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Atlantic
06-07-2025
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It was March when I received the news that Harold had died in one of his caves. I hadn't expected him to still be doing fieldwork himself; having watched him make a nest of his laurels, I admit that I saw him as one of those shrewd birds that thieves other's eggs. The last time we'd met was three years before, in Paris. He'd come from a conference in Lyon and was driving a rented Mini that made a caricature of the stately form he'd acquired in his late years—at any moment, the toy car looked like it would break into pieces, the doors falling off and the bottom dropping out, leaving Harold clutching the steering wheel in open air. He was wearing a woolen overcoat and a fur hat in the Russian style; I believe they call it a shapka. He claimed it had been a gift, but it was so apt that it was hard not to believe he had gone out and bought it for himself. I could imagine him walking down the street somewhere and catching sight of it in a shop window, and the uncanny feeling it must have produced in him, like seeing one's hands on another person. Obviously he had to buy it. When I saw him in that hat, I had a feeling of déjà vu. For a minute, I couldn't grasp what he reminded me of, until suddenly it hit me that he looked like a Holbein portrait. I saw that glossy animal skin atop his head and the spreading shoulders below, and in a flash something was revealed to me—or so I told myself—about his authorship. One always has the sense of how gloomy it is to be a Holbein, despite their regal bearing. How utterly unfortunate to live so far north, to be constantly suffering drafts, to be given such jowls, to have to go along with the Reformation. They make no bones about their misery, the Holbein people. They're dressed in those hugely impressive clothes, and yet under the radar of the great master, they somehow manage to smuggle a secret message to us about what a difficult fate it is to be one of them. There was something of that in Harold, I thought: Here was the great ambassadorial gravity of his presence, buttressed on all sides by the bulk of his convictions, and it was all so uniform, so convincing, until, looking closely, you happened to catch a tiny flicker in his small, gray eyes, a little sign of doubt that threatened to throw the entire enormous project of being Harold into question. It was that flicker I thought of when I got the call from his sister. While studying his beloved cave art, he had broken the safety rules, left his colleagues behind, and lost his bearings; by the time they found him in a shaft, he was dead from carbon-dioxide poisoning. He must have been wearing his spelunking overalls and hard hat, but as Clara spoke, I pictured him slumped beneath the sword of a stalactite, shapka still perched like a spirit animal atop his head. I was not lying when I told Clara, who was weeping on the other end in her Jerusalem apartment, that I loved Harold. Of course I did. Loved him and resented him too, though I left it at love and didn't elaborate. Nor did I tell her what I believed to be true: that Harold wasn't capable of becoming accidentally lost, and that if he had died of lostness, it was because he had decided, in no uncertain terms, to lose himself. After I hung up, I stood, shocked, at the window, staring out through the dusk thickening over Central Park, and when a hunched, darkened form broke rank with the surrounding branches and glided forth—a giant bird with outstretched wings—I saw it as a farewell message from Harold, proof of a levity that had come to him now: a final mark of distinction in the heavens, or whatever realm he had advanced into. Harold, née Harel, Hebrew for 'mountain of God': to the land where he was born, he now was returned, to be buried next to his parents, who had clawed their way to Israel from the threshold of the crematoria, and in defiance conceived the great geologic form of a child, permanent and holy. From the beginning, he could do no wrong. When, at 7, he threw a stone at another child's head, causing a bloody gash, his mother defended him on the grounds that the injured child had possessed the stupidity to stick his head in the stone's path. I first heard this canonical story at the start of the summer of our junior year, when I followed Harold back to Jerusalem and stayed with his family. My own mother had always kept a careful log of my shortcomings, written, as my analyst once said, in her own blood. I was used to an anxious love, the kind that cuts down the tree before it can grow so that it can't be felled by another axe. But Harold was allowed to grow and grow until he became too large for his family's apartment, too large for Jerusalem, too large even for Israel, and left for America, where, at Yale University, he continued to unfurl. As his roommate, I was amazed to discover that he didn't know how to fry an egg or do his laundry. Only when I met his family did I come to understand that Harold was their sun king; that they revolved around him, their great hope and vindication. They came to pick us up at the airport, and his mother, in large plastic earrings and practical shoes dusted with ancient sediment, threw herself around his neck, craning her head back to drink him in, until he shook her off to hug his father—a long, tight embrace of a sort that I had never seen between men. 