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Wrens are among the very lightest of our birds, weighing one third of an ounce or ten grams, about the weight of two sheets of paper, too small to survive cold for long. The frost is murderous for them. In hard winters, they can be found roosting together, usually not more than ten in one place, but 61 were once found crammed into a sheltered nook. No wren spends the winter anywhere that January temperatures drop below –7 degrees Celsius and many in Europe migrate to escape the cold, either southwards—Swedish wrens have been known to fly 1,500 miles to northern Italy for a Mediterranean winter—or in the Alps down off mountains where they have summered.

British wrens are not so mobile and there can be little doubt that the birdhouse and its louvre-entrance had been a life-saver for this bird. At regular intervals, frost devastates them. Between January and March 1963 England suffered its coldest winter since 1740. There were widespread reports of high numbers of dead and dying birds. Moorhens, lapwings, mistle thrushes and song thrushes all died in numbers. Thousands of robins and blackbirds were found dead in the fields and under hedges. But no bird suffered more than the wren, whose population fell by 79 percent in that one winter. It took until 1967 for their numbers to recover.

There is no need to be sentimental about this. Whatever the winter, three-quarters of all wren chicks will die in their first year of life and almost 70 percent of the survivors die the following year, and 70 percent of those survivors the year after that. Most wrens can expect to live no more than two years. The oldest recorded was seven years and four months old.

The pattern repeats. After that harsh winter, there was a steep increase up to the mid-1970s, when a series of cold winters slashed the numbers again, with parts of the country seeing a mortality rate of more than two-thirds, only for the wrens to recover once more. The population went through a sleigh ride, crashing again in the winter of 1996, peaking in 2006, crashing in 2011, reaching an even higher peak in 2017, dipping again, before rising in Britain and Ireland in 2023 to a record 11 million wren territories (each with a male bird and potentially several mates). The wren is now the commonest bird in the British Isles. They may summon our nurturing instincts but we need have no fear for them. They combine spectacular vulnerability with spectacular resilience, and it is a successful genetic strategy. They remain small because it is less costly to maintain a small body, even if smallness makes them vulnerable to the cold. Wren genes can risk mass destruction at regular intervals on the assumption that after the crash growth will return. Averaged out over decades, wren populations are almost stable.

When King Lear looked for a symbol of the sexuality that ruled the world, it was the insects and the wren he chose.


The motor for this multi-generational life pattern is an urgent erotic energy. The answer to death is sex. If the wrens suffer in cold winters, their full-on approach to breeding will start to refill the niches the following spring, a fierce compulsion to propagate that has driven it to world success. Like many other wrens, ours began as an American species, and the sheer vehemence of its tiny life has driven it, drop by drop

 territory by territory, across the whole of Eurasia.

Look at a wren and you are not seeing a sweet little fragmentary being but the demands of life itself, the product of tens of millions of generations bundled into a tiny round cocktailed package. Its evolutionary history is scarcely believable. It flies at a little more than twelve miles per hour, and is known in Shetland as “the wee brown button… too much like a mouse to lay eggs,” but wrens have spread from the Atlantic coast of Canada to the Pacific Northwest of the United States, across the Aleutians, island by island, each one with a different subspecies, to Japan, and on to Tibet and the Himalayas, thriving in Sikkim and Kashmir, to the shores of the Caspian and Turkestan, on into Europe, up to 7,700 feet in the snows of Psiloriti in Crete, to the High Atlas in Morocco, to France, Britain, and Iceland and only stopping short of the shores of Greenland. Wrens have landed and developed into separate subspecies on St Kilda and Fair Isle. Its essence is not vulnerability but vibrancy.

The spectacular life-drive of the wren has long been recognised deep within European culture, having played a part in a pair of rituals that survived until the twentieth century. The first took place either on 26 December, St Stephen’s Day, or Twelfth Night, 6 January. Men and boys would beat the hedgerows until they caught or killed a wren. The bird would be nailed to a pole or put in a cage dressed with ribbons that were tied into holly and ivy and other winter greens. The shrine would then be taken from house to house, where the “wren boys” would sing at the door and ask for food and drink. In return the householders would be given “lucky feathers from the bird.” At the end of the day the wren, by now almost naked, would, if not already dead, be solemnly killed and buried.

In the depths of winter, a tiny radiant creature was captured, sacrificed, reverenced and buried. This was the remains of a fertility rite, a ritual to banish the deathliness of winter and, like all sacrifices, to offer up the beautiful in the hope of appeasing the brutal and destructive forces of the world. Winter sacrifice of the wren was accompanied by a spring version, when the bird was again captured and displayed in little boxes decorated with leaves and spring flowers, though this time not killed but honoured before being released back into the wild. These May festivities were sexualised, a celebration of the power of the procreative drive in people as much as in birds. And the wren was well chosen because it does indeed turn out to be the most lustful of creatures.

Shakespeare knew it so that when King Lear looked for a symbol of the sexuality that ruled the world, it was the insects and the wren he chose:

The wren goes to ’t, and the small gilded fly does lecher in my
sight.
Let copulation thrive …
To ’t, luxury, pell-mell …

Sheer procreative energy and sexual demand on the wing is what the little cocked tail and the bright habits of the wren’s darting, dancing body, popping in and out of the shadows, now say to me. It is a ten-gram bundle of desire.

With the last of the frosts, growing light levels make deep physiological changes in them, as in all birds. In the females, as the days lengthen and brighten, the egg-laying mechanism grows and thickens. In the males, the testicles start to grow by a factor of a hundred or more. A winter testicle that might occupy less than a cubic millimetre—a mustard seed—could be almost one hundred cubic millimetres—the size of a pea—by mid-April, having increased in size by four or five cubic millimetres a day until it occupies three percent of the wren’s body, pumping it full of aggressive male hormones.

Wrens now begin their preparations for breeding. They re-establish the boundaries of their territories by singing their hard, metallic territorial songs at any of up to seven neighbouring rivals. When not singing, the males start to build what are called cock nests, often made only of sticks roughly laid together, or in this wood of moss torn from the boles of fallen trees.

These nests are signals of their own excellence made to the females, who have much larger and overlapping territories and who in early spring roam the woods and rough grounds looking for suitable mates. Nests are expensive to make. Each one can take between half a day and five days to build. By the time it is finished, the cock nest weighs on average four times as much as the bird that created it.

This expense is part of the point. A high-quality cock is one that builds strings of nests (the most that have ever been found is twelve on one wren’s territory) and female wrens judge a male by how many candidate nests he has made. The more a wren has built, the more likely it is that a female will mate with him. He controls an acre or even two—a lot of land for a small bird. Other, bigger songbirds tend to hold less ground: a reed warbler only 500 square yards, a willow warbler about a third of an acre, a blackcap or a garden warbler a little more. It seems that a wren in particular depends for his well-being on making something of a show in the world, part of the widespread phenomenon in nature of the displayed handicap: if a male peacock can cope with such a tail, or a wren waste so much energy on unused nests, he is a mate worth having.

