great blue window at the back of the church. The story in the window was unclear, but the shapes were kind somehow. A man gestured out... or embraced? He laughed or spoke? Jane turned away. She was tired of stories right then. She closed her eyes and listened to students trying to look respectful but mostly point to how they were to sophisticated to be taken in by this rich-beyond-imagining-man's attempt at piety and good works.

On the bus ride back to Manhattan, Jane felt around inside. It felt like there was a question missing, something important that the tour avoided, the explicit artwork sidestepped or even papered over, that the church wanted to ask. Eventually the bus's motion put her to sleep.

---

Six months later, Jane and her uncle entered an otherwise empty church. It was a perfect early summer day. Hunter was out, and so Jane was at liberty. Cadwallader was out, and so Uncle Eb was free. Jane was going to spend much of the summer in New York, taking one class and working in a gallery for next to nothing. Eb was going to travel, having a first summer in a decade without a growing girl and young woman to take care of at least some of the time. "Visiting friends," was as much as he was willing to say. Jane knew he was private, and let it go at that.

Eb walked in and sat down, and Jane sat down behind him. Jane thought the smell was different today. No smell at all really. The church seemed flatter.

"It seems flatter today," she said to Eb.

He nodded. "It's a church. Nice glass, but it just feels like a church to me. Maybe you should tell me more about the kinds of stories you were thinking about last fall."

She thought. "Well, the big window back there—it's the Good Samaritan story, by the way; I looked it up—was a memorial to Abby Rockefeller, and I remember they talked a lot about her on the tour. She founded MOMA and Historic Williamsburg. And that rose window," she said, pointing forward, "was Matisse's last work."

He thought. "What were you thinking after the tour?"

"I was tired. I was just, y'know, brain-full."

"Mmmm."

"And I was tired of everyone, I guess, knowing everything. The tour guide, Professor Edsall, all the students trying to be so smart."

"Who's trying to be smart here?"

She was quiet, then got up and walked out to one of the windows on the side. It was a picture of a man huddled into himself.

"I think they were trying to escape something. The Rockefellers. Like trying to undo something they couldn't really. Wanting to be something else."

Eb laughed a half-chuckle. "They didn't want to be rich and powerful? Seems unlikely."

Jane was quiet. "They didn't want to be Rockefellers. Or they wanted God to see them without the name, or something."

"They wanted the goods without the responsibility."

Jane nodded, slowly. "Yeah, something like that." She walked around to look at some of the other windows. After a while, Eb got up and went to look at the big window in the back. After more of a while, Jane joined him.

"We all want to be given credit for what we ourselves did, and disown the things done by other people in our name." Eb paused. "This is staggeringly beautiful, isn't it? Thank you for dragging me up here."

Jane smiled, and looked up, and gave Eb a hug.

---

Eb was dead, and Jane got tired of going through his things. She needed to go away, and so she randomly decided to road trip to her friend Eileen and her family in Vermont. Halfway up the New Jersey Turnpike, she decided on a different course, and in an hour she was standing outside the church again. It was January, and the doors were locked. Of course they were.

Jane walked around the outside, the street side and the parking lot. It was a plain church in a very upscale neighborhood. Fieldstone, neatly kept grass. Like a certain sort of woman, the kind you see in Princeton, with work to do and perfectly-kempt practical hair. Steely, certain, and so fitted into the groove of her life that she had become the groove.

Jane got back in the car. She felt out of place, alone in her car, here. It was a place a lot like Princeton, and as she had when she had visited with Eb, she was aware of her being from this kind of place, and her discomfort with the groove. She scratched irritably against the sides of the channel. wore clothing that signaled she did not belong there. And yet, she had lived most of her life there, and she was not at all sure she actually belonged anywhere else.

Jane pulled out her phone and opened up the map app. Where was she really? She'd only been here on the field trip, and on the brief jaunt with Eb. The map zoomed in, and she scrolled in and out. This was a locus of things she had heard of: the Stone Barns for well-heeled locavores, Rockefeller this and that. Sleepy Hollow with the headless horseman over to the east. Chappaqua with the Clintons up there, White Plains down there. SUNY Purchase, which she had looked at for college, over there. Connecticut, so close, and down there was her grandparents place, where Eb had his teenage years. And New York City, also close. All these things, and this place that kept being on her mind sometimes, and she had never visited again, since that summer after her freshman year.