'This,' he said, turning back to me at last, 'is the friend I've been telling you all about.' Seeing me now for the first time, they embraced me too, as if I were an extension of Harold— as if what he loved, they also loved, without reservation. His father had a limp that I imagined had come from the camps, perhaps even Mengele, but he snatched up Harold's suitcase anyway and carried it to the car. Though their apartment was small, Harold was given the best room and only duvet. I slept on a sort of thin pallet that his mother unrolled every night at the foot of his bed; lying there, I felt resentment at my own mother, who'd made me give up my bed whenever we had a guest. At their dinner table, mother, father, and sister rehearsed for me Harold's hagiography while he sat silently, endowed with their admiration, drifting in and out of the smoke from his own cigarette. Naturally Harold had impressed me from the start too. In the early months of our courtship, we'd strutted and preened around each other, expounded on Vico's giants and mimetic desire, formed a cabal consisting of only us and the legendary dead. Though I was better-looking, he was more attractive to women, except when he got carried away and overspilled himself, drowning them in his endless barrage of arguments, assertions, opinions. But until I followed him home, I'd believed our differences to be largely cultural. I'd never been to Israel before, nor had I ever known any Israelis. So I took Harold to represent his kind—took his confidence to be exotic, Middle Eastern, born of a surfeit of sunlight and pioneering; his self-belief to be the survival strategy of a whole people. But when I met his family, I came to understand it as the inevitable result of being loved to the point of worship. My own parents believed that praise was unhealthy, just as they believed that bathing in cold water strengthened resilience. To his parents, Harold was a phoenix risen from the ashes; naturally he had learned to fly. But if I tried to work out how his confidence had been cultivated, bit by bit I also began to believe that it was innate, and however much I coveted it, I would never myself possess it. Harold first took me caving that summer. His father surrendered the car and took two buses to his job at a municipal office so that Harold could drive us to the Dead Sea, where he had been exploring caves since he was a youth in the Scouts. Once we passed out of East Jerusalem, the desert opened up—I'd never seen anything like it; I was moved and terrified by so much space, and what seemed to me the raw matter of the world. Harold bore down on the blue and ancient salt-crusted sea that appeared in the distance. There, he coated himself in foul-smelling clay and floated belly-up like a corpse, drifting out toward the no-man's-land between the shore and Jordan. Afterward we lunched on the sandwiches his mother had packed for us, and then, thickly swabbing his pita in hummus, he delivered a brilliant lecture about the scrolls discovered in the caves above us, among the oldest known manuscripts of books later included in the Hebrew Bible. There was also the nearby Cave of Horror, where the skeletons of refugees from the Bar Kokhba revolt had been found, having perished under siege by the Romans. As a teenager, Harold himself had found a Roman coin while exploring caves he'd managed to reach on his own. I still remember how his eyes gleamed as he spoke; history had always come alive for him, but his gift was to be able to animate it for those who could not see, as he could, through the narrowest of openings, the sweeping vista of the past. Two decades later, his book The Art of Prehistoric Man was that rare anomaly: praised by his fellow archaeologists and read by laymen. It was to the caves—which we reached that day from the parking lot at the Ein Gedi Field School, after a hike and an arduous climb (back then, Harold had been lithe and, if never slender, at least athletic)—that he was most strongly drawn. In their dank depths his imagination burned most vividly. I think it was a passion connected to his boyhood, to the excitement of uncovering what had lain in secret oblivion for thousands of years. Though I want to say that something more was at work, that what he felt in those underground chambers was something spiritual. Entering behind him that day, nourished by his mother's lunch, I was set on feeling it too. Heady with Harold's excitement, with a nearness to the ages such as I had never felt in Grand Rapids or New Haven, I thought that what was his might become mine as well; that I might find it through the ingress of that dark, jagged hole that led far back into time. With jaw clenched, I readied myself, ducking after him into the cave. I don't know what I thought—that I might receive, be granted, a conversion through atavistic energies, the awakening of an anima that had long been slumbering within. But it was not to be. How could it have been? Years later, when I visited Harold in the Cave of the Trois-Frères, he showed me the stenciled prints of hands that appear in so many painted caves, and spoke of the possibility that those who made them believed in the existence of a world behind the surface of the rock, one that imbued the handprints with its power. Though he couldn't sustain such belief himself, a sense of sanctity nevertheless came through to him across the passage of time, amplified by the echo of 30,000 or 40,000 years. There was something shamanic about him; he was, I always felt, a kind of conduit. It didn't surprise me when, at the start of graduate school, he situated himself in the Upper Paleolithic. To me, he had—had always had—special access: Why not to the moment when humanity first discovered its own powers of creativity and chose to represent itself and the world? Was I envious of Harold? Of course I was. At times, I wished I'd never met him and could have gone about things my own way. I thought highly enough of myself when I arrived at college, which was something of a feat, given what I'd been up against at home. But the more I knew of Harold, the more deeply ensconced he became in my psyche, crowding out light and widening a passage for doubt. I fell in love with the first woman who ever wanted me and I clung to her, dedicated myself to her without reserve. Agi used to say