He sings and displays high in his territory, with his tail erect. Scientists have found a correlation between the length of that tail and high breeding success. Huge testicles, a long upright tail standing high above him, and an extensive, nest-filled territory with plenty of cover in which to hide: these are the foundations of wren triumph.

Once he has filled his spreading acres with potential homes, he finds a female prospecting and takes her on a tour, showing her nest after nest with a sweet cooing, quite unlike the machine-gun rattle he fires off at his male rivals. He sings outside or on top of each one and then inside to demonstrate its qualities. He is advertising to her the genetic likelihood that her offspring will also be top birds, capable of controlling and furnishing a territory as splendidly as he has. She is choosy. Female wrens have been seen flying from one territory to another, taking the tour and moving on to see if they could improve their chances. Her investment, after all, is in the even more energy-expensive process of creating, laying and incubating eggs.

Huge testicles, a long upright tail, and an extensive territory: these are the foundations of wren triumph. 

Wren coupling is less like a marriage than a merger. Both birds are more interested in profitable outcomes than the lovability of their partner. The fact that he has persuaded her to fit out and lay in one of his nests does not stop him courting other females or showing them the other nests he has made, nor mating with them and fathering several further broods that summer, each with a different hen. Individual cock wrens can have up to nine wives in one year. She too, having raised her chicks in May or June, will not hesitate to find another cock in another territory (almost never the same wren again) to lay and raise a second, third or fourth brood before the summer comes to an end. Polygyny rules, the male wrens holding their accommodating territories, the females cruising between them, the genetic material proliferating through the woods.

In this way, even though a variety of predators take a fifth of all nests, if not more, removing both eggs and nestlings, the population pump restores the damage the winters have wrought.

It is as if the wrens are the matadors of the songbird world. Each time they add a stick or a piece of moss to their cock nests, the wren will sing snatches of song at steady intervals beside it. Here I am! This is me! Look at Nest Seven! It is one way in which birders can locate the otherwise well hidden and disguised structures the birds have made.

It is a paradox. Make every effort you can to conceal the precious nest and then shout about its location to all enemies and predators. The ornithologists Matthew Evans and Joe Burn have speculated that this is a flamboyant gesture by the male wrens. If they are doing something that carries with it a high possibility of harm, they are demonstrating to any passing hen a quality that might be called courage, or at least bravado. Who but a top wren would dare in the omnipresent face of the enemy to sing about his nests so clearly? In the shrubland of Hollow Flemings, the kind of territory a wren likes to inhabit, with plenty of bramble and bracken, I was surrounded by unseen nests. Its acre or two would have been the size of a city block for a wren, full of hidden alleyways and rewarding corners, its geography and resources intimately known by the bird who would have spent nearly all its life there, familiar with the routes through, the resting places, the convenient bypasses. Only the occasional sight of a wren hop-skipping in the shadows between the leaves and the insistent territorial song gave their pervasive presence away. ♦

Adam Nicolson is the author of many books on history, landscape, and great literature, including

ser-martin

A Ten-Gram Bundle of Desire

At times, the length of Edie and Marie’s friendship, a full half of their lives—the entirety, so far, of both of their adulthoods—at times it felt that knowing someone this intimately and for such a critical duration had been and may continue to be the main event of Marie’s life. Being in love and later being married had been more urgent, more time-consuming, and in some ways more intimate, but nothing had felt more central and reliable than the conversation that had been happening between the two of them, and, at least until recently, with K. This long witnessing, on even ground—unlike the angled perspective between parent and child or the concave mirror of marriage—had created an unwritten record within each of them about how the other had or had not changed, an archive of actions and habits that became more detailed and more critical with every passing year.

Marie had met K and Edie when she was 17, just shy of 18, gawkish and awkward and closeted, freshman year, still a child in her newly adult body. K and Edie, who’d spent their whole childhoods together, adopted her into their friendship as if they’d been looking for her all this time, and many years ago, though Marie could hardly stand to recall this now, K had told her that she, on her 24th birthday, was 

, a statement she would have been unable to accept from anyone else, not from a girlfriend, not from her own family, and when K’s sister used this exact phrase in her vows to Marie on their wedding day, unaware of what it echoed, Marie had blushed. She knew it was a lie.

As a girlfriend she hadn’t been easy to love, and as a wife she knew she still wouldn’t be easy to love. Marie was melancholic, indecisive, and anxious. She had insomnia so strong it was often contagious, and when she did sleep she hogged the blankets. She couldn’t cook, barely cleaned, and had a regular habit of getting drawn into long conversations with neighbors and colleagues when she should have been on her way home for dinner or carrying out an errand she promised she’d do or meeting her wife somewhere on the rare nights they went out. Above all she knew she wanted too much from romantic love, held it to impossible standards, wanted it to totally redeem her, somehow, effortlessly and constantly. But Marie did believe that she was good at friendship, easy in it, never asking anything unreasonable of the platonic, always relaxing into the human texture, the natural ebbing and flowing of her bonds with K and Edie. She gave herself up without tension into friendship, respected her friends enough to allow them to change her.

It was Edie who had, one day toward the end of their third year in college, said to Marie,

. And she didn’t have to say more than that. Marie knew exactly what Edie meant, yet it was only in hearing Edie make this observation about this change that Marie suddenly knew and felt it to be true—that tenacious streak of self-hatred, that ambiguous but inescapable sense of being a failure, the stiffened way she’d been occupying her body—for years it had been lifting but had lifted almost entirely the moment that Edie said this—

—or at least the first layer of it had lifted, and Marie knew the only reason this change had been possible was the way she’d been absorbed into K and Edie’s world—they, the pair of friends who’d come to college together, platonic prom dates, everyone said they’d be together in the end, those kind of friends. Even as children they knew they were already together in the end—it was already the end, and they were already together. K and Edie’s relationship seemed to be the most radical and rare thing to Marie—a true marriage, a marriage without marriage—and for years she’d thought herself ancillary to the two of them, a role she felt at home in, an additional person, a spare, a friendly ghost, until it was clear, all at once in the August she turned 21, that she was, a shock to herself, no less essential, just a newer element, the obvious third point of the triangle.

The three of them had lived in a crooked and cheap little apartment for a time during and after college, the soft and uncomplicated years before jobs and partners and graduate school and travel had peeled them apart, and though each of those transitions had seemed final or potentially final, none had yet proven so. The moves to other cities or other apartments in the same city seemed to signal the end of an era and the likelihood that it would never be quite like this again, that they’d never live together again, that the nature of this family was once again changing. But relationships that had seemed permanent had ruptured, jobs were lost, new moves were needed, and graduations ended in nothing but a more advanced state of the confusion that had led to grad school in the first place, and it was then that one of them always returned to one or the other or both of them, hovering for a few weeks or months in a guest room, changing their lives once more with the assurance that their conversation and their jointly held archive and their shared support may actually be the most stable thing in their lives, and though other aspects of adulthood may peak or crash, this thing between the three of them would change shape but never reach a conclusion.

It was clear that K and Edie were the axis of her life, though it seemed real adults were supposed to forge that kind of centrality elsewhere.

