Dreams and Destinies

Book excerpt: Dreams and Destinies, the Rosetta Stone of Marguerite Yourcenar's canon, is an intimate journal of her dreams. In Dreams and Destinies Yourcenar has provided us with the most daring, yet least conventional form of autobiography, a form that allows the reader to view her life refracted through the poetic sensibility of her own sleeping mind. In recording her dream life, Yourcenar wanders through a picture gallery of the soul, pausing before ruined cathedrals filled with candles, dark ravines that hold dead bodies, and still reflecting pools located deep inside soaring gothic churches. Her dreams are populated by men, women, and children as well as animals and mythical creatures. Available for the first time in English in the way that she intended upon her death, Dreams and Destinies is a reminder from one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century that the dreams we create are with us forever.