that Harold, who began to publish early, confused his pen for his penis. Only much later did I begin to see the holes in his own self-belief. Harold himself was always fascinated by the contradictions in people. In countless conversations, he circled back to that: how a person can contain within himself such violently opposing forces, and they either hold him in strange balance or tear him apart. Only much later did it occur to me that perhaps all that time, however unconsciously, he had been asking me to see what he knew others would miss in him. On the plane to Israel for the funeral, I noted down a few scattered remarks, should Clara ask me to speak. It might have been presumptuous—in later years, Harold and I had been in touch far less—but I remained, after all, one of his oldest friends. And yet what was there to say about Harold's passion? His appetite? His special knowledge of the Fall of Man? What did a world without Harold mean? I lifted the window shade and stared out into the blinding dark. Had it not been for Harold, I wrote, I might have become what I wanted to be. That might have gotten a laugh, but it was true enough—we had met in a class on the ancient world, and our mutual passion for the subject drew us immediately together. I'd harbored hopes of becoming a historian, though my parents expected me to go into business or law. It was Harold, a man of the sun and the Earth, who loved the materiality of things—Harold who needed to palpate history (and not only history) with his own hands. It was contagious. Why should I want to study history behind a desk, or in the musty basements of libraries, when I could be out in the field, out in the world, excavating what had been lost, forgotten, hidden? Bringing the past, quite literally, to light? That day in the caves above the Dead Sea, he had inhaled the humid earthiness, nostrils flaring, and caressed the walls with a kind of sensuousness. Later I would blame my parents for my retreat into law, where I went from success to success, and rose to become a partner in the firm. But in my heart, I considered Harold responsible. He took up the whole field of history, of prehistory; I couldn't see how I could pursue it in his wake, I would have forever been aware of all I was lacking. I studied history for as long as I could before I had to make a definitive choice, and then, if only to get out from under his shadow, I slunk away into law. I don't think I'd ever put it so bluntly to myself, but in the darkened hull of the airplane, trying to make sense of what Harold had been to me, I knew that's what I believed. I hadn't been back to Israel since that long-ago summer. I'd never had the desire; I suppose I'd never really liked the place—the overfreighted passion, the endless exaggeration, every day a mountain out of a molehill. From Ben Gurion Airport, I took a taxi straight to the cemetery and arrived there just in time. Squinting in the sunlight, I saw the dark clot of mourners gathered among the cypresses. Two of Harold's three wives were there, his grown children, a handful of friends and colleagues: whoever could make it so far, in such haste, to see Harold put to rest in his shroud. A larger memorial service was to be held at Oxford at a later date, in the chapel at Magdalen College, where Harold had been a fellow for 30 years, and where, on a long-ago visit, he'd shown me an enormous 16th-century copy, made by da Vinci's studio, of The Last Supper : the ballet of hands, the feet, the elegant betrayal. I stood across from his third and youngest wife, who'd separated from Harold a few years earlier because she wanted a family; underneath her shapeless linen dress, she appeared to be pregnant. She was an archaeologist too, a woman who normally went around dressed in Patagonia and had little tolerance for formality. But his first wife, Helen—to whom he had been married for more than 20 years, and who had maintained toward Harold an attitude of wry condescension that allowed her to indulge him—had always been glamorous. She stood now, petite and dark, in enormous sunglasses. After the rabbi said some words, their son and daughter spoke, the latter stepping forward to address the hole in the ground, as if the finally mute Harold could hear her. She hadn't talked to Harold through her teenage years, as far as I recalled, but now she was talking to him. She was followed by one of Harold's closest friends and colleagues, an Englishman who called him a mensch, which struck me as a goyish misunderstanding of the word, and spoke of the terrible accident. I looked around at people's faces—did no one else suspect that Harold had been deliberate? That he would never make such a misstep? Next to the hole stood the headstones of his parents. The sudden transformation of life into archaeology—who'd understood that better than Harold? When my turn came to throw a handful of dirt, I crumpled the page of notes I'd written and threw it in with the soil. It was then, while I was looking down into the hole at the bottom of which Harold lay, that the bile rose in the back of my throat and I felt, for the first time, that I might weep. Afterward we gathered at his sister's apartment, a brightly colored and comfortably inhabited place that exuded a sense of the good and happy life that Clara—uncelebrated and mostly overlooked by her parents—had grown up to lead. Framed photographs of Harold were set out on a table. At the center was a large one, taken 10 or 15 years earlier, of him standing before a cave wall on which painted bison and horses seemed to be flying past in perpetual motion. His head was tilted back, and eyes cast upward, and the effect was of Harold paused at attention, listening to the sound of their hooves. His fellow prehistorians agreed that deciphering the meaning of the paintings would only ever be speculative. But Harold had made his name with the theory