In fact, the possibility of a diminished potency in her relationships with K and Edie had been the only fear Marie could not even bring herself to confess to her wife in the months before the arrival of the twins. All the other fears—the medical and mortal fears, the fears of their marriage getting filleted by two babies, the financial and logistical fears, the fear of failure—they had all seemed more dismissible than the worry she felt that she might lose her friends. It was clear that K and Edie were the axis of her life, though it seemed real adults were supposed to forge that kind of centrality elsewhere.

Marie’s wife had always been certain that bearing and raising children was a central if not the sole purpose of her life, a certainty that was sometimes unsettling in its unquestioned steadiness, but Marie also knew her wife’s certainty would be the lighthouse of their family life, the velocity that kept the whole thing aloft.

Then the twins came. They had been manageably unruly, without any major or lasting problems in their behavior or health or temperament, and Marie’s transformation into a parent had not (as she had silently feared) ended her friendships with K or Edie, and it had even, in some ways, enriched them. Edie would occasionally obtain permission from her partner to visit Marie and the twins for a weekend, and she naturally became a child around the children, getting on the floor with them, inventing absurd games. When Edie looked up at Marie from the twins’ angle, each saw new dimensions in the other.

Alone with the twins, noticing how intensely they surveilled Marie from their car seats and high chairs, how they seemed to forget nothing and catalogued everything about their parents—words used in passing, momentary flickers of emotion, loose promises made then broken—Marie had often thought of and longed for the softer ways her friends had watched her, how different it was from the nonstop, existential intensity of those two little sets of eyes. Marie’s wife did not, she knew, share this irritation at being watched so closely all the time, and it was possible, Marie thought, that her wife’s innate impulse toward birth and child-raising had really been about this, all along—the desire to be witnessed with such life-or-death intensity, for her children to create hyperrealistic and micro-detailed portraits of their mother, and to live beneath them for the rest of their lives. Knowing this, knowing that these people who did not yet exist could be created and would in turn create this portrait of her—was this what Marie’s wife envisioned as she walked with determination and authority into a sperm bank, mercilessly studied the options, and made her choice without hesitation?

During the years Marie had helped raise the twins, feeding them and ferrying them around and tucking them in and waking up with them once more, she felt that though there was so much humbling clarity in these daily acts, the one-directional devotion of parenting also felt a little demented and compulsive—similar to the way, at the height of her smoking, she’d sometimes realize she was inhaling from a cigarette she had no memory of lighting, like there was a ghost inside of her that smoked without her awareness—like there was a ghost inside of her that went through the actions of parenting without her conscious participation. But she was good at it, she was told. Everyone said so.

Now that her marriage and relationship with the twins and her friendship with K had been severed in the course of a single afternoon, Marie’s relationship with Edie was the most long-lasting thing in her life—Edie, Jesus, fucked up, feral, and precious as she is—and Marie is coming close to crying now, though she’s smiling, watching Edie still talking about her exploits, remembering how Edie has always been able to give the best advice but never to take it, and how irritated Marie has always been by Edie’s tendency to disappear for months on end, then show up as if she’d been there all along.

Marie is still watching her friend recount the details of some small orgy, distantly registering the facts of the event, but mainly she is just watching Edie’s face, the wild gaze of someone newly introduced or reintroduced to the world. It’s in that faint glimmer in her skin, in her eyes, her gestures, and of course her overblown word choice, her breathless way of speaking, the way she fidgets the fray on her shorts, curling her legs unnaturally in her chair, as if she isn’t used to being alive, as if the life in her is constantly at risk of spilling out, rushing out everywhere and into everything.

and Marie says she doesn’t know, that she’s just out of it, but Edie asks again, 

Edie sits up, alert and formal as she recites an answer that seems rehearsed, how sexuality was one of the most beautiful and simple ways for a person to leave their mind and interact with the subconscious, or how sex was one of the few ways to exist directly as a body, as an animal, as a mortal and dying thing, and how sex also brought your awareness out of yourself and into the consciousness of another and how essential that was—but when Edie reaches the point in her response about the Paraclete, the soul, salvation, Marie pours another glass of mezcal and tilts it back quickly.

But she had no self-awareness sometimes, and it was true that what Edie had been through was terrible, and it was true that it was good for her now to be finding pleasure in something, regardless of how frivolous, but Edie’s recently past problems and their subsequent solutions all seemed so small right now, while Marie’s problems were ongoing, they were serious and inescapable and quite frankly they were tragic, and perhaps the most tragic problem was that she could no longer have a reasonable relationship with the twins, and maybe even worse than that she was beginning to feel that the twins were never really hers in the first place, as they had never been genetically hers—the product only of her wife’s body and the anonymous substance from the sperm bank—and though the genetics of the twins had never seemed consequential in the years she had lived with and raised them, her lack of genetic claim and her lack of domestic responsibility now amounted to the fact that though she’d once had children, she now no longer had children, and perhaps they didn’t even miss her, didn’t need her, that she had perhaps always been something like a nanny in their life, removable, extraneous, easy to send away. It had become difficult to even say the word “my” before the word “children.” 

What K saw. That you were seeing someone else.

Seeing is a weird word for it, isn’t it? Seeing—I can see you right now. I’ve seen a lot of people.

I do know what you mean. It just happens not to be a particularly simple situation, and no one knows that because no one asked me anything. K didn’t ask me anything. My wife didn’t ask me anything. You didn’t even call.

Brenda was house-sitting and tickets were cheap.

So you went to Greece for a month. Great.

It’s just that—you’re the sort of person that goes to Greece for a month, and I’m the kind of person who lives here.

But Marie doesn’t know where to start, especially with someone who felt that sex with someone she barely even knew was or even could be something sacred when, in Marie’s life, sex had mainly been something that brought people into her life or sent people out, the beginnings and endings of things.

How to tell it? She wants to tell Edie the truth, but she doesn’t trust herself to know it.

Helena claimed that she distrusted the urge toward sex, how it seemed that the people who regularly followed that urge tended to be led around in circles. 

, Marie says, but already she was getting things wrong. It hadn’t seemed like a friendship; it had seemed, for reasons Marie could not completely discern, like a game, a series of challenges from this woman, Helena, a parent she’d met at day-care pickup years ago now, a mother with whom she’d exchanged numbers on the pretext that their kids might want to hang out, even though they could both tell that their kids didn’t like each other, a fact made painfully clear on that one playdate a week later that ended with Helena’s kid pushing one of the twins over and the other twin retaliating by taking a handful from the sandbox and forcing it into his mouth. 

, Helena said, and Marie just felt her head nodding. 

