BENICIA LITERARY ARTS HAS STARTED SOMETHING NEW, a Literary Salon that meets the third Monday of each month upstairs at First Street Café, beginning at 7 in the evening. I’ll be moderating the next Salon on Monday, May 19. The theme will be beginnings — the reader’s burden, the writer’s bane, about which I’ll have more to say in my next article. So I hope to see you at the next salon with some short story or novel beginnings that captivate or challenge you. Certainly, if you don’t come with your beginnings, our beginnings will miss your contribution.

But now I’d like to reflect on the first Literary Salon that was moderated by Lois Requist, Benicia’s poet laureate and a Benicia Literary Arts board member. It was held on April 21, and continued for about an hour and a half. The turnout was good, the refreshments light, the discussion lively — thank you so much, Lois — and I hope attendees had as much fun as I did discussing characterization. Maybe they even had an epiphany or two.

One flash of insight — or was it confusion? — I had during the Salon was that the characters who are most likely to add a layer or two to our souls are moral accretions of whys and hows. Let me explain what I mean by this by considering the topic of love — more specifically, love’s history.

Should I think about the history of love, of course parents, grandparents, my wife, our sons, our daughters-in-law, our soon-to-be-born granddaughter come first to mind.

And yet, there’s now a little corner in my cluttered mind where Leo Gursky sits.

In Nicole Krauss’s soul-layering novel “The History of Love,” Leo Gursky is a Polish Jew, an old man who emigrated after World War II and who lost so much, much more than I could ever imagine in my worst nightmares. He sits on his chair in his cluttered apartment in my cluttered mind and whispers the history of love, a Jewish, a human history of loss and despair.

And yet.

Leo Gursky, this character sewn from the fabric of Nicole Krauss’s imagination, who has never existed, who has always existed, whispers a history of love that demands the loss, that demands the despair, that is made essential, meaningful by the loss of family members, of friends — by the loss of those who returned our love, and of those who didn’t. Leo Gursky whispers that I must remember if I am to truly understand the history of love.

And yet.

How was Nicole Krauss able to create this character who so affected my soul?

Near the end of the novel, Leo sits on a park bench waiting for a love that may be real, may be not. Her name is Alma, but she’s not the Alma of his past. She’s the Alma of a different future. Leo doesn’t know this, and even if he did it would hardly matter, for the line has long since blurred between what has happened and what is going to happen. Leo’s present is lived in the past.

And there’s a note pinned to his chest: “MY NAME IS LEO GURSKY I HAVE NO FAMILY PLEASE CALL PINELAWN CEMETERY I HAVE A PLOT THERE IN THE JEWISH PART THANK YOU FOR YOUR CONSIDERATION.”

“My God!” I say to myself as now I’m crying, trying to stifle sobs that convulse my chest. I’m sitting in a public space, the waiting room in Kaiser’s Martinez facility, nearing the end the novel, my heart aching, waiting for my doctor to give me an exam, behaving like a sentimental fool. “What must others think?”

There are few advantages to age, but one is that death is much closer than it used to be, which focuses the mind in a way that was never possible when I worried more about sexual distinction — “I feel pretty / Oh, so pretty / I feel pretty and witty and bright!” — than about love’s history. So I don’t really give a damn what people think, which is simultaneously a strength and a curse.

And yet.

Here I am at age 67, learning something new about love from an author whom I don’t know who created a character I can never meet except in my imagination. But still I haven’t answered the question: How did Krauss do this?

If I’m a reader, I want to know the answer to this question because I want to know what we talk about when we talk about love, and knowing how Krauss created Leo Gursky might help me along my way.

And if I’m a writer, I want to steal Krauss’s secret, the magic formula she used to create her characters, so that I can follow her lead but claim my characters as products of my own creative brilliance.

So I return to the idea that those characters, real or imagined, who are most likely to add a layer or two to our souls, are moral accretions of whys and hows. They help us to understand why we choose love over hate, and how to know the difference.

Anton Chekhov instructs us in an 1866 letter to his brother Alexander that character action requires a perpetual falling, a turning and turning about a center of gravity: “The center of gravity should be in two persons,” Chekhov writes.

“Things fall apart; the center will not hold,” William Butler Yeats adds in 1919 in “The Second Coming” — if the best characters lack conviction, if the worst are full of passionate intensity.

And Martin Luther King Jr. asserts in 1965 that the arc of the moral universe is long, but bends toward justice — toward Chekhov’s center of gravity and toward the center of Yeats’s gyre, but only if the best among us tell us why and show us how.

So that, it seems, is Krauss’s secret. That is why Leo Gursky moves me to tears of understanding.

And yet.

Here I sit in the Kaiser waiting room, closing the cover on Krauss’s novel, wiping tears from my eyes, waiting for my physical exam. If there’s anything worse than an old person sitting on a bench, sobbing in public because he read a novel, it’s probably an old person who can’t wait to tell you what his doctor said during his physical exam.

Dave Badtke teaches English at Solano Community College and is a Benicia Literary Arts board member.