"In turning the pages of a volume of Flaubert's correspondence much read and heavily underscored by me about the year 1927 I came again upon this admirable sentence: "Just when the gods had ceased to be, and the Christ had not yet come, there was a unique moment in history, between Cicero and Marcus Aurelius, when men stood alone." A great part of my life was going to be spent in trying to define, and then to portray, that man existing alone and yet closely bound with all being." (Marguerite Yourcenar in "Reflections on the Composition" of Memoirs of Hadrian)
This fictionalized memoir of Hadrian opens with him waiting for death and writing a letter to his successor, the very young Marcus Aurelius. Here as throughout, the facts are intact but of only shadowy importance as the brilliantly constructed voice of the emperor is heard not as god or the impersonal political construct of the office but as a man preparing to leave his mortal form. The book does not begin with tales of his political conquests and failings but with reflections upon the nature and pleasures of love, "that mysterious play which extends from love of a body to love of an entire person."
"I shall never believe in the classification of love among the purely physical joys (supposing that any such things exist) until I see a gourmet sobbing with delight over a favorite dish like a lover gasping on a young shoulder. Of all our games, love's play is the only one which threatens to unsettle the soul, and is also the only one in which the player has to abandon himself to the lover's ecstacy. To put reason aside is not indispensable for a drinker, but the lover who leaves reason in control does not follow his god to the end."
The letter continues on in this same vein, the thoughts of a man who considers himself in his most naked state and not clothed in the garb of his office or place in history.
"I offer you here, in guise of corrective, a recital stripped of preconceived ideas and of mere abstract principles; it is drawn wholly from the experience of one man, who is myself."
Hadrian confides that he is equal parts instinct and training, and the book takes us on a journey alternating between the two. He redefines the Roman empire in the light of his own imagination and with the god-like authority assigned to him, and yet he is humanized again at the height of middle age by his love of the young man, Antinous, and the tragic outcome of that relationship. The duality of his existence stays with him until the very end of the book when his failing body is a constant reminder of his human limitations but his legacy still suggests the immortal.
"Life is atrocious, we know. But precisely because I expect little of the human condition, man’s periods of felicity, his partial progress, his efforts to begin over again and to continue, all seem to me like so many prodigies which nearly compensate for the monstrous mass of ills and defeats, of indifference and error. Catastrophe and ruin will come; disorder will triumph, but order will too, from time to time. . . . Some few men will think and work and feel as we have done, and I venture to count upon such continuators, placed irregularly throughout the centuries, and upon this kind of intermittent immortality."
The book was Richard's pick for The Wolves for September, and I have to admit I had no preconceived ideas about this one. Certainly did not expect to fall smitten with the language and the way in which the author imagines the voice of Hadrian filled with the benign self-deceptions of which we are all subject at the same time the best of him shines through the worst choices and impulses. He is like and not like others and therefore always apart, always alone. Touching. I took my time with this one, relishing every well-chosen word. Has me wondering about Yourcenar's other writings now.