that they had been produced at the moment when, after millennia of being dominated by animals, humans began to dominate them. He likened it to the Fall of Man, only the forbidden knowledge acquired was that humans were distinct from other animals. The paintings, he asserted, expressed the guilt, regret, and glory that came with the belief in that separation. Like all theories, right or wrong, it said something—or so I always thought—about its author: his will to triumph, the loneliness of his distinction. Looking up from the photograph, I caught sight of Helen refilling the platters of food. I had the urge to lead her away so that we might speak in confidence: Surely she didn't believe that Harold had gotten lost, and was merely pretending for the sake of Clara and the kids? For 35 years, she had been seeing through Harold. When she bobbed away after my second or third approach, I got the sense that she was avoiding me. I finally cornered her in the kitchen, and with lowered voice asked her if he'd been depressed. She gave me a long, tired look. 'Everyone liked to think they'd figured Harold out,' she said. 'Only Harold could admit to never figuring out himself.' Then she squeezed my arm, offered a worn smile, and turned to rejoin the others in the living room. And yet it gnawed at me. I went out to the terrace to smoke. The hills of Jerusalem were turning a fiery gold, but I wasn't in the mood to appreciate their beauty. For as long as I'd known him, Harold had been gnawing at me! How many things did I hold against him? Why not his death, too? It was 35 years ago that I'd found him in bed with Agi. His hairy back in the moonlight; he was consuming her. She was Hungarian, Agnetta who went by Agi—my Agi! As a child, she used to crawl between the double windows of her Budapest apartment, and there, in that narrow space of insulation, suspended between the inner and outer world, she read. I loved her for that. Her family had escaped in the back of a truck to Naples, and in its warm climate she discovered that there were no double windows, and barely even a windowsill. Instead, she spent her days standing on a chair looking out at the lines of laundry and the blue Mediterranean, and so she emigrated, as she put it, from books to the world. She had a heart-shaped face, dark eyes, an astuteness that was almost witchy; I thought I might marry her, though I was always a little afraid of her, too. Afterward, I didn't speak to Harold for two years—difficult years, during which I fell into a deep depression, and nearly dropped out of law school. Our friendship should have been over, but he wore me down with letters of apology, claiming to be a sex addict, and when, one day, he showed up in the lobby of my apartment in New York, I let him up. For once he appeared smaller, humbled. The fury had gone out of me after all I'd been through, which of course had stemmed from things that stretched back much further than Agi. Perhaps a part of me was even relieved to lose her, to no longer have to deserve her. And yet, I never really believed his excuses. No matter that I'd already ceded to him the whole field of history—he could be magnanimous at times, and having him in your corner was something, and yet underneath everything he couldn't help himself, he needed to conquer at any cost. It was part of a proof being worked out, a proof about the nature of Harold. All his life he was engaged in proving something that he didn't entirely believe about himself. Coming to see this is what allowed me to continue to be his friend. I'm not proud of it, but the truth is that I could tolerate his largeness because I found satisfaction in being able to spy the weakness at his core. After a while, I was called back inside. Stories were being told. His children and Clara sat on collapsible chairs, and we were to entertain them with remembrances of Harold. Helen told the story of the time they all went on safari when the kids were young, and Harold, alone in their hut, sitting on the toilet when a gang of baboons broke in, emerged from the invasion, as he'd put it, spiritually altered. No one knew exactly what had happened, but for the rest of the trip his respect for the baboons was enormous; at every appearance of the tribe, Harold went off with them to huddle, as if he suddenly shared with them a common language. While she spoke, I thought of what to recount. The story of the time we went to London as students, and Harold stayed out one night and came back to our borrowed flat with the princess of Norway? Or how, when my daughter was born, he sent a horrendous, yellowish, sickle-shaped thing in the mail, which we discovered, after my wife threw it out, was the 30,000-year-old tooth of a cave bear, intended to act as an amulet? Or should I instead recall the part of his book—easily overlooked or forgotten—on how the high levels of carbon dioxide that cycle into underground chambers cause hallucinations, a phenomenon that likely played a role in the mythologies and rituals that took place in the painted caves? Or the lab experiments he'd cited, showing that subjects who fall into such an induced trance experience the same three stages: first seeing lines, zigzags, and abstract forms; then seeing objects; and finally feeling pulled into a vortex that induces vivid hallucinations, usually of monsters or animals, with which they feel their body and spirit merge? Didn't anyone else feel the need to ask what, departing the human, Harold had finally become? In the end, I told the story of the day he took me to the Cave of the Trois-Frères and how, overwhelmed, I turned to Harold, who was looking at the paintings, and, for the first and only time in my life, saw on his face a look of absolute reverence. And yet my agitation only grew. By the time I took a taxi back to my hotel, I felt my insides churning and thought I might be sick. I rolled down