She sat and looked at it another minute, and then got back on the road in her purring car, Eb's old, nice, purring car, and headed back to the freeway and north.

---

"I want to show you some things, and they may not all make sense, but I want you to have seen them, so when I talk about them, you know what I mean," she had said, in Atlanta. Liam was fourteen, and it was an Northeast road trip. Andy would stay home with the dog, and with his work, and so it would just be a mother and son thing. There was some business: a walk-through of Eb's house with the property manager, a quick face-to-face with a client she'd only dealt with via email in Washington, a gallery near Longwood Gardens that was interested in carrying her paintings. If she could get going on making paintings more regularly again.

And so this was the northern loop. The old studio building where she'd spent so much time at Hunter, which was now an office space (of course it was). The grandparents house in Greenwich. And this church, though she had to remind herself where it was and what the name of it was. Union Church of Pocantico Hills. Utterly anonymous and corporate. The First Bank of Privilege and Smug.

They pulled in, and it was the middle of tour season. A bus was in front, humming electric like a vast beetle. Theirs was one of at least a dozen podcars in the lot, waiting to take the owners wherever the owners said, as long as the car thought it was a good idea. The church sign in front had the telltale yellow bulb on top, the little transmitter with a whole world of information, stories, and the local take on things on behalf of the congregation in it. Liam reflexively reached to turn on the infobox clipped to his waist, but Jane stopped his hand.

"No, hold on. Let it be itself first," she said.

Liam shrugged. Mom had ideas, and thought "whatever." It's not like you couldn't get the message from anywhere if you just tried a little harder.

They walked in. It was pretty much the same as she remembered. Smaller, somehow, but places always seemed smaller unless they had been emptied. The church was clearly resolute in keeping the old ways, or things Liam would think of as ancient.

So odd to think of all of this as "modern" art, all these things from before her birth, from... she did some mental math... fifty years before Liam was born. All those people, so worried about the future, and the future so unpredictable and those people so wrong, as Alex Jeddish had said.

The rose window, Matisse's last work, was as unimpressive as ever. Pretty, and nice, and pat. Jane thought, I would never have been able to think that, back then. Or I would have thought it and assumed I was just ignorant. Liam probably thinks that now. She looked over, and he was clearly unimpressed too. It was a circular window, with colors. Whoopdedo.

"So Liam," she said. "I'm honestly curious. This isn't a sacred stop for me, but it's a place that kind of nagged at me over the years. Lots of money bought what the donors thought was the best, finest art here. It's what the Rockefellers wanted, and they could have bought literally anything. They brought whole buildings to America to make the Cloisters in New York—crated them up in Europe and replanted them in Manhattan. Plonk. So this is what they did at their home church. John D Rockefeller Jr commissioned the church, the rose window was in memory of his wife Abby, and the rest of the windows, the Chagalls, are in memory of John D Jr., by his kids. So... I'm honestly curious what you think. Walk around; I'll sit here in the middle, and then you come tell me what you think."

And so they did that. He walked, as the tour group wended its way around and then left, and just a few (mostly gray haired) tourists lingered.

Eventually, Liam sat down next to her.

"Why'd they put the best part in the back?" he asked.

She shrugged. "I don't know." They sat in the pew and looked forward. The light, colored and speckled, shone in over their shoulders. "It's a nice effect, you know. It's not the point of the church, the art. The church things are. The guy sitting up there talking, and everyone singing along to the organ."

Liam nodded a little. "You can see how much they wanted things to be, kind of, a certain way. Like it's supposed to look really old, and it was built to already look old. And now, like, the fakiness of that is something you can see."

She smiled. "You're a smart kid, you know that?" He smiled and looked away.

He shrugged. "That's kind of it. Rich people wanted to make something that would be just right, and it'll be perfect forever, and here it is and everyone who made it is dead, and we just go on."

