Grace and Grit [antikvár]

Introduction to the Second Edition As I WRITE THIS, it has been ten years since Treya's death. I am immeasurably more, and immeasurably less, because of her presence. Immeasurably more, for having known her; immeasurably less, for having lost her. But then, perhaps every event in life is like that: filling you up and emptying you out, all at the same time. It is just that, it is oh-so-rare that such a one as Treya is with us, and thus the joy, and the pain, are all so intensely amplified. There are as many Treyas as there are those who knew her. What follows is my Treya. I am not saying it is the only Treya, or even the best. But I do believe it is a full account, fair and balanced. In particular, it makes liberal use of her own journals, which she kept off and on for most of her adult life, and which she kept almost daily during the years we were together. I had always intended to destroy these journals after Treya died, and without reading them myself, because they were so intensely personal for her. She never showed them to anybody, not even me. Not because she was reclusive or private about her "real feelings" and thus had to "hide" them in her journals. On the contrary, one of the most extraordinary things about Treya—in fact, I might say the single most astonishing thing about her—is that she had almost no split between her public and her private selves. She harbored no "secret" thoughts that she was afraid or ashamed to share with the world. If you asked, she would tell you exactly what she thought—about you or anybody else—but in such a nondefensive, direct, straightforward way that people rarely got upset. This was the basis of her enormous integrity: people trusted her right from the start, because they seemed to know that she would never lie to them, and as far as I can tell, she never did. No, I had intended to destroy the journals simply because when she wrote in them, it was a special time for her to be alone with herself, and I felt that nobody, including me, should violate that space. But right