Home Thoughts, From Abroad

I was never tempted to major or minor in English. What appeared to me a brutal and incomprehensible subjectivity in the discipline had frightened me as early as the seventh grade. It was too easy to imagine not being able to count on succeeding in English no matter how hard I might try. Your teacher could punish you for having your own views, or for thickly resisting having any views on large portions of any given work that had excited the teacher. Most of the time I thought I didn't get it, couldn't get it, and would never get it.

It's so obvious to me now that we all approach any book, newspaper, blog, or other reading willing to hear only a limited number of messages that we believe will help us somehow. Other readers will float without a reaction right past the spots that shock us because we've been looking for someone to express such thoughts for some time. And should we underline such passages, we may return years later and have no clue why we found that part so exciting. We no longer need what we think that passage offers.

If all this is true, then what hope was there to succeed at literary interpretation? In college I took the minimum English required, plus one extra course because some friends did too. Thereafter what fiction I read would be only for pleasure, never a grade. A lot of people approach their study of history the same way, and I'm very happy for them.

Recently an acquaintance with impeccable literary taste overcame some scruples against recommending anyone else read a favorite work, and let me know about Nicole Krauss's Man Walks into a Room. A few weeks later I was ready to read some fiction -- I hadn't done much since I devoured almost every one of Nick Hornby's novels in a spree last summer.

Man Walks into a Room served me well. I'm always interested in reading and thinking about the tension between being alone and being with others, between loneliness and union, between friendship and love. No passage made this more clear than the following, excerpted from pages 124-125. It's a dialogue between the main character, Samson, and a medical researcher, Ray (I've omitted some of the descriptive passages between the sections of dialogue):

Ray: "When you're young, you think it's going to be solved by love. But it never is. Being close -- as close as you can get -- to another person only makes clear the impassable distance between you."

Samson: "I don't know. If being in love only made people more lonely, why would everyone want it so much?"

Ray: "Because of the illusion. You fall in love, it's intoxicating, and for a little while you feel you've become one with the other person. Merged souls, and so on. You think you'll never be lonely again. Only it doesn't last and soon you realize you can only get so close, and you get brutally disappointed, more than ever, because the illusion -- the hope you'd held on to all those years -- has been shattered."

Ray continues: "But see, the incredible thing about people is that we forget, ... time passes and somehow the hope creeps back and sooner or later someone else comes along and we think this is the one. And the whole thing starts over again. We go through our lives like that, and either we just accept the lesser relationship -- it may not be total understanding, but it's pretty good -- or we keep trying for that perfect union, trying and failing, leaving behind us a trail of broken hearts, our own included. In the end, we die as alone as we are born, but having failed in what we once imagined was possible."

Samson: "People really want that, what did you say, merging souls? Total union?"

Ray: "Yes. Or they think they do. Mostly what they want, I think, is to be known."

Samson: "But don't you think that being alone is somehow ... I don't know, good? That to love someone is one thing, but if it means giving up the part of you that's alone and free --"

Ray: "That's just it!...How to be alone, to remain free, but not feel longing, not to feel imprisoned in oneself. That ... is what interests me."

One of the brightest stars of 1970s and 1980s pop psychology, Scott Peck, blamed nature or evolution for the illusion that love creates. Basically, nature doesn't care what it has to do to us to make us procreate. As far as nature is concerned, we're life support systems for our reproductive organs. If we long to be known, as Ray says above, then nature provides us with a way to commingle being known with procreation: we call it love. If nature had a more efficient way of uniting humans in order to reproduce, I'm sure it would have taken it.

Why should we be so shocked when men and women, socialized to be different from birth and subject to varying hormonal influences, often find life beyond sex to be difficult, maddening, or (maybe worst of all) boring? It must be because those of us outside cultures in which marriages are arranged buy into nature's sweetest lie, that we will find (as Ray says) the one, we will be perfectly known by that person, and we will always want to be with that person as intensely as we did at the beginning.

Maybe there are many who have found the perfect union. I don't want to deny it's possible. Many more are likely instead to have accommodated themselves to some poor approximation, and because of social or cultural pressure, the need to provide stability for their children, fear of the unknown or of admitting failure, or just plain laziness they've decided to stop looking. They blame themselves or their partner for changing, when in fact nothing was more certain than that they both would either change into something new or revert to habits and patterns they had suppressed in order to satisfy the illusion of a perfect match.

So, yes, there may be a few who beat the odds and find a perfect match. There are also a few who win the lottery or those NCAA basketball tournament prediction contests. It's a poor idea to base one's sense of self and happiness on what happens to only a few, and only rarely. Instead, as Nicole Krauss says through the mouth of her character Ray, many of us might do better to search for a way to "remain free, but not feel longing." But I don't think nature's going to let many of us get away with it.

Litter

You reach a certain point and you're amazed at all of the people you've discarded, or who've discarded you. I'm probably better than most at trying to keep friendships alive even when the friend or I have moved, but eventually I give up too.

"Replace the ones you love," goes the line in a favorite song. You try, and you succeed, but there's still a sense of waste at the number now consigned to a feeble and shifting memory, where they will become something they never were -- perfect in either their goodness or their flaws. You either want them again or you're glad to be rid of them for equally false reasons. If you'd like them back, you're forgetting that who you and they really were prevented the friendship from becoming a lifelong one. If you're amazed you were ever friends with such a person, you're forgetting how circumstances put you both into a spot where you needed and benefited from the company.

The friendships that endure require a level of transparency and trust that would exhaust any of us if we had more than one or two of them. You have to know your friend or you won't hold back anything important from each other, and you have to know they're always going to be there, even if they live somewhere else. Otherwise, it's not a friendship but a convenience -- necessary, helpful, and enjoyable -- but fleeting and ultimately disappointing. Such transitory relationships, be they platonic or amorous, are another of the hidden costs of making it through the day or night. You will pay to have them, or pay not to have them. Take your pick.