Still later, Fred Ottenburg, the rich man who loves her but, like all the men in this book, wants Thea to have her life, says to her,

Don't you know most of the people in the world are not individuals at all? . . . A lot of girls go to boarding-school together, come out the same season, dance at the same parties, are married off in groups, have their babies at about the same time, send their children to school together, and so the human crop renews itself. Such women know as much about the reality of the forms they go through as they know about the wars they learned the dates of. They get their most personal experiences out of novels and plays. . . . You are not that sort of person. . . . You will always break through into the realities.

It is from passages like these -- vivid, sustained, dominating -- that The Song of the Lark draws its power. Cather makes a great romance of the loneliness of the artist's vocation, into which she pours her own defiant necessity, but that is not her subject at all. Her subject is the conviction that in pursuit of the deepest self there is glory, and in the absence of that pursuit there is emptiness.

In 1925 Woolf and Rhys seemed sophisticated, Cather an American provincial. When Jean Rhys wrote "he left me all smashed up," she meant, "life and history inevitably leave one all smashed up." Cather, on the other hand, wrote as one who saw herself pitted against the elements in a fair fight, and there was no question but that the fight was worthy. Not only worthy, obligatory. At all times one's life is worth having.

Hannah Arendt became Martin Heidegger's student at the University of Marburg in 1924. She was eighteen years old. He was thirty-five and already famous in university circles. (Three years later, when Being and Time was published, he would be hailed as a major philosopher). She was beautiful and, needless to say, the smartest girl in the class. He was attracted, and he moved. Within months they were lovers. The affair lasted four years.

Heidegger did all the controlling, Hannah did all the worshiping -- naturally, how could it have been otherwise -- but the dynamic between them was something of an equalizer. He needed her intelligent adoration as much as she needed to give it. They both approached his talent for thinking with reverence, each believing he was a vessel of containment for something large, something to be served, protected, and responded to always. This intensity between them, as it turned out, proved a bond stronger than either love or world history.

What it comes down to is this. If you don't understand your feelings, you're pulled around by them all your life. If you understand but are unable to integrate them, you're destined for years of pain. If you deny and despise their power, you are lost. This is what the great characters in Hardy and Ibsen are about: women and men in the very grip. In Hardy they struggle unsuccessfully, and come to sorrow. In Ibsen they repress and deny, and they are doomed.

The story of Hannah Arendt and Martin Heidegger belongs to the dramatists, not the critics. It is a tale of emotional connection made early, never fully grasped, then buried alive in feeling the protagonists kept hidden from themselves. Such feeling is like a weed pushing up through concrete. When the hurricane is over, and the world is littered with destruction, it is still waving in the wind.

She told herself that she would not contact him, that February in 1950, but the minute she reached Freiburg she picked up the phone. Within hours he was at the hotel. Two days later she wrote to him,

When the waiter announced your name it was as though time had stopped. Then, in a flash, I became aware -- I have never before admitted it, not to myself and not to you and not to anyone else -- that the force of my impulse [to get in touch] has mercifully saved me from committing the only truly unforgivable disloyalty, from mishandling my life. But you must know one thing . . . that had I done so, it would have been out of pride only -- that is, out of pure, plain, crazy stupidity. Not for any reason.

Three months later Heidegger sent her four letters in quick succession to say that her return to his life had brought him joy; that she alone was close to him when he was thinking; that he dreamed of her living nearby and of running his fingers through her hair. He sounded like a man newly charged, filled with hope and longing, excited and immensely glad to be alive.

For such people, Heidegger was a visionary, a man surrounded by an aura, imbued with the dark power of ''thinking." This astonishing gift placed him, in the imagination of almost everyone who knew him, beyond ordinary judgment. To do it as he did it was to climb Mount Olympus. Reading him, or listening to him speak, people felt exalted. His very presence renewed the idea of being alive. The experience carried with it the conviction of re-creation, aroused an inner atmosphere toward which one yearned -- not a sensation to be resisted. And no one did resist it. Not Hannah Arendt, not Karl Jaspers, not anyone exposed to the man whose gifts of mind were large enough to persuade that he saw life whole, and then he saw beyond.