Anyway, this woman is married, and anyway, this woman is straight, and anyway, it’s nothing

, and the next time they saw each other didn’t happen until nine months later, a text from a name she’d nearly forgotten, a slow day at work anyway, an excuse to go downtown for lunch. That evening, when Marie’s wife asked her how her day had been, Marie had simply not mentioned her lunch with Helena. She didn’t tell her about how Helena had launched immediately into the most intimate conversation Marie had ever had with anyone she didn’t actually, technically, know—Helena had been thinking about the nature of desire and power and men and women and how the reasons she had gotten married just ten years ago now already seemed so retro and regrettable, almost unmentionable, but she did believe in sticking it out, in sticking around even when it seemed doomed, when it seemed like she may never again feel 

real sexual pleasure with another human body, 

 What had even been the purpose of sexual pleasure in the first place? 

she asked, undercutting the urgency with which she had just uttered the phrase “real sexual pleasure with another human body,” and Helena claimed that she distrusted the urge toward sex, how it seemed that the people who regularly followed that urge tended to be led around in circles, but still, lately she spent a lot of time thinking about how being in a couple seemed entirely at odds with being in a family and how it might be better if all the women just took all the children away from the men and raised them collectively, without the men, men who seemed only to get in the way, men who seemed so often to be no different than children, just larger. 

Oh, but I don’t really mean it, I do love my husband, what am I even saying, he’s a good father, a great father

 And Marie had tried to reassure her that this all seemed to be normal in a long marriage, the irritation at the edges of it, though Marie did not, at least not consciously, feel any of that irritation in her own long marriage.

, she said to Helena, an observation that seemed to calm Helena, a little, but Marie also noticed the tragic little tick in Helena’s voice when she asked and rapidly answered two questions she’d pushed together into a single line:

 But you’re married right to a woman right? 

Marie paused as if she needed to remember whether she was married (right?) to a woman (right?), then she said, as if reading the phrase, 

. The lunch went on, both of them increasingly tense, overly aware of their own breath and each other’s every gesture, and at times Marie thought she was doing something wrong just by being there (though she couldn’t identify what, exactly, was wrong with it), and at other times she thought she was being presumptuous to assume anything indecent about this lunch of salade niçoise and chenin blanc with Helena, whose intentions, personal history, desires, middle name, fantasies, and current mental health status were all still to be, soon, discovered.

A month passed before they met again, a duration of time that made Marie feel that perhaps deciding not to mention the existence of this lunch with Helena to her wife (or even the existence of Helena) had been absolutely fine, as there was nothing to mention, and Marie accepted the spontaneous invitation for a coffee and a walk—

—thinking that she would, of course, tell her wife about Helena afterward, but the morning coffee spiraled into a long walk through a cemetery and a discussion of the purpose of sexual fantasy in general and the contents of their fantasies in specific, a conversation so frequently punctuated with 

 that shame itself was even worn away and nothing was taboo any longer. They touched only once that day—as they parted Marie had tried to use the vaguely formal contactless bow she’d gotten away with last time, but Helena went in for the European cheek-kiss and missed, landing on Marie’s neck, wrecking Marie’s composure for a fraction of a second, a fraction that Helena had recognized and taken in, and from that day onward their meetings became more frequent and passed with greater intensity, in stranger and stranger locations in order not to be observed, the secrecy of an affair but without any of the traditional forms of contact—without actual sex, for instance, without so much as a kiss. It was like a nineteenth-century courtship, but with conversations that verged on the pornographic; brief, one-hour meetings and occasional phone calls during which they divulged secrets, asked questions that neither had ever asked anyone, and, eventually, each woman dared the other to fuck their spouses with special assignments—positions to use, words to say, and images to imagine. But they never touched each other—not like that—not physically, and because of that lack of contact Marie began to think of her time with Helena as time she was spending alone, or time she was doing something like therapy, or as time she was reading a book, a book called Helena, a book with whom she was on speaking terms. And maybe it could have gone on like that even much longer than their three years, with many extended breaks, which they each filled with remorse, swearing the whole thing off, laughing at it privately, then giving in again, sending a quick text, meeting up immediately to continue this erotic game. Then there was the day they each confessed that this was insane, it had been years, and all their discussions and dares and disclosures had to stop—

, Marie said, and though she wasn’t entirely sure what she meant by that, Helena agreed, and from there they went straight to a hotel, texted lies about work to their spouses, and stayed in that hotel until it was time to go home and tuck their children into bed. ♦

by Catherine Lacey. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Catherine Lacey is the author of the novels 

, which is out this week from Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 

Rule of Threes

“Welcome to Port Authority, New York City. Please watch your belongings as you exit the bus,” the bus driver’s cheery voice announced.

I stepped through the glass doorway of the bus terminal into the sidewalks of Times Square just two weeks after my 19th birthday. It was 12:30 on a Saturday night in late September 1975. It was warm but not stifling hot like it had been in Florida. I didn’t have much of a warning for the bombardment of people, flashing lights, and signs that hit me everywhere I turned. It looked like something right out of a TV show. I was tired from the bus ride but felt a rush of energy as life gushed all around me. Across from the Port Authority on Eighth Avenue below 42nd Street was a chorus line of girls, wearing the shortest skirts and the highest heels I had ever seen, grabbing at men as they walked by. A half a block down I saw a hotel sign hanging on a hinge over the doorway. I slung my backpack on and walked across the street to the hotel. Just as I reached for the doorknob, a girl, not much older than me, with a feather boa draped around her neck, grabbed my upper arm.

“Hey, Cutie, you goin’ in there?” She surprised me. “Yeah,” I said.

She looked puzzled. “You mean you’re going in there and you don’t need a date?”

I was getting irritated. “This is a hotel, isn’t it?”

“Yeah, sure it’s a hotel. But…” She paused. “But most people don’t go in there without a date.” She looked me up and down. My backpack was getting heavy. “You just get here or something?” She nodded her head to the bus station and asked, “From where?”

“You ever been to New York before?” I shook my head no.

“You know anybody here?” I shook my head no.

She smiled at me, not her working-girl smile, but more like the way my sister Lucy smiled at me just before she left me out on the highway in Florida. She pulled me close to her and gave me a kiss on the cheek. “Listen, you take care, sweetheart.” She grabbed another man as he passed us by. “Hey, wanna date?” She disappeared into the river of people on the sidewalk.

It was dark inside the door of the hotel. A steep flight of stairs led up to a bulletproof window. The wooden steps creaked and moaned as I climbed to the top. The rail wobbled in my hand. A big guy with a big stomach and faded tattoos on his forearms came up to the window and looked down at me. He seemed surprised when I told him I wanted a room for the night.

I said for the second time in the last five minutes, “This is a hotel, isn’t it?”

“Yeah, wait, hold on a minute.” He left his booth. I could hear him talking to someone. When he came back to the window he said, “20 dollars.” I thought that was kind of expensive since the night before I’d paid $17.99 at a Motel 6 just outside of DC, and it was in much better shape than this place. I pulled out my Traveler’s Checks and started to sign my name.

“You have to watch me sign this check or else it’s no good.”

“Oh shit. We don’t take Traveler’s Checks.”

“Why not?” I asked. “It’s good. You can cash them anywhere. I thought everyone took Traveler’s Checks.”