the window, and the warm spring evening floated in. But I felt a depressing weight descend, a heavy sense of guilt. In the elevator I grew dizzy. A vision came to me of Harold's carbide headlamp ablaze in the dark like the eye of Polyphemus. In the room I gulped a bottle of water, closed the curtains, and lay down to wait for sleep. But what followed was a long and difficult night in which I tossed and turned, trying to cough up the bone in my throat. My mind roamed restlessly, driven and disturbed, until at last, down long and darkened passages, a hazy memory returned to me, dragging its heavy burden: Harold sitting in a chair by a hospital bed in which I lay. The memory had been lumped together with all of the strange, drugged visions I'd had that week so long ago, after I'd tried feebly to take my own life. No one except my parents knew where I was, and Harold and I hadn't spoken for a year by then. He couldn't have known, and in any case, I would have been humiliated had he known, and so later it was buried in the jumbled set of half-waking dreams, which included one of my mother captaining an ancient ship at sea, and a dark army of hundreds, even thousands, marching forward, come to take me. But lying now in the dark room, I felt that it had happened. It had happened, hadn't it? Somehow Harold had found out, and come to sit with me, and out of respect for my dignity had never mentioned it afterward. And some part of me had always known, and buried it out of shame. The dark army had knelt before my bed, the troops had waited to take me, and I had almost gone—what a relief it would have been to go!—but in the end I stayed. Something shifted in me, and I turned them away and came back to my life. It was Harold who had come, hadn't he? I had never had the courage to ask him. Later, I decided that Harold would not have understood those shades of darkness, nor the horror of true despair. Or perhaps I needed for him not to understand. Needed to see him as one chosen by life, gifted with every advantage, so that I had an excuse not to pursue the things I wanted most. His existence let me off the hook. And if, later on, when my life turned out well regardless and I began to see cracks in the picture of Harold, didn't I see them only because it made me feel better to have chosen as I had? Then it was easy to think how difficult it must have been to be him. Harold had always been what I needed him to be, hadn't he? He had allowed me to see him as I wanted to see him, as he'd let his parents and so many others. If I had failed to truly understand him, it was because it hadn't been to my advantage to really try. At one or two in the morning, I finally rose from bed, dressed, and fled the hotel, desperate for some air. I walked the empty streets without direction. A few times one of the Orthodox, dressed in dark clothes, hurried past me, coming and going from who knows where in the middle of the night, away from or toward some urgent learning, or some prayer for the living or dead. I didn't know where I was going, but I, too, was bent forward like them, pressed with tension. After 20 minutes, I saw a taxi and flagged it down. Harold had once told me that even Neanderthals buried their dead with red flowers. But having no clue how to procure any at that hour, I demanded instead to be taken to the Dead Sea. The driver laughed, which only stoked my irritation and made me dig in my heels. When he saw that I was serious, he flicked four or five beads of a misbaha under his thumb and said the drive would take an hour and a half from Jerusalem; late as it was, he wouldn't do it for less than 400 shekels. A big man, he overwhelmed his seat. I got into the back seat. Dead Sea where? Ein Gedi? I waved my hand in a gesture of More or less. He pulled away from the curb and did a U-turn, driving southeast toward Highway 1. From time to time, he glanced at me in the rearview mirror with the alert and assessing eyes of a man who had once been trained in military tactics. We left the city behind, and the headlights illuminated the barren, sand-colored hills. His phone rang and he shouted at what must have been a family member, a brother or grown son, at the volume of love as an argument without end. An hour passed before the dark, still sea appeared in the distance. I want to go to the Ein Gedi Field School, I told him, leaning forward between the seats. Where? he shouted back, as if I'd ordered him to the moon or across the sea to Jordan. I waved my phone at him, having pulled the school up on the map, and without slowing his speed he grabbed the phone and held it up, swerving into the oncoming lane as he attempted to decode its meaning. Unable to make out the English, he handed it back and made me repeat the name until finally he found it on his own phone. Ahhh, he exclaimed, Beit Sefer Sade Ein Gedi! I paid him. Here you're staying? he asked, gesturing in the direction of the hostel, though he might have meant the desert itself. I nodded. In the dark, I recognized nothing. The place looked abandoned; a lone dog barked in the distance. Forty years had passed since that summer of my visit. The cliffs loomed up terribly out of the blackness. The driver counted the bills while I got out, then gave me a last interrogating look through the half-lowered window; if he had been trained to kill, perhaps he also had been trained to save, though presumably he was less practiced at that. He spun the car back toward the road, headlights momentarily sweeping the vast, striated geology, an expression of all time. The lowest place on Earth! Harold had exclaimed when the fetid, turquoise sea had at last come into view. That day, he'd been fixed on what he'd wanted to show me. The sun beat down savagely, but he mopped the sweat from his face with a crumpled bandanna and otherwise took no notice. I followed as he made his way nimbly, goatlike, over the rocks. He was talking, he was always talking. Words flooded from him as if from a spring fed by an ancient aquifer: a 12,000-year-old grave had been found in a cave in the Galilee, a woman's body covered with two martens, the foreleg of a wild boar, the wing tip of a golden eagle, the pelvis of a leopard, the shells of some 50 tortoises, a human foot placed lovingly—lovingly?