Teresa, My Love: An Imagined Life of the Saint of Avila

Contents\nAbbreviations and Chronology\nPart 1. The Nothingness of All Things\nChapter 1. Present by Default\nChapter 2. Mystical Seduction\nChapter 3. Dreaming, Music, Ocean\nChapter 4. Homo viator\nPart 2. Understanding Through Fiction\nChapter 5. Prayer, Writing, Politics\nChapter 6. How to Write Sensible Experience, or, of Water as the Fiction of Touch\nChapter 7. The Imaginary of an Unfindable Sense Curled into a God Findable in Me\nPart 3. The Wanderer\nChapter 8. Everything So Constrained Me\nChapter 9. Her Lovesickness\nChapter 10. The Ideal Father and the Host\nPart 4. Extreme Letters, Extremes of Being\nChapter 11. Bombs and Ramparts\nChapter 12. “Cristo como hombre”\nChapter 13. Image, Vision, and Rapture\nChapter 14. “The soul isn’t in possession of its senses, but it rejoices”\nChapter 15. A Clinical Lucidity\nChapter 16. The Minx and the Sage\nChapter 17. Better to Hide . . . ?\nChapter 18. “. . . or ‘to do what lies within my power’”?\nChapter 19. From Hell to Foundation\nPart 5. From Ecstasy to Action\nChapter 20. The Great Tide\nChapter 21. Saint Joseph, the Virgin Mary, and His Majesty\nChapter 22. The Maternal Vocation\nChapter 23. Constituting Time\nChapter 24. Tutti a Cavallo\nPart 6. Foundation– Persecution\nChapter 25. The Mystic and the Jester\nChapter 26. A Father Is Beaten to Death\nChapter 27. A Runaway Girl\nChapter 28. “Give me trials, Lord ; give me persecutions”\nChapter 29. “With the ears of the soul”\nPart 7. Dialogues from Beyond the Grave\nChapter 30. Act 1. Her Women\nChapter 31. Act 2. Her Eliseus\nChapter 32. Act 3. Her “Little Seneca”\nChapter 33. Act 4. The Analyst’s Farewell\nPart 8. Postscript\nChapter 34. Letter to Denis Diderot on the Infinitesimal Subversion of a Nun\nNotes\nSources