“Let me see some ID.” I pulled my driver’s license out of my wallet and stuck it under the slot beneath the bulletproof glass. He looked at me and then the picture of me on my license. Then he examined my signature on the check. He had a washed-out tattoo of a heart with a knife going through it on his forearm. Blood dripped off the tip of the knife. He slid my license back to me underneath the thick glass window.

“You from Kansas City, kid? I was there once. On my way to LA. Stopped and got gas. Had some of the best damn barbecue I ever ate there.”

He stuck a clean white towel and a key with a room number scratched into it under the thick glass window, and then buzzed me in through a big beat-up metal door.

“Up one flight and down to the left.” He nodded with his head towards the staircase.

My room was big enough for a bed and an old, rusted, white porcelain sink. The window had bars over it and faced a brick wall about two feet away. I tried to open it but couldn’t because it was sealed shut with nails and layers of paint. My fingers turned black from the dust and soot on the windowsill. As I rinsed them off in the sink a roach shot out from underneath and ran up the wall. I pulled my transistor radio out of my pack and propped it up on the edge of the sink. I found a Top 40 station and stretched out on the bed. The sheets smelled like fresh laundry. Downy fresh. The mattress was lumpy. Every time I moved, the bedsprings groaned and pressed into me. An R&B song came on the radio that I knew from the Miami station. Guys singing 

 in high falsetto voices. I liked that song.

I couldn’t sleep, so I went for a walk. It was still warm out, the middle of the night, and the streets were full of people. The sky was black but it felt like daylight because of all the storefronts, streetlights, and movie marquees. 42nd Street was lined with porno shops that had pictures of nude people having sex in their front windows. Kids about my age tried to sell me drugs, but I didn’t want any. I walked down 42nd Street from Eighth Avenue to Broadway and looked at Times Square. One thing I liked about New York was that it didn’t look like other American cities. My first disappointment from hitchhiking and traveling around the country was that almost every city looked exactly the same, only the landscape was different. There were McDonald’s, IHOPs, and Denny’s in almost every suburb across America. Once you got through the miles of ranch-style homes, shopping centers, and fast food restaurants to the heart of the city, a small cluster of skyscrapers, there was nothing to do. Downtowns were dead after 6:00 pm. Anyone out on the street after dark was a sitting duck just asking to be harassed by the police. But New York wasn’t like that. It was piled on top of itself instead of spread out. You didn’t need a car to get around. From the minute I arrived I was surrounded by the feeling of 

 everywhere. It was like I had been plopped down in the middle of a giant school of fish and had to swim fast to keep up.

I woke up early in the morning ready to get out of that hotel and go look for the Empire State Building. I threw my backpack over my shoulders and headed down Eighth Avenue to 34th Street. The city didn’t look like the same place in the daylight. It was a brownish-grey, and the streets seemed almost deserted. All the flash and excitement of the night before had disappeared. I stopped and pulled a sweatshirt out of my pack because it had cooled off during the night. No more warm tropical Miami breeze. Fall was in the air.

A tall man with a camera around his neck walked up next to me and said, “You look like you’re either lost or you don’t know where you’re going.”

“I’m looking for the Empire State Building.” He laughed and said, “Look up.”

I looked straight up and realized I was standing at the base of the Empire State Building. It was so gigantic I hadn’t recognized it close-up. The man watched me as I took off my backpack and tilted my head, looking all the way up the sleek, tan building.

“If you think that’s tall, you should see the World Trade Center. It’s twice as tall.”

This was tall enough for me. Besides, the World Trade Center was new. I wanted to see this old building that I’d heard so much about since I was a kid.

“You should go to the top to see the view.” The man pointed to a revolving brass door, so I walked over and gave it a push. It was locked. A sign in the window said tours started at 10:00 am on Sunday. It wasn’t even 9:00 yet.

“You wanna go get some coffee?” I turned and looked at him. He was big with curly dark hair. He held up his camera and snapped a picture of me. “I’m a photographer. How about you?”

“What are you up to? You look like a runaway or something with that ugly-looking pack you’re carrying around.”

“I’m not a runaway. I’m just looking.”

“Oh. Well. Do you want to get some coffee with me or not? You don’t have anything to do until the building opens anyway. Come on.” He put his arm around my shoulders and tugged at me. I shrugged his arm off. He seemed nice enough. I wasn’t getting any weird vibes from him so I gave in and followed him down the street. At 34th and Fifth Avenue he pointed to a McDonald’s. People sat looking out on the street from tables on the second floor, above the entrance. I’d never seen a two-story McDonald’s before. Yellow cabs honked as the guy ran across the street in front of oncoming traffic. We went inside and got two coffees. I ordered some hash browns, too. He took the tray and led me up the stairs to a table by the window. It felt like I was in a foreign country.

“What’s your name?” “Joe. What’s yours?” “Bud.”

We shook hands. The sudden formality made me nervous so I laughed a little.

“I don’t mean to stick my nose in your business, but what exactly are you doing wandering around with that backpack?”

“Like I said, I’m just looking around. I’m on my way back home to Missouri from Miami and thought I’d stop by to see what New York was like.”

Bud stared at me. He lit up a cigarette. I looked down on the street at the people walking by. “You’re serious, aren’t you?”

“Yeah, I’m serious. Why wouldn’t I be? Haven’t you ever known anyone who’s gone traveling before?” I poured two nondairy creamers into my coffee and watched the white cream swirl around.

“Sure I have, but most of the people I know want to leave New York, not come here.” He exhaled a big cloud of smoke. “You know what? I’m not doing anything today. If you want, I can show you around. I’ll be your tour guide.”

I thought about it for a while. He asked too many questions. I liked looking around by myself, but I had no idea which way to go, really. All I knew was how to get back to the hotel and that was one place I didn’t want to go.

He said he would take me on a tour, but first he needed to go by his apartment to pick up another camera. We rode in a cab over to Ninth Avenue and West 20th Street. His apartment, on the 11th floor, was small. The entryway had framed pictures of him with Bette Midler and Carol Channing and autographed covers of programs from Broadway plays. There was barely enough room in the kitchen to walk around a table that was covered with dirty dishes and The New York Times. The other room, the living room/bedroom, was as small as the kitchen. At McDonald’s he told me he had a one-bedroom apartment, so I asked him where the bedroom was. He said I was standing in it. In the daytime it was a living room. At night the couch pulled out into a bed and it was the bedroom. From the window above the couch, I could see the Empire State Building over the roofs of the Chelsea district.

He dug around in a closet and found the camera he wanted. Then, when he was ready to go, he told me I should leave my pack there. I said, “Thanks, but no thanks.”

“Because that would mean I’d have to come back here later.” I figured he had ulterior motives and I wasn’t going to set myself up for another awkward situation. Men only wanted one thing.

“Okay, if you feel like carrying that thing around all day, it’s up to you. But you don’t have to.”

We took the subway down to the Staten Island Ferry and rode across for a quarter each. He paid for me and said, “My treat.” I said, “Big spender,” and he ruffled my hair. When the ferry passed the Statue of Liberty I was disappointed. I expected it to be gigantic, the size of the Empire State Building. But it was much smaller. A strong, cold wind blew across the water and into us. The skyline of Manhattan got smaller and smaller as we got closer to Staten Island. We stayed on the ferry and rode back without having to pay again. Bud knew lots of little tricks like that about the city.

