Hanging On

Standing at the used-book counter, you decided that if you never again
laid eyes on George de La Tour's Joseph the Carpenter or Goya's The Third of May, 1808,
or Decorative Figure against an Ornamental Background, its Cubism posed against the grain
of a classical tradition, it would be worth it.
The High Baroque The Blinding of Samson, a clear example of Rembrandt in Amsterdam
was something you would just as soon forget, its theatrical light and violence
forcing you, perhaps, to draw an all too easy parallel between Samson's infatuation
and your own, and to realize the way the old cliché about love and blindness makes sense.

But what you couldn't do without, what you trimmed so carefully from the top-right
corner of page 221, was figure 11-6: West facade, Notre-Dame, Paris. And I am left
to imagine the Gothic architecture and to wonder who she was that you couldn't bear to miss.
You even left the right margin of the page, the edge of the Parisian sky, clouded heights
and a glimpse of roof tops tucked inside the fold of the spine, evidence of a theft
left there to prove that you really had no interest in any of it except for this.