Portrait of Jennie
by Robert Nathan
In 1938, painter Eben Adams struggles to find his muse and put food on the table until a
young girl named Jennie appears to him from some two decades earlier, beseeching him to
wait for her. Over the next few months of visitations in Eben’s time, Jennie grows into
her twenties, and Eben falls in love with his muse.
— Michael Main
Never before had it occurred to me to ask myself why the sun should rise each morning on
a new day instead of upon the old day over again; or to wonder how much of what I did
was really my own to do. It may be that here on this earth we are not grateful enough for
our ignorance, and our innocence. We think that there is only one road, one
direction—forward; and we accept it, and press on. We think of God, we think of the
mystery of the universe, but we do not think about it very much, and we do not really
believe that it is a mystery, or that we could not understand it if it were explained to
us.
Portrait of Jennie by Robert Nathan (Alfred A. Knopf,
1940).