When Noble stares at herself or into the eyes of those she’s observing—be it a naked artist’s model or a gorilla in the zoo—she’s trying to understand how the world perceives her and answer the questions that haunt many of us: what makes me me, and what makes me worthy of love? She discovers that she shares a common desire for connection, but as a writer she craves to be loved for powers of discernment and empathy, untainted by sentimentality. She possesses an animal body but also a distinctive spirit:
My gaze meets that of the sitter. I think we are really looking at each other. I want us to be really looking at each other. I want her to see that I am different from the other people here: the boy pounding on the glass (despite the sign that says not to); the woman who grimaces and says, “It stinks in here”; the teenager who laughs, pointing, “Look at its tits!” I want her to see sympathy and understanding in my eyes, that we are two primates separated by only a few twists of a chromosome—and a wall of shit-splattered Plexiglas. (“On Looking”)
Organized into six sections, the essays in Be with Me Always have tremendous formal and tonal range: from exercises in deep observation with Montaigne-indebted titles (“On Looking” and “On Silence”) to essays that accrete through numbered sentences or paragraphs built like castles of dripped wet sand. “Striking,” for instance, has twenty entries like a book of matches. Besides more formally conventional personal essays such as “Ambush,” about a dangerous liaison from the author’s youth who eerily resurfaces shortly after her marriage, there is even an essay called “Vertebrae” that, verse-like, is lineated to look like a spine.
While Noble is interested in our desire to be swept away or consumed by love (even Dracula makes an appearance in this book), her essays are the opposite of passive fantasies. She seduces the reader with her active curiosity and intellect, demanding that we look deeply at the world with and through her. If, as Sharon Salzberg says, “one way to train in love is to train in attention,” then Noble, with her facility to train her attention, and by extension ours, teaches us how to love. In “Behind the Caves,” an essay about attending her twenty-year high school reunion shortly after giving birth to twins, Noble describes her mind as “dilated—like an aperture.” After reading Be with Me Always, I feel as though my mind has been pried open, my heart made larger: large enough to accept that, paradoxically, “pain rusts into beauty, too.” Be with Me Always leaves ample room to breathe and stretch—both heart and mind.