Jane thought, and nodded. "Yeah, I think that's about right. Thanks." She gave him a sideways hug, and they sat there for a moment, in the blue and red and yellow light, in the nearly empty room with the dark wood beams that were supposed to look very very old above them.

"Speaking of going on," she said, letting him go, "I'm done. That's it. Where do you want to go from here?"

Liam thought, did some quick calculations. "I'm tired of old things and driving," he said.

"You want to go home?"

He nodded. "I want to go home."

Introduction

I get some strange letters. As literary executor of Ebenezer Stone's
estate, I find myself oddly situated as the bureaucrat in charge of a
kind of cult.

Readers familiar with my uncle's writings will not be surprised that his
early analysis of Hegel is not what gets people going, or his "amusing
little project" from 1995, on the history of dictionaries and the
meaning of "meaning." Nor, really, his published opinion pieces from the
mid-2000's on same-sex marriage and homophobia, though these are
actually still quoted from time to time. No, the strange letters are all
about that one book. Why I Cannot Define Beauty/Why I Must Define Beauty.

It will probably not surprise you that I have read the book several
times. I was the first person to read it; it was locked in a drawer of
an Odd Cabinet (more on that later), specifically designed to be opened
when I turned 24, about five months after his death. What may or may not
surprise you is how it's grown on me, and in me... how it has changed.

I was 24 when I read it, and I could clearly hear Uncle Eb's voice
reading it. It was beautiful to that younger me. Liberating, in a way.
It told me that the aesthetics he had spent so much of his professional
career could be put aside. That I should throw myself into a life where
making beautiful things and enjoying beautiful things took top priority.
And He had left me with the funds that (as long I was frugal) I could do
that, and so I did.

Now I am 49, which is the age Eb was when I came to live with him, and I
have a seventeen year old son, and I see the other side of what he is
saying—the need for that safety and structure and definition we build
around us all the time. It's the little asides—about our need for wood
and the cutting of trees, about the necessary tragedy of food, and
beauty made from dead things—that grab me now.

I could make a pat explanation about age and wisdom and impending
mortality, but here too he's anticipated me, in the chapter on glosses.
Actually, this is the heart of the book for me now, in a way it was not
25 years ago. Beauty as a lack of avoidance, a spike straight through
the chest cavity to the heart. I heard that in my youth as being about
direct experience, but now I see it as about a more cultivated habituation.

The letters from fans of the book have informed my experience a lot over
the years. Heather Macklemore's wonderful, expansive analysis of the
book from a feminist perspective especially opened it up for me, and got
me to reflect in ways I had avoided, or glossed over perhaps, about
Uncle Eb's experience as a gay man, in an era where the meaning of that
fact changed so utterly.

I could pretend that this slim volume just came out of that quarter
century of reflection. It's a convenient anniversary to write from. But
that would not be the truth. Because I also just had the birthday where
I unlocked the last door on the Odd Cabinet. And that shared compact
between Ebenezer Stone and his niece Jane Stone is really the heart of
the story I want to tell.

6

The first time Jésus and I had sex, I felt something slide sideways in me. It was like part of me that had not felt a resolved chord shifted into a major key, and another part fell out of alignment. One vertebra snapped into line, and another one crunched out.

Jésus—and I know what a cliché this is—a poet. He talked about the shape of language in a way I've never really heard before or since. He could feel the flavor of words, and like a master chef, he could feel his way through rich, staggeringly complicated meals, and know to put a drop of balsamic vinegar just so, and there was a sense beyond what you could immediately pick out, that the Right Word had been spoken.

He chose me. He saw me, he wanted me, and he set out to have me. And he knew it, and even admitted it to me that night. We were done, and it had been, for all I knew, spectacular sex. Certainly very different than the kind of ham-handed sex with my high school boyfriend. I mean, I loved Drew, but we were stupid. I was still stupid, maybe, with Jésus. But just as he was actually, in retrospect, amazingly good at sex for a college student, he also had issues.

