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.

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.

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.