—between the two of her own. God knows what else he said. Lost psalms, the Book of Lamentations. We reached the mouth of the cave and I followed him inside, where it immediately became dim and cool. Onward he went into darkness, removing a headlamp from his pack to light the way. Our footsteps began to echo, and I lost all measure of the space around us, guided only by Harold and the beam of his lamp. I thought of Agi, her beautiful naked back arched over a book as she read, and missed her terribly. I imagined skulls in crevices, brown with age, the jawbones come away. The pottery shards of a last meal. A wave of nausea seized me. Nothing spoke to me; I lacked reception and had no taste for cave life. But Harold forged ahead. A wall loomed up and he studied it for footholds, then instructed me to follow him. The climb was harder than it looked, but at last I scrambled after him to the top, gasping for breath in the thin air. He was standing before a huge stalactite, pointing a flashlight at what seemed to be some sort of primitive writing, black chicken scratch on stone. It had been found by the guide at the Field School who'd first discovered the cave. Written in Hebrew script older than the Dead Sea Scrolls, it was, Harold told me, a sort of curse. I didn't ask him what kind. I felt sick, filled with a terrible gloom. Deep in his rapture, Harold didn't notice my mounting anxiety, my breath coming more heavily. There was only air enough for one of us; let Harold decipher the menacing letters. I was desperate to get back out into the sunlight, where, unoppressed, I might go on with life, less and less touched by history. But even then, I couldn't leave him, couldn't retreat to choose my own way. Now, turning alone in the dark, I had no clue which way to go. A howl of rage filled the back of my throat. I would never know what he had finally discovered—there on the other side, among the endless buried.
BBC News
06-07-2025
- Entertainment
- BBC News
Beyond words: The 200-year-old hidden languages of dating
From Regency-era "fan flirting" to coded gifts, people have perfected the art of discreetly signalling their love over many centuries. Here's what it reveals about our quest for love. If you visit the Richelieu wing of the Louvre in Paris, you might meet the gaze of a former Queen of England. Her hands, adorned with expensive rings, are clasped together. She smiles ever so slightly in her reserved, composed way. Jewels and gems cover her headdress as well as the rich red and gold fabrics of her puffed-sleeve gown. A small cross hangs below her neck. There is no doubt from the painting that she was destined to turn heads. So arresting was Hans Holbein the Younger's betrothal portrait of Anne of Cleves, it caused one of the most powerful people in the world, Henry VIII, to enter an engagement with her in 1539. The painting was described by Henry's ambassador in Cleves as "very lively", implying that it was an accurate portrayal. However, some historians have accused Holbein of exaggerating her beauty. Either way, Anne and Henry's first encounter in person was incredibly awkward, with historical accounts suggesting that neither was attracted to the other. What followed was an unconsummated marriage before the couple were granted an annulment in July 1540 – some may say, a lucky escape for Anne. While presenting a potential future Queen in portrait form might initially seem far removed from our modern-day efforts of finding love in a world of digitised dating services, courtship portraits are, actually, back. Dating apps, used by 30% of adults in the US as of 2022, require users to make crucial preliminary judgements based on little more than a photograph and perhaps a few reassuring words from friends. As the majority of modern dating interactions begin from behind a screen, online users are exposed to hundreds of potential partners sorted by an algorithm. But, dating today and courtships hundreds of years ago suggests that words have not always been central, or necessary, for finding love. Some of the hidden languages or visual signals of attraction have remained remarkably similar over centuries, while others have faded into oblivion. What do these non-verbal codes reveal about how we perceive romantic relationships – and might understanding them, help us find true love? "Fan flirting" Let's begin with a period in a history known for celebrating romantic love and courtship. The Regency era, loosely defined as the decades around 1800, offered women the opportunity to be wooed – courted – but also, to actively go out into the marriage market. In novels by Regency era writers such as Jane Austen, characters often pursue marriage for financial or social prospects – but love tends to win by the end. Marrying for love became a "widely celebrated ideal during the 18th Century", says Sally Holloway, research fellow at Oxford Brookes University and author of The Game of Love in Georgian England. People emphasised finding love before marriage, as opposed to developing love for someone later, "not dissimilar from how you would assess compatibility with a partner today," she says. A love interest might develop at one of society's social events. Holloway says that there was fun to be had in subtle flirtation in these public settings – for example, there was a "language of fans" during the period, "but it was more a bit of fun than a serious method of communication". In 1797, the designer Charles Francis Bandini created a fan on which he printed