Sunday

When You Are Old


When you are old and grey and full of sleep,
And nodding by the fire, take down this book,
And slowly read, and dream of the soft look
Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;
How many loved your moments of glad grace,
And loved your beauty with love false or true,
But one man loved the pilgrim Soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face;
And bending down beside the glowing bars,
Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled
And paced upon the mountains overhead
And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.

Tuesday

Stability vs. Freedom

The psychological struggle between the need for stability and the desire for freedom is perhaps the central concern of Breakfast at Tiffany's. The conflict structures the relationship between the narrator and Holly, who are opposing forces. While the narrator is happy to have his first home, Holly is consumed by her need to constantly escape from places, people and things. Even Holly's identity is in a constant state of flux. Holly assumes the name "Holiday Golightly", which encapsulates her strategy of avoiding stability by making a holiday out of life, and abandoning relationships and responsibilities when they threaten to jeopardize her freedom. For Holly, the distinction between stability and freedom is articulated by two of the novella's major symbols: animals (including Holly's cat) and Tiffany's (in which Holly feels properly "at home"). Holly despises the caging of animals, and refuses to name her cat. As a "wild thing", she feels he doesn't "belong" to her. Her fantasy that one day she will have, "breakfast at Tiffany's," an absurdity since Tiffany's does not serve food, indicates her choice to avoid stability by casting it in the unattainable ideals of fantasy.

By casting the two main characters on opposite sides of the stability/freedom divide, Capote suggests that each has something to learn from the other. The mutual influence of the two friends is demonstrated by their Christmas gift exchange, in which Holly gives the narrator a bird cage and the narrator gives her a medal of St. Christopher. Each gift illustrates a median between stability and freedom: Holly's gift is a cage, but it will never imprison a bird, and the narrator's gift is a medal of the patron saint of travel, but it comes from Tiffany's, Holly's personal symbol of home. By the conclusion of Breakfast at Tiffany's, it is clear that this influence has, at least in part, been realized: Holly confesses her sense of "belonging" with her cat, and the narrator reveals that, since the conclusion of their friendship, he has enjoyed lengthy trips around the world.

While Holly and the narrator represent different psychological impulses toward stability and freedom, Breakfast at Tiffany's suggests that both characters' pathologies stem from the sense of social exclusion common to people whose lifestyles do not conform to American convention. Indeed, both characters are consumed with a sense that they do not belong or are not "at home" in the larger world. The narrator feels a constant outsider, his nose pressed against a glass, and Holly is convinced that she is a "wild thing", unsuited to a proper place in society. Thus, Holly and the narrator are similar insofar as for both of them, "home" has become a charged object of fantasy and longing.

Saturday

Sonnet XXII

My glass shall not persuade me I am old,
So long as youth and thou are of one date;
But when in thee time's furrows I behold,
Then look I death my days should expiate.

For all that beauty that doth cover thee,
Is but the seemly raiment of my heart,
Which in thy breast doth live, as thine in me:
How can I then be elder than thou art?

O! therefore love, be of thyself so wary
As I, not for myself, but for thee will;
Bearing thy heart, which I will keep so chary
As tender nurse her babe from faring ill.

Presume not on thy heart when mine is slain,
Thou gav'st me thine not to give back again.