"You know how there's that moment, right in the middle of sex, where you have everything you could possibly want?" he said, afterwards. "Like that gulp of juice on a hot day."

"It's called orgasm."

It was dark, but I think he blushed. "No! No, I mean, before and around that."

I was silent. I had still kind of been feeling that. Now it was drifting away. He was making me think, making me be his conversation partner again. Not that I minded being his conversation partner. But, "Is it always about you?"

"What do you mean?"

"I mean, I was still enjoying that big glass of water or whatever, and you wanted to talk about it, and now I'm not drinking it so much."

"Sorry."

"Yeah, me too."

"I don't want to want so much. But I do. I want you. It's like I want to eat you up, all of you."

"Just shut up and hold me. Please."

And he did. And I really did love him a lot. I wish, kind of, that I'd been able to be a better friend. I mean, I love my husband and son and life and everything I did because I wasn't Jésus's love forever. We probably would have broken up eventually, but I'm sorry I couldn't help more with learning how to be that person who wasn't so much appetite. I still read his poems. He's a middle-aged guy now, like I'm middle aged. I bought his most recent book. It's pretentious. Still some really lovely bits, but he wanted so much to be a professor with the tweed jacket, and he wanted it like everything else he wanted, with a fierceness and quiet stratagem. He got me, and then I didn't want to stay gotten. He didn't know then how to not get something and maybe be gotten by someone else instead.

When I was in college, one of the presents from the Odd Cabinet was a book of Robert Mapplethorpe's photographs of flowers. They made Eb weep the first time he saw them, he said, the longing in them. The ache of sensuous desire. He said he thought Mapplethorpe's genius was that he wanted, he desired, but knew he couldn't touch with his hands the way he wanted to—that would just destroy the things, those perfect, gorgeous flowers. And so the eyes, and the fingers on the photographic equipment... the eyes and the tools were how he came to possess and caress those flowers, and leave them just as they were.

What he says reminds me of Jésus. I was loved that way, and then there were actual fingers. And I was still loved that achingly, hungrily, but I couldn't love back quite that way, because of those fingers. I was beautiful to him, and if he was beautiful to me, I wasn't really able to possess him the way he wanted to possess me. And I didn't want to possess him, to own him. Or at least I didn't think that way. Maybe I did and didn't want to let myself be that way.

In any case, the next spring, when I wanted to go to L.A. to visit my mom for spring break, and he had planned to have me be part of Easter with his very Catholic family, and I said no and maybe I said it the wrong way, or maybe I just said it at all, and he just got very weird. Was it jealousy? It didn't occur to be to call it that at the time, but maybe that's what jealousy is: what you want to lay claim to doesn't accept the claim, not as fully as you would like. What you find beautiful wants something unrelated to its beauty to you.

We never spoke again. And the thing that shifted sideways in me... I'm not convinced it ever quite slipped back. Maybe it just slipped back quietly over time, but I think maybe it just became part of who I was. Certainly I have never felt so... possessed, ever again. Which is a relief, I suppose. But there's a part of me that regrets that. I never accepted myself as someone's treasure so fully again.

3

Jennifer Hainault and I had a long conversation about Eb at a conference in London about five years ago. Well, to be fair, it was mostly about how she discovered Cannot/Must. She was undergraduate at on the campus of Oxford, and had recently been sexually assaulted. It’s the story that frames her essay “Rape when it isn’t rape is rape:” the son of an North African multi-millionaire, essentially untouchable, got her drunk, wouldn’t let her out of his rooms until she had stripped for him, and let him grope her.

She discovered Eb’s book about three months later, she says, and was amazed that it hadn’t become a standard piece of feminist grounding, given how neatly it equated beauty with the colonizing gaze. She told me that the book gave her a really useful tool and what to actually do to get herself back at the steering wheel, as she put it. Refusing to be viewed without viewing back—refusing to be beautiful for anyone, but instead demanding love—became a kind of mantra for her. And so she became Jennifer Hainault.