a coded alphabet in tiny, ornate lettering – to allow women to send messages from across the room. The fan, called Fanology or the Ladies Conversation Fan listed different hand positions to indicate each letter in a similar fashion to semaphore, which was a method of communicating employed mostly by sailors using coloured flags. Another fan, entitled The Ladies Telegraph, for Corresponding at a Distance from 1798, was similar. "The primary use of the fan between lovers would have been as a much less explicit means of flirtation, accompanied by longing looks, fluttering eyelashes and loving glances," says Holloway. Fan signals were useful at crowded and noisy dances, or where discretion was required. But in closer quarters, men and women could use scents to "stimulate and strengthen feelings of love and sexual desire," says Holloway. Liquid scents were also applied to love letters in order to entice a lover. Holloway says that men during the Regency era typically presented women with a wide range of gifts, from flowers to miniature portraits, to show their affection and suitability as a partner. "Couples would check that their disposition and outlook on life were suitably similar by exchanging books as tokens and underlining the passages that they most agreed with," says Holloway. "In their letters, they discussed their hopes and fears, their moral views, what they hoped to find in marriage, and worked to build a closer emotional bond." In return, women "typically presented men with handmade items such as embroidered ruffles and waistcoats to indicate their domestic skill and time invested in a suitor, and pressed flowers such as violets, which symbolised their modesty, truthfulness and faithful love," says Holloway. The two most symbolically important gifts were locks of hair – a physical piece of the loved one's body which would outlast their time on Earth – and a ring, which symbolised their hand in marriage. While the language of fans may no longer be in use, according to Holloway, there are some similarities to the way couples still use gifts and messages to connect in the modern dating world. "All of these rituals helped to create a sense of intimacy and emotional closeness in a similar way to how modern couples might exchange a flurry of gifts, texts, emails, plan dates and days out, and spend time together as a way to ascertain their compatibility," Holloway says. The earliest form of social media? As photography became more accessible and widely distributed during the Victorian period, more people had the chance to see likenesses of celebrities and even royalty for the first time. Friends and family could also exchange mementos of each other. And soon the technology sweeping through British Victorian society found a romantic purpose: the cartes de visite – a portrait photograph around 9cm by 6cm, pasted onto a piece of card that could be sent to prospective lovers. Cartes were cheap and easy to exchange, so in their own way, a portrait could go viral like an image might go viral online today. People posted adverts requesting an exchange of cartes, and lovers might keep their suitor's cartes close to them, "almost like a little fetish object," says John Plunkett, an assistant professor in the department of English at the University of Exeter in the UK. Originally made famous by Queen Victoria and Prince Albert before becoming more accessible to the middle and upper classes, the cartes were "part of an individual's construction of themselves in relation to a wider collective identity," wrote Plunkett in a paper published in the Journal of Victorian culture. Cartes provided some people with their first and perhaps only opportunity of having their photo taken. As with modern dating apps, a carte could allow them to make an impactful first impression. "You're going to dress up in your Sunday best," says Plunkett. People included something of their personality, showing themselves reading, or posed in a way that showed how dominant or demure they were. "It gives you a chance to make a statement about who you are. You're going to make yourself look more socially mobile and higher status," says Plunkett. It became fashionable to turn the cartes of one's closest social connections into collages. An art style developed around posing friends in unusual and creative ways, such as assembled in a drawing room or even as unfortunate victims in a spider's web. The aim was to save these mementos in a scrap book and express something about how closely one's friends were held. In many cartes, some of which can be viewed at the V&A museum in London, UK, people posed with objects that represented wealth, such as art or sculptures – and even pets. Plunkett explains that the use of props helped people to remain still while photographers took their pictures, since those early photographs required much longer exposures than photos do today – but also to incorporate "the sense of a grand background" or to show off your profession, for example. "It's all about putting on an appearance and thinking about what's the vision of yourself you want to project… [like an] Instagram or Twitter profile… You're going to choose something that shows off a certain version of yourself," Plunkett says. Similarly, on dating apps today, people use backgrounds and props including exotic landscapes or animals to reflect their interests and how they like to see themselves. Romance in Berlin nightclubs By the end of the Victorian period, social etiquette was beginning to relax, and daters found new places to seek partners. Dancehalls played increasingly upbeat music late into the night. Jaunty ragtime dances gave way to jazz in the 20th Century. It became more socially acceptable for single women to go to bars and clubs with friends and meet people there. With new dating spaces came new ways to signal interest. Around this time, in the 1920s, Berlin