After we rode on the ferry, Bud took me to Greenwich Village. We walked down Christopher Street and he explained to me the different types of homosexuals who hung out in that neighborhood. He said they preferred to be called “Gays.” “I don’t know why they chose that one,” he muttered. “There’s nothing ‘Gay’ about it, really.” This was 1975 and the Gay Liberation period was in full swing, so a lot of people were coming out of the closet and dressing flamboyantly. I saw a guy dressed as a cowboy in red leather chaps, a blue vest, and a white cowboy hat. Someone else was dressed in army fatigues, like he was a soldier. Bud pointed out a couple of men dressed head-to-toe in black leather and told me they were into “S and M.” I didn’t know what that was. He said they liked to beat each other up. He told me most guys weren’t as extreme as the ones we saw. There were lots of regular-looking guys who dressed low-key, like in blue jeans and bomber jackets. It seemed like all of them had mustaches and short hair.

Bud knew a lot of people. When he walked me through the Village, he introduced me to his friends. They were open and seemed genuinely glad to meet me. They didn’t act like it was bizarre or “wrong” for me to be traveling around by myself. No one asked me why I wasn’t in school, which was the first question I got from most of my hitchhiking rides. A few of them gave Bud a knowing wink. People were nice to me in New York. Even though I’d just arrived there, I didn’t feel weird like I did back home in Missouri. No one stared at me like on the bus in Baltimore. This city felt comfortable. Bud asked me if I wanted to go into a Gay bar. That made me uneasy. I didn’t really. He said it would be good for me to see what one was like and that it was no big deal. He walked me to one of his favorite bars called the Ninth Circle on a little side street. We stood at the bottom of the stone stairs that led up to the bar. I didn’t want to go in. I was afraid if I went in I’d turn queer and I didn’t want to be a big fag with everyone laughing at me. I didn’t want to be a lecherous old queen with a Southern drawl like that guy in Jacksonville Beach.

Bud laughed but then got serious when I told him this. He turned, facing me, putting his hands on my shoulders, and said, “Joe, what about all the guys I’ve just shown you walking around the Village? Do they look like big fags?”

He argued, “But not all of them. Right?”

I had to admit that a lot of the Gays he showed me looked fairly normal.

The beer calmed me and helped me get over my nervousness about being in a Gay bar for the first time. Now that I was inside I didn’t feel so threatened.

Inside the bar “Fly, Robin, Fly” by the Silver Convention played from the jukebox. That was another one I knew from the radio. The bar itself was long and narrow. The walls were covered with a light wood paneling. Past the bar was the jukebox and then a bench with little café tables that ran around the perimeter of the bar. There was space to stand out in the middle. Through the back door was a garden patio with people eating hamburgers at tables covered with giant umbrellas. Heads turned and guys looked us up and down as Bud and I stood in the doorway. Downstairs was a pool table. Bud said that’s where the hustlers hung out. I went down and looked around. Some guys were shooting pool and hanging out. There was nothing dangerous or sinister about them like the word “hustler” insinuated. They reminded me of my friends back in Missouri. Back upstairs, two men sat at the bar in a locked embrace, kissing. They were so engrossed they looked like they were going to tip off their stools at any moment. I tried not to stare but couldn’t help it, so I hid my face in the jukebox and read the entire list of selections. I found my song, “Sweet Sticky Thing,” and noted that it was by the Ohio Players. When I got back to Missouri I wanted to buy a copy of that record. The song that played the most was a disco tune called “Do It Any Way You Wanna.” It seemed like every other person who went up to the jukebox played it. There were no words except the title repeated over and over. The rhythm and beat of the song sank into me. I liked it. I liked the song and I liked hearing it at that bar. Bud brought me a beer in a big glass. The beer calmed me and helped me get over my nervousness about being in a Gay bar for the first time. Now that I was inside I didn’t feel so threatened. Like the song said, people were doing it whatever way they felt like. I felt a load lift off of my shoulders. Light, relieved. I started to relax.

Bud introduced me to an older guy who was dancing to the jukebox with a knit neck scarf like he was a burlesque dancer. He had a puffy face, droopy eyes, and a sweet mischievous smile. Bud told me that the guy was in some of Andy’s movies.

Bud stopped and looked at me surprised. “You really are a hick, aren’t you?”

I said, “What do you mean?” It pissed me off that all of a sudden Bud was acting superior to me. I didn’t like being called a hick. I was raised in the suburbs, not the country.

He said, “Andy. Andy Warhol. Do you know who that is?”

I got defensive. “Of course I know who that is.” Bud glanced at me sideways like he wasn’t convinced. Thinking of Andy Warhol made me think about one of my favorite meals, a grilled cheese sandwich and tomato soup made with milk. I wanted to have that as soon as I got home.

The man danced up to us and said in a stoned nelly voice, “Ohhhh! My Quaalude is kicking in…” He wiggled around to the music and rolled his eyes up to the ceiling. I told Bud that was exactly what I did not want to turn into. Bud said I had a long way to go. There were a couple of girls sitting at a table in the corner. That was another thing. I liked girls and didn’t want to quit hanging out with them. Bud said just because he didn’t want to sleep with a woman didn’t mean that he didn’t like women. He just preferred having sex with men. That was the first that Bud referred to himself as being Gay. I tried to let that comment slip by but kept it in the back of my mind. I didn’t want him trying anything funny with me. The girls smiled at me and I went over and started talking to them. When I got close I realized that one of them was a boy with long hair and makeup. I was surprised for a little bit, but actually liked it. I thought he was brave. They seemed okay. I said hello and told them I was from Kansas City and had been out hitchhiking. They said they were from Queens, and Manhattan was as far as they’d been away from home. The guy turned to the girl and said, “Oh! You’re from Queens? I’m from normal parents!” Then they cracked up laughing. I told them they should go to Kansas City sometime, that it would do them good to get away. They asked me who I was with and I pointed out Bud to them.

The boy said, “Ooooo, better watch out. I think he likes you ‘in that way.’”

The girl winked at me. “I think your friend’s cute. I wouldn’t mind liking him in that way.”

“Are you two boyfriend and girlfriend?” I asked. They laughed even harder.

She said, “No, honey! Excuse me… What are you thinking? I’m his fag hag, not his girlfriend.”

I’d never heard the term “fag hag” before and was shocked. Why would anyone call themselves something like that? A hag? She didn’t look like a hag to me. I was slightly appalled, but figured it must have been okay because no one was calling her a hag. She was the one who said it. People told me weird stuff all the time when I was traveling. I filed this term away in that category and pretended like I didn’t hear her.

Bud and I went back to his apartment. He made spaghetti for dinner and then pulled out the couch in the living room, turning it into the bedroom. He seduced me while we watched 

 on TV. I didn’t move. I just lay as still as possible and let him give me a blow job.