In a way, the book is a cheat. It tells us we need to convert beauty to love, to live in the world as if the world looked back. But he doesn’t say how to do that, and then he died, and so there’s the gauntlet lying there on the ground, and there’s no one there to actually do battle with. You can’t argue with Eb, because Eb is dead. You only get to argue with the Eb in your head.

But of course, as a philosopher, Eb would have seen nothing unusual in this. He certainly didn’t shy away from arguing with the living when he felt he needed to. Hans Schlicht will never have the same place in the public’s eye after Eb’s rebuttal to him on same-sex marriage—Eb did not take up the battle-flag easily, but you really didn’t want to be in his way when he did. But much of his career was spent arguing with long-dead white men who didn’t even write in English.

It’s OK. It’s a good cheat. He was really very good at open-ended questions. Probably his students initially hated him for it, but when I’ve gotten the occasional remembrance of him, that’s what I heard above everything: he asked questions that have stuck with them, sometimes for decades.

2

Eb was sitting with me out on the back porch of his house. I was a hot day, probably in July, but there was a nice breeze, and sometimes it carried sound of excited children from the orchard across the road. Eb had been looking through some of his old notes, throwing most of them into boxes destined for recycling. I told him I wasn't worried about cleaning up after him, but he said it gave him a sense of finishing business.

Some of the stacks went wholesale into recycling, with a bare glance. "Dead-end projects," he said. "Philosophical topics that even I found boring, mostly. Don't worry, no hidden gems here."

And some files he went through lovingly, tossing almost nothing. Sometimes, he laughed; sometimes he tsk-tsked, shaking his head.

"Now this one," he said, holding up a sheaf of papers, "this was the draft I was working on Orcas Island. 1990, so three summers before you moved in. This was what turned into the dictionary project."

"Orcas Island sounds great. I've wanted to go to the San Juans for a long time. A friend from Hunter went had a family place there."

Eb closed his eyes, put down the sheaf. "It was wonderful. The weather was perfect, always just right but never that weird perfection you get in California. Just an ocean breeze. I had a cabin, the front porch looked out over a kind of meadow. Low scrub, I guess. Just a little ways into that, you could look out and see the ocean. The stars at night... well, you remember in Yosemite. Like that, every night. What a place!"

"And you went there to work?"

He nodded. "It was one of those writing fellowship deals. You applied and got a grant, and all these writers got together in the evenings and talked shop. I got to be a writer. Whole lot of gay men, all at least pretending convincingly to know what they were doing."

"And you ended up with that?" I asked, pointing at the sheaf in his lap.

"Yep. What a waste it was. I forced myself to just write, like they tell creative writers to do. You know, just get it out. I'd never worked that way before. So I just poured out the stuff I'd been thinking about, stuff about how human language, and human neurobiology, made our models in philosophy fundamentally different from how the hard sciences understood the universe. I thought it was brilliant, breaking through all those stifling things I'd felt trapped by. Then I re-read it after a month, and God it was awful. Absolutely appalling. I would have burned it, but I figured maybe I'd just box it away and look at it sometime. And so here we are."

He picked up the iced tea next to him, and took a long sip.

"So here's the strange thing I remember, coming out of that summer. I realized that most of the guys there were just..." He took off his glasses. "I want to say posers, but it's not as simple as that. Many of them were published. But they didn't need to write, it wasn't part of a net of responsibility. They only had to answer to their editors, and to the audience I guess. I probably should have been jealous of their freedom, but it seemed so... narcissistic is the word that comes to mind. It reminded me of a friend from Yale. He worked on the Daily News, and he was always sneering at the creative writing people, and even the academic writers: they had never learned to write to deadline, he'd say, like he was some hard-bitten old newspaperman. I think he felt the same way. You probably get the same thing with art: the difference between people who the work is part of a bigger thing, and ones who it's this isolated..." He looked for the word.

"It's kind of airless, I think you mean. It's something they do just for themselves," I said. "Yeah. That's one of the things I like about Ames. Maybe it's what people mean by 'keepin' it real.' I heard that a lot at Hunter."