became the poster city for ultra-modern night life. Some Berlin clubs were "immense, multi-level, with movable floors and even water for water ballet shows," says Jennifer Evans, a professor of 20th Century social history at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada, and author of Life Among the Ruins: Cityscape and Sexuality in Cold War Berlin. Technology of the time enabled dancers to flirt in busy clubs. The Berlin nightclub Residenz-Casino, known familiarly as the Resi, became famous for offering night-clubbers the means to contact each other using either a telephone or an elaborate system of pneumatic tubes from their table. Like the tubes used in internal office mailing systems, department stores and banks to send money from the shop floor to the back office, a message could be stuck inside a metal canister and pushed into a tube, where it was sucked by a vacuum to its destination. Someone could write a message on paper and send it to a switchboard, where an operator would read to ensure it was polite (a bit like, an early example of content moderation on social media today) before diverting it to the recipient's table. Alongside messages, gifts "from cigarettes to small trinkets to cocaine" could be bought and sent to the intended love interest, says Evans. "There must have been something quite scintillating about seeing your person across the room as they received the message, hidden in plain sight," says Evans. "Their reactions, positive or negative, immediate and unfiltered, enhanced by the sense of fun and frivolity in the room. Maybe we should bring them back." The outbreak of World War Two in 1939 spelled the end of this form of social interaction, she says, but some nightclub communication systems lived on in what would become West Berlin after the war. The Resi itself re-opened in 1951. "I suppose we are constantly re-inventing ways to talk to one another, expressing our desires, in these demi-monde [fringe or clandestine] spaces,' says Evans. "It seems to say a lot about who we are as humans and how badly we seek connection." Secret signals in LGBTQ+ culture Same-sex relationships have long had to rely on alternative modes of communication because of the history of oppression and marginalisation that has targeted people in LGBTQ+ communities. Historically, secret signals allowed LGBTQ+ people to find partners while trying to stay safe from hostility, violence and repressive laws. Same-sex relationships were illegal in much of Europe until the 1960s and 70s, and 2000s in the US. The green carnation, for example, originally became popular as a symbol with a hidden meaning by gay writer Oscar Wilde. In 1892, Wilde instructed a handful of his friends to wear them on their lapels for the opening night of his play Lady Windermere's Fan. When asked what it meant, Wilde (allegedly) said, "Nothing whatsoever. But that is just what nobody will guess." "This sums up so many of these queer symbols – they have to be hidden hints and nods without overtly saying what they mean," says Sarah Prager, speaker and author of Queer, There and Everywhere: 27 People Who Changed the World and other books about LGBTQ+ history. "This can be a challenge for historians," adds Prager. "There might never be full confirmation or separation from legend with some of these symbols, because the whole point is to be able to communicate in secret in times of oppression." Other flowers and plants became associated with the LGBTQ+ community. "Besides the green carnation, one of the oldest examples of queer floriography is violet and lavender. [...] The colours purple, lavender [and] violet, have all been associated with queerness for centuries," says Prager. "We think this dates back to Sappho, the Greek poet of the 6th Century BCE, [who] wrote about women loving other women and is one of the earliest recorded examples of queerness between women." Jewellery has long been used as a visual expression and communicator of sexual identity in queer communities. "I have tattoos, earrings, clothing, that signal my queerness so that it makes it easier for me to feel in community with people," Prager says. "The feeling that I get when I see somebody else showing one of these symbols is an instant recognition of community, safety, kinship." Through the musical and sexual liberation of the Swinging '60s and '70s, queer culture found a new voice. There were increasingly spaces for the LGBTQ+ community to seek love. In Germany, "gay men used the Contacts Desired pages of magazines like Der Kreis and the later gay magazines like Him," says Jennifer Evans. "There, they'd advertise for 'friendship' or companionship... or sometimes, more brazenly for photo exchanges." The test of time The desire to see a sweetheart's likeness, and playfully connect through coded gestures and implied meaning, has continued to the present day – whether through dating app profiles, curated online presences, pings, likes, swipes and compliments. "There's a long history to secret writing, long before sexting or slipping into someone's DMs as they say," says Evans. She points out that flirting and the early stages of courtship have long been associated with the development of new technologies that allow people to communicate hidden thoughts and feelings, even in plain sight: "From symbols like a coloured handkerchief hanging from a back jean pocket in gay cruising, to shorthand emojis and acronyms in sexting." Sometimes, she adds, this furtiveness serves a purpose in keeping people safe – such as when being public about engaging in certain sexual practices could put one in danger. But more generally, she says, it is the sheer thrill of developing shared intimacies. Codes, rituals and carefully composed images are all "part of the game". -- For more science, technology, environment and health stories from the BBC, follow us on Facebook, X and Instagram.