I stayed there for a couple of days. The second night I loosened up. We had sex and I let him fuck me. I was on my stomach. It was kind of boring. His body was about the same size as my dad’s. Kind of big and soft, but not hairy, and his stomach wasn’t as fat as Dad’s. I enjoyed sleeping next to him with his arm and leg draped over me much more than I did having sex with him.

I wandered around the city by myself in the daytime and then met up with Bud in the evening. I ate at a Chinese-Cuban restaurant on Eighth Avenue. I went there because after Miami, the Cuban was something familiar to me. But even there I had never been to a Chinese-Cuban place where the Chinese waiters and cooks spoke Spanish to each other. That was a bizarre mix to me. English was the Chinese guys’ third language. The rhythm of the city was starting to make sense to me. No matter how out of place I felt in Missouri, I felt completely normal in New York. ♦

Joe Westmoreland is the author of the novel 

, originally published in 2001 and excerpted below. He lives with his partner, the artist Charles Atlas, in New York City.

First Love

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Hermeto Pascoal, the visionary Brazilian composer and multi-instrumentalist, passed away on September 13, 2025. The following piece was written in 2023 to commemorate his performance at Pioneer Works. We share it now as a tribute to Hermeto's boundless spirit and lasting mark on music everywhere.

“When I came to earth, I came with a mission,” Hermeto Pascoal declares, looking distinctly wizard-like under his wide-brimmed hat and with his large white beard. We’re sitting in a hotel lobby in Manhattan’s Financial District, the morning after Pascoal’s sold-out show at Pioneer Works. For the 87-year-old Brazilian artist, music is not merely an artform or mode of expression, but an animating force. Throughout his six-decade-plus career, he’s consistently released music that has innovated and disrupted the world of jazz, building on Brazilian musical styles both contemporary and traditional with inventive, improvisatory gusto. He has earned a reputation even among giants; Miles Davis once remarked that he was “the most impressive musician in the world.” For him, nothing is off limits: everything he sees and hears is a creative tool. Throughout his life, this openness has led to intercontinental and unbridled works which have radically expanded the bounds of what music or an instrument can be.

“If you let it flow,” he tells me, “you’ll realize that sound is always there.” This typical, koan-like utterance turns my mind towards Pascoal’s ambitious, genre-traversing arrangements—music that incorporates numerous sounds and instruments. On “Gaio Da Roseira,” the 15-minute epic which closes his 1973 record 

, spare musical passages accentuate the breadth of individual sounds. The 

, a single-string Afro-Brazilian percussion instrument, is struck in various manners which unveil its textural complexities; later, flutes and drums exchange solos in ways that emphasizes their evolving rhythms. This structure is a pedagogical technique, inviting listeners to understand these instruments in an isolated manner before they emerge in a larger arrangement. When the full band breaks into song, everything feels brighter, and more immense: the whistle has a percussive flair, the piano phrases are breezy, and the drum beat shuffles with the vocals in a playful warp and weft. That the song ends with conversational chatter is a reminder that making music should be a social, convivial act.

Such joyful camaraderie was palpable from the beginning of Pascoal’s Pioneer Works show—his first in New York since 2010—as well as a certain wonder, for admirers of the aged master, about the impossibly youthful exuberance of his presence. When his five bandmates arrived on stage, they huddled around microphones and began sputtering and shouting in harmonious fashion. The members gesticulated and swung their heads back, until Pascoal finally entered the stage, assuming his position at a keyboard. The band launched into a slick groove led by winding sax melodies, and their ecstatic music filled the hall.

Born in a small town called Lagoa da Canoa, Pascoal couldn’t spend much time outside in northeast Brazil’s heat due to his albinism. As we converse in the hotel, he assures me that this condition was never a hindrance. Though he began playing flute at age eight and picked up the accordion from his father three years later—quickly outpacing him—Pascoal’s musical interests precede his time with traditional instruments. When he was seven years old, he would help out at his grandfather’s blacksmithing shop. “He would ask me to throw things away, but I wouldn’t,” he recalls. “I would hide them in my room and start building stuff.” His mom eventually walked into his bedroom to find it littered with scrap metal that Pascoal had hung on a clothesline. Where his mother saw garbage and disarray, Pascoal saw an entire world of possibility. He would play with this scrap metal before learning the flute or 

 (an eight-button accordion), but he didn’t call what he did music; he had never heard the word before. “They were just sounds, and they made sense to me.” He goes on to explain his lifelong curiosity. “I think in the same way that I did when I was seven,” he tells me. “My soul is the same, it’s just my body that’s grown up.” Be it with a symphonic orchestra, in his sextet, or solo, he approaches music intuitively but with purpose, often composing pieces in a manner where the planned and the improvised are impossible to discern.

“I think in the same way that I did when I was seven,” he tells me. “My soul is the same, it’s just my body that’s grown up.”

During Pascoal’s set at Pioneer Works, he occasionally took a seat, choosing not to play anything for minutes on end. I chalked this up to the weariness of age, but he explains that he wasn’t doing it to rest. “It’s to appreciate, to see the audience, and to feel better,” he assures me. Watching him sit there, happily bobbing his head to the music, I thought about how listening necessitates a sort of concentration that can be as demanding as playing music: receiving any sound is to be in a posture of ultimate sensitivity. It’s an insight that Pascoal has long nurtured, since his rural childhood, in bustling cities. He has been based in Rio de Janeiro for decades now, but in the 1970s spent several long stints in New York. “I wanted to play my flute but the neighbors would complain,” he says. After moving his practice outdoors, people began to congregate, mesmerized by his playing. He never performed any actual songs, though. Instead, he would tune in to the sounds around him and improvise. “A bird would sing and I would reply on the flute, or a fire truck would pass and I would play with it.”

The city’s sonic density, for Pascoal, was a constant source of inspiration. “Everything is together here—there are birds singing and fish swimming in ponds, there are cars and people and horse-drawn carriages. I consider all of it nature, and I really like that it’s all part of the entire atmosphere—

 music.” His stories of New York remind me of “Quando As Aves Se Encontram, Nasce O Som” (“When Birds Meet, Sound is Born”), from the 1992 Hermeto Pascoal e Grupo album

. It’s a brief track that cycles through a series of warbles and chirps, the Rhodes piano and percussion intermingling with the various avians. “O Galo Do Airan” is even more audacious, prominently featuring rooster crows amid boisterous instrumentation: drums and whistles, a piano and soprano saxophone, even a 

—an ox horn traditionally used by Brazilian shepherds.

The most astonishing bird sounds one can hear on a Pascoal recording are on “Papagaio Alegre,” the fourth track on the 1984 album 

. The song prominently features his pet parrot Floriano. Its coarse timbre takes on a multitude of feelings; at certain moments it sounds like rambunctious children, while at others it provides a counterpoint to other noises, some of which come from a percussion instrument made from a tape reel he calls the 

 (a portmanteau of the Portuguese words for “round” and “triangle”).

