Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life
My muddle, in retrospect, is clear: I had underestimated my aversion to wanting anything; I had overestimated my capacity to want nothing.
What can be spoken does not sustain; what cannot be spoken undermines.
To speak when one cannot is to blunder.
One always knows how best to sabotage one’s own life.
There is no ladder out of any world; each world is rimless - my friend Amy Leach writes. A ladder is no longer what I am seeking. Rather, I want one day to be able to say to myself: Dear friend, we have waited this out.
I wasn’t necessarily drawn to every part of this memoir, but it is intimate, and the high points are very, very high indeed. I’m not sure I can do it much justice. I just finished reading it. I have many thoughts but I’m exhausted to immediately find coherence. Instead, here are some excerpts.
In an ideal world, I would prefer to have my mind reserved for thinking, and thinking alone. I dread the moment when a thought trails off and a feeling starts, when one faces the eternal challenge of eluding the void for which one does not have words. To speak when one cannot is to blunder.
“We write to narrate, not to prove,” Turgenev advised a young writer in a letter. I wish I had learned that earlier, though to prove, even as a failed effort, brings the relief of certainty, and what brings relief can become a habit, an addiction.
…what is the freedom? Though freedom, like originality, is curious only as a universal fantasy. How people endure the lack of freedom is more interesting to me than their pursuit of it.
To think that eager person - not wanting to miss a connection with the world - would grow up into the recluse I prefer to think of myself as today: there must be a part of everyone’s youth that later one avoids looking at too closely.
If aloneness is inevitable, I want to believe that aloneness is what I have desired because it is happiness itself. It must be a miscomprehension - though I have been unwilling to give it up - that one’s life could be lived as a series of solitary moments. In between, time spent with other people is the time to prepare for their disappearance. That there is an opposite perspective I can only understand theoretically. The time line is also a repetition of one’s lapse into isolation. It’s not others who vanish, but from others one vanishes.
Only by fully preparing oneself for people’s absence can one be at ease with their presence. A recluse, I have begun to understand, is not a person for whom a connection with another person is unattainable or meaningless, but one who feels she must abstain from people because a connection is an affliction, or worse, an addiction.
Did we ever ask ourselves; Why are we so lonely, so proud, and so adamant about perfecting our pretense? We kept our secrets well, from the world and from ourselves, and out of fatalism we cultivated stoicism.
Why are we told to seek out people? In forming attachments, does one become more than oneself, or does one lose an essential means of preserving oneself? The danger of forming an attachment - to a person, to a place, to a profession, to a cause, even to one’s own life - is that one can trick oneself into believing that an attachment has a reason, and worse, that the reason can be mistaken as a right.
There is no greed in this wanting - greed comes from lack and a desire to be rid of it by any means. He [John McGahern] is at peace with wanting. Perhaps this is why the memoir is always difficult for me to read. If there are things lacking in my life - and there are, as is the case for everyone - I have resolved never to want them. This must be greed too; wanting nothing is as extreme as wanting everything.
Loneliness is the inability to speak with another in one’s private language. That emptiness is filled with public language or romanticized connections. But one must be cautious when assuming meaning. A moment of recognition between two people only highlights the inadequacy of language. What can be spoken does not sustain; what cannot be spoken undermines.
The sense of being an imposter, I understand, occurs naturally, and those who do not occasionally feel so I find untrustworthy.
To defy any political authority, to endanger myself in a righteous way, to use my words to distinguish this self from people around me - these, at eighteen, were short-cuts to what I really wanted: confirmation that life, bleak and unjust, was not worth living.
There was the advantage in believing I was old already because it released me from having to be young. There was the possibility of death, which allowed one to bypass digressions into a life that had to be lived in detail.
“Whatever the problem, we must elude the sense of being trapped - even if all one can say to one’s self is, “if not now, later.” …If nothing charms or sustains us (and we are getting food and fresh air) it is for us to say, “If not now, later” and not mope. I never fully succeed, and am beginning to think I never shall; still, the automatic sense of participation, brings one along.
- Marianne Moore, in a letter to a disheartened friend
“There is something profound & terrible in this eternal desire to establish contact.”
- Katherine Mansfield
“Solitude is noble, but fatal to an artist who has not the strength to break out of it. An artist must live the life of his own time, even if it be clamorous and impure: he must forever be giving and receiving, and giving, and giving, and again receiving.
- Romain Rolland, Jean-Christophe
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