Hannah Arendt could not avail herself of Jaspers's solution. She had been the student, not the teacher, and she had slept with Heidegger. Worship of the transcendent mind, once eroticized, can (and for her I believe it did) become a thing one bonds with somewhere in the nerve endings. Once an experience becomes fused with an irreducible sense of self -- and this is inescapable -- the impulse to rationalize its "contradictions" replaces the impulse to act rationally and looks, to the one doing it, like the same thing. To explain Heidegger's Nazi sympathies as harmless became a reasonable undertaking for Arendt, as reasonable as she was to herself. I understand the act perfectly. I grew up in the company of people unable to separate from the Communist Party when to stay meant to go on explaining the inexplicable, but to leave -- to walk away from the only transcendence they would ever know -- meant living with a granulated ache in the nerves that would tell them for the rest of their lives they'd been expelled from Eden. And this, they decided, they simply could not do. Such "decisions" are taken in a place in the psyche well below the one where rational thought operates effectively -- the place that Arendt, essentially, discounted.

Presently he reaches out his hand and touches her hip. . . . He runs his fingers over her hip and feels the stretch marks there. They are like roads, and he traces them in her flesh. He runs his fingers back and forth, first one, then another. They run everywhere in her flesh, dozens, perhaps hundreds of them. He remembers waking up the morning after they bought the car, seeing it, there in the drive, in the sun, gleaming.

Her stretch marks, his convertible: it comes finally to that. The story, like much of Carver's fiction, is permeated with the nakedness of the moment. This is Carver's great strength: stunning immediacy, remarkable pathos. No other American writer can make a reader feel, as he does, right up against it when a character experiences loss of hope. It is impossible to resist the power of such writing, and while I'm reading the story I don't. But then I find myself turning away. The atmosphere congeals. I feel manipulated. These people fail to engage me. I cannot be persuaded that life between Toni and Leo was good when the convertible stood gleaming in the driveway. What's more, I don't think Carver thinks life was good then, either. I think he yearns to believe that it should have been good, not that it actually was. This yearning is the force behind his writing. What fuels the intensity of his gaze, the clarity with which he pares down the description, is not a shrewd insight into the way things actually are between this man and this woman but a terrible longing to describe things as they might have been -- or should have been. The sense of loss here is original and primal, unmediated by adult experience.

Connection between people like Toni and Leo is predicated on the existence of a world in which men and women conform to a romantic notion of themselves as men and women. These two have never been real to each other. They were bound to end in her stretch marks, his convertible. Carver knows that. Instead of being jolted by what he knows, startled into another posture, he feels only sad and bad. He mourns the loss of romantic possibility in each life; in Carver's work, story after story"What Do You Do in San Francisco?" "Gazebo," "They're Not Your Husband," "Little Things," ''What We Talk About When We Talk About Love"is saturated in a wistful longing for an ideal, tender connection that never was, and never can be. Carver's surrogate character seems always to be saying, "Wouldn't it be lovely if it could have been otherwise?" In short, the work is sentimental. Trapped inside that sentimentality is the struggle so many women and so many men are waging now to make sense of themselves as they actually are. The struggle has brought men-and-women-together into a new place; puzzling and painful, true, but new nonetheless. In the country of these stories not only is that place not on the map, it's as though the territory doesn't exist.

There's a novel by Richard Ford in which the narrating protagonist says, "Women have always lightened my burdens, picked up my faltering spirits and exhilarated me with the old anything-goes feeling though anything doesn't go, of course, and never did. . . . [But now] . . . I have slipped for a moment out onto that plane where women can't help in the age-old ways. . . . Not that I've lost the old yen, just that the old yen seems suddenly defeatable by facts, the kind you can't sidestep -- the essence of a small empty moment." Frank Bascombe delivers himself of this insight on page 61 of The Sportswriter and then goes on speaking until page 375 exactly as though he hadn't. Taking in his own experience is not what this man is about.