“Papagaio Alegre” is one of the most thrilling tracks in Pascoal’s discography because it showcases an approach to songwriting that rejects the way music is taught in schools. “They use a lot of theory but have it all wrong,” he laments. “Music is out in the world and you have to catch it before it flies away. Then you can write it on paper if you want to experience it again.” He thinks composers who have attended prestigious academies approach writing in the opposite direction, obsessed with using theory and putting their 

 creations out into the world. “There are limitations to formal reading, to formal writing and notation—they have their value, but don’t try to create nature from paper.”

The most famous of Pascoal’s fauna-featuring works is the title track from 

, the 1977 LP that made him a name outside of Brazil. While recording the album in Los Angeles, he brought local pigs into Hollywood’s Paramount Studio to record their squealing. (The family who owned the swine came as well to ensure they’d be treated humanely.) At first, their grunting accompanies a loping guitar figure, painting the animals as contemplative but firm. A nimble bassline then energizes the piece before a six-person group chant steals the show. The pigs slot nicely into the mix as an actual 

: their gruff grunting seamlessly blends with the freewheeling singing and laughter.

“When people graduate, they sometimes think they know stuff and hide behind their degree. That’s what dying is. When you think you know, that’s when you’ve really died.”

There were unfortunately no live animals at the Pioneer Works show in May, but Pascoal’s son Fabio did have a toy pig that made noise. He cycled between that, other toys, a kazoo, a whistle, a tambourine, a friction drum, and more. Like the rest of the band, he was embodying “universal music”—Pascoal’s apt term for a musical practice that’s born of regional styles and sounds from distinct worldly places, but that also transcends them. (“My mind is not geographically locatable, it’s something that goes beyond,” he tells me.) On 

, there’s a dissonant piano track, “Just Listen,” that pulls from the Brazilian duple-meter 

 rhythm, with frantic playing matched by playful shrieks. The song slots nicely beside a sweet and deceptively kaleidoscopic piece, “That Waltz,” whose 

—a lightweight friction drum from Brazil—could be mistaken for a bird.

I kept thinking about this phrase—“universal music”—while watching Pascoal and his group perform. Throughout the night, a circular colored light showed occasionally on a screen behind the musicians. About 30 minutes in, an orange light appeared right as an emphatic bassline was played, emanating a radiant sunrise. The next morning in his hotel, a smiling Pascoal tells me death doesn’t scare him at all. “People think about it as an end, but for me it’s just part of the journey.”

Hermeto Pascoal & Grupo | Pioneer Live

 death. “You have to be very careful with children,” he tells me, calling back to our conversation about music schools. “People try to teach them stuff that they think is right, and don’t respect who the children are.” He’s grateful to have been awarded an honorary doctorate from Juilliard, but he has a warning for those aspiring to credentials rather than hard-won knowledge. “When people graduate, they sometimes think they know stuff and hide behind their degree. That’s what dying is. When you 

Pascoal and his bandmates concluded their set in the same way it started: musicians gathered together, singing and playing instruments like they were in the most intimate of settings. They walked off stage, shaking tambourines until the applause drowned everything out. Pascoal was the last to leave, melodica in hand, waving goodbye to the hundreds of people in front of him. Or maybe it was another hello, as he knew there was more music to come, not necessarily from the band, but from the trees and birds in the vicinity, the small talk after the concert, the feet scurrying toward the exit. ♦

Joshua Minsoo Kim is a Chicago-based high school science teacher and culture writer whose work can be found at Pitchfork, The Wire, Cinema Scope, and MUBI Notebook. He is the founder and editor-in-chief of Tone Glow.

mus-croissant

The Eternal Life of Hermeto Pascoal

Garth Greenwell Is Too Much

Kameelah Janan Rasheed Wants to Name Names

What is love? How is it best sought, fallen into, lived? What do we express through love, and what of lust? Longing? Who are we in love, and how does love make us? Why do we lose the ones we love, and how do we come to find we've lost ourselves?

What to make of this thing we flailingly, failingly call love? 

 attends to the ways we come together and come apart to ask what it means to love—well and badly; romantically, platonically; greedily, freely, and carelessly; unconditionally or conditions required—exploring the questions most fundamental to love’s labors and spoils, its alchemy and its chaos.

At the age of 35, the writer Melissa Febos decided to give up sex. Her abstinence would include romantic and erotic entanglements of all kinds—no sex, no dating, no flirting. “At first I minimized the stakes of my celibacy, of changing myself, because it made it easier to step toward that challenge,” she writes in 

, published this week by Knopf. “I did not want to admit that my life might not be worth living if I did not change.”

Temptations present themselves. Stakes are raised. Masturbation is considered. Describing her year of celibacy with characteristic self-scrutiny and a delicious wit also found in (but less central to) her other works, Febos consults the experience of others, interweaving the stories of celibates past—mystic nuns and radical feminists, cult leaders and the celibate-adjacent—with her own. She makes an inventory of all her relationships, and studies her patterns with the diligence and dedication of someone desperate to change.

Writers and artists also fill her pages, those Febos once admired for their passion and promiscuity (Edna St. Vincent Millay, Colette) and those whose wisdom buoys her metamorphosis (Audre Lorde on the erotic, Sappho on eros). From Febos (barely) resisting the urge to flirt at the airport, to lush descriptions of the “unbeingness” of orgasm and artistic creation alike, all amid the company of Octavia Butler, Simone Weil, Agnes Martin, Sara Ahmed, May Sarton, Sophie Fontanel, Nan Goldin, and many others, 

Celibacy opens Febos to an era of solitude as transformative as any great love affair, alive with its own sensuality and thick with discovery. “I had been thinking of this time as a dry season,” she writes, “but it had been the most fertile of my life since childhood. I had run dry when I spent that vitality in worship of lovers. In celibacy, I felt more 

Lucy McKeon

To start, why don’t you tell me about your decision to “take a break,” as your mom put it.

Melissa Febos

I had an uneasiness about my romantic pattern for some years. I was in consistent, consecutive monogamous romantic relationships from the age of 15 until I was 35. By my early 30s, I definitely had multiple people, especially my mother, saying, “you should maybe take a break and spend some time alone.” At that point I was annoyed in that very particular way that comes with recognizing a correct note from someone who knows you. And I think my uneasiness deepened when I didn’t—which I guess meant that I couldn’t—take a break. I just kept ending up in relationships.

Then, when I was 34, I had a really, really painful breakup that was the end of a really, really painful relationship, and it felt like a bottom of some kind. And at that point I was so uncomfortable and my life had been so adversely affected by that relationship that I had no ability or will left to deny it. I got serious about taking a break.

A Ten-Gram Bundle of Desire

A Ten-Gram Bundle of Desire

Rule of Threes

Rule of Threes

First Love

The Eternal Life of Hermeto Pascoal

Garth Greenwell Is Too Much

Kameelah Janan Rasheed Wants to Name Names

The Sexiest Thing About Celibacy

The Sexiest Thing About Celibacy

Rachel Kushner on What Makes a Good Spy

Lunar Time

Playing God

The Perfect Orgasm

Picture This: Adinkras

Picture This: Adinkras