# 24 Paying Attention Is Inviting a Story into Being

On female heads, a photo essay—Rome, Italy

I love female heads. I love looking at them, hearing from them, and imagining what they’re thinking.

Last week, in the small Pietro Canonica Museum and the great halls of the Capitoline Museums in Rome, I paused in front of many busts, sculptures and statues of women, mythical or real. I looked into determined, bored, anxious, serene, wistful, angry, haughty, shy, and stubborn faces. And I realized I could write a story about each of them. Each head deserved and told a story.

I imagined I would post this essay today as a celebration. But after the US election results came in, this essay came out rather differently. It’s mournful and despondent. Still, I’m paying homage to these female heads. I focus my attention on them and let them lead the way.

“She had no faith in humanity. The look in someone’s eyes, the beliefs they espoused, the eloquence with which they did so, were, she knew, no guarantee of anything. She knew that the only life left to her was one hemmed in by niggling doubts and cold questions.”
—Han Kang

“And that’s the reason why there will never be any reforms. Because, instead of shouting, complaining, all I feel like is crying very softly and staying still, silent.”
—Clarice Lispector

“The scream
of an illegitimate voice
It has ceased to hear itself, therefore
it asks itself
How do I exist?”
—Adrienne Rich

“This society hasn't changed one bit. People who don't fit into the village are expelled: men who don't hunt, women who don't give birth to children.
For all we talk about modern society and individualism, anyone who doesn't try to fit in can expect to be meddled with, coerced, and ultimately banished from the village.”
—Sayaka Murata

“Once I was a great beauty and attended all sorts of cocktail-drinking, prize-giving-and-taking, artistic demonstrations, and other casually hazardous gatherings organized for the purpose of people wasting other people's time.”
—Leonora Carrington

“My mother always said something bad would happen. My mother was sure that sooner or later something bad would happen, and now I can see it with total clarity, I can feel it coming toward us like a tangible fate, irreversible.”
—Samanta Schweblin

“A wound gives off its own light
surgeons say.
If all the lamps in the house were turned out
you could dress this wound
by what shines from it.”
—Anne Carson

“ I had left my passport at an inn we stayed at for a night or so whose name I couldn’t remember. This is how it began. The next hotel would not receive me. A beautiful hotel, in an orange grove, with a view of the sea. How casually you accepted the room that would have been ours, and, later, how merrily you stood on the balcony, pelting me with foil-wrapped chocolates. The next day you resumed the journey we would have taken together.”
—Louise Glück

“Livid and Pallid were astonished at my outburst since I rarely express my opinion on any serious manner but only live out my destiny, which is to be, until my expiration date, laughingly the servant of man.”
—Grace Paley

Time to Say Goodbye

I have nothing to add to what the women above me have said.

With love,

Claire

P.S. Next week I’ll publish the second episode of Artists in the Wild and introduce you to a special friend who happens to be an award-winner dancer.