He smiled. "Yes, exactly. So here's a Princeton professor writing an obscure text 500 people at most are going to read, looking down at novelists from San Francisco for not 'keepin' it real.' Whatever. You can look at it if you want. I can't throw it away. Feel free when I'm gone."

"So what did you do?"

"After the summer? I came back here, and I looked at all that flatulent writing, and decided to just pick one corner of it, and do it right: research it, and write it up carefully and slowly. And there was a piece about how the regularizing of language in the early modern era had made language a way we created nations. And so the dictionary book."

He leaned back and closed his eyes and took another sip of iced tea. I was thinking.

"So, Eb, there's this funny thing in botanical illustration. A lot of the people taking a lot of the courses at illustration school... they're serious about it, and they really throw themselves into it, but they're like spouses of rich people, and it's a really serious hobby. And there are people who approach it like artists."

"You're an artist."

"You know I hate that. I like making art, but I hate being an artist."

"So you want to be an amateur."

"No, wrong direction. You know this, we talked all about it a couple years ago, before I went to Ames. I want to do something where what I make is actually used. Where if it's good, it's good because it works, not because it looks good."

He nodded, and gestured at me with his tea. "Yes, exactly. That's exactly what I thought too. The other stuff might have been good, it might be well written, but it was self-indulgent. It wasn't in service to anything but itself."

We settled into silence. After a while, he went back to sorting his papers. I went in to wash dishes.

1

A week or so before he died, Uncle Eb had a moment; one of those snaps out of the morphine-drip haze that come over advanced terminal patients sometimes. I was sitting by his bed, reading silently, and he lifted his head to me, and said, "Do you know what I think happens when you die?"

His eyes were very big at the end, his skin had shrunken around his skull. The skin on his arms had splotches on it, as if he were twenty years older than he was, and a not-healthy, un-pink color behind it. He was dying.

Well, the short answer was yes, we had talked about that at some length. It had been a major subject of conversation the prior month. He did not believe in an afterlife, or heaven, or reincarnation. He thought death was the other end of the thread that the three Fates spun, measured, and cut. He had other thoughts, long elaborated meditations on how reality was framed by perception and how hard it was to formulate a vision of an unobserved universe, a world without a self in it... but that was basically it. So I nodded. But he shook his head. He had new information.

"Your whole life," he continued now, "you're becoming something else. We're always changing into someone different than we were before. And then, when you die, that stops. You stop becoming."

I nodded, and shrugged. "Yeah, I guess that's true."

"I mean," he went on, his eyes bright like they often were when he had hold of something interesting, "that's how we know we're alive."

"Changing?"

"Exactly. Becoming something different than we were."

I thought of something, "You still change after you die. Your body falling apart, cells collapsing and stuff." I know he was OK talking this way. He did it all the time. He nodded now.

"True, but it isn't you any more. The thing that was you... it stops changing, and when it does, so do you!" It seemed kind of circular to me, but I didn't say anything.

I was quiet for a while, then asked, "Are you still becoming?"

He smiled, "For a little while still, I suppose. Sure." His eyes narrowed a millimeter. "You're becoming someone different too. I'd like to see that." He looked me, just for a moment, the looking-right-to-the-middle-of-you look he reserved for his most interesting students. Then he looked away, saying, "Sorry."

I was trying not to cry now. "I'll miss that too." Dying people say sad things. That's just what comes out of their mouths sometimes. I gave him a kiss on his forehead. He let out a little "Oh, I didn't mean to upset you" sigh, and then just an utterly tired sigh.

His bedroom had become something different too. It had been a private refuge—I was never welcome there particularly, even after living with him for a decade. Now he was never alone for long—he had a nurse who came twice a day, and I filled in, and he had visitors. This was his new living room, while he was dying.

"A thing that would be beautiful," he said, less focused already. "A thing that would be lovely is some chicken soup. I'm feeling cold."

"OK, Uncle Eb," I said. "I'll go get you some chicken soup." He nodded and leaned back to rest some more. By the time I had reached the door, he was snoring slightly.

That was the last really fully lucid moment I had with Eb. I think about that conversation a lot. It reminds me to wonder what I'm becoming.