Weltschmerz

I may in my imagination throw a point high up in the air, or drop it into the depths where I cannot reach it with my body. But in order to make it plausible . . . I must draw it with a pen and write the word "point" next to it, so that the point will mean "point."

—Albrecht Dürer, The Painter's Manual

He who referred to his wife as "my good Agnes," and always in connection with the maid—simple girl who cried out in the midst of a miracle, crosses dropped from the sky onto the clean white shirts of her master— what could he say to a creature so devoid of irony, she couldn't even laugh when he yelled Come out of the rain? Still, the century's fresh. Three days' journey to view a beached whale, and by the time he arrives, the whale has been swept to sea again. He stays a while anyway, collects rocks, sketches a Negress so plump and shy she can't lift her eyes from the tops of his hobnailed boots. Morosity, he writes later, is the penalty for too much thought without exercise. So he digs Dame Sorrow out of metal, carves her slouched among orbs and compasses, swathed in grim drapery—and yet it is his own jaw etched in fury, his gaze he finds burning beneath those extravagant curls. What goes up must come down: the maid saw that with her own silly eyes. Throw up your hands, put it down on paper, in ink . . . what can one say to a woman who refuses to pose nude, even for a famous artist? Gather up your stones, your crab carapaces, your smudged equations for human perfection— and remember a green brooch for the melancholy Agnes.