All You Wanted And More

"If she was all you wanted and herself besides," asked Rydra, her head shaking between two names on the screen, "could you love her?"

Excerpt from Babel-17
by Samuel R. Delany

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It seems to me that there are many ways of loving someone, but in my experience there are some that pop up frequently:

1. Because she's everything you wanted (or close enough)
Why else would you be with someone? Isn't this what we all strive for? The ideal? The person who treats us how we want to be treated, makes us feel better about life, is easy to look at and talk with, the best friend and lover, and the one who always has our back, no matter who else abandons us? This is the purely selfish part of love, but a necessary part. What we want matters, just as much as what the other person wants.

2. Because you understand her
Harder to express is how important it is to "get" the person you're with, whether they see it or not. To appreciate their sense of humor; to be able to make sense of their moods, their subtle facial expressions, and their words (or lack thereof); to feel a sense of enjoyment and relief because of how close this understanding makes you feel to them.

3. Because she grew on you
Despite perhaps being perplexed at first by the person you're with, their peculiarities begin to grow on you. They walk a certain way, laugh a certain way, sleep a certain way, and though you may always find these things fascinating, you eventually consider them less odd than necessary. Their way of being has grown on you to such an extent that you can't imagine not having them play a role in your life.

4. Because she's herself
Sometimes the trickiest aspect to loving someone is in doing so for whomever and whatever they are. This is where collisions happen, where personalities must navigate the same waters and find ways to moor. Accepting others when they're being themselves, and encouraging it, is in fact one kind of love, and perhaps the most difficult. It often requires giving up some of that selfishness, and just allowing yourself to adore the person you're with.

 

Even When We Take On Giants

...I can too easily imagine how his feathery hope is being crushed beneath a weight of unearned shame. His failure to defeat something more powerful than himself, and the scar that reminds him of his failure, is no reason for shame; guilt is deserved only when the effort to resist evil is never made.

Yet the human heart is disheartened by the most unreasonable self-judgments, because even when we take on giants, we too often confuse failure with fault, which I know too well. The only way back from such a bleak despondency is to shape humiliation into humility, to strive always to triumph over the darkness while never forgetting that the honor and the beauty are more in the striving than in the winning. When triumph at last comes, our efforts alone could not have won the day without that grace which surpasses all understanding and which will, if we allow it, imbue our lives with meaning.

Excerpt from Odd Interlude: A Special Odd Thomas Adventure
by Dean Koontz

 

Good Enough

"Happy?" I ask. He smiles as if guilty of something but only says, "Heh," a kind of grunt with raised eyebrows, which I now know means "abbastanza," good enough, the highest degree of happiness he can allow himself to experience. Italians are suspicious of American exuberance.

Excerpt from Blood, Bones & Butter
by Gabrielle Hamilton

Hopefully we can all allow ourselves more.

 

Everything I Expected And Less

To continue with the theme of my recent post about being sheltered from the world, here is a quote that I find amusing and relevant:

"I didn't want to leave that party. It was great."

"No, it wasn't. The music was too loud, the food was cold, the drinks were too few and the people many. It was everything I expected and less. I'm never going outside again unless I need to find a place to throw up."

Excerpt from Black Books

 

Happiness In Another Universe

I've just finished reading an immense novel by Neal Stephenson called Anathem. It's an interesting story that takes place in an alternate cosmos with characters who use words not known in our own cosmos (if I ever find myself in that particular universe, I am now fluent in their language). In addition to science fiction, there's a lot of philosophy in the story dealing with things such as knowledge and where it comes from, as well as how the acquisition of knowledge may alter everything else. And something I particularly liked about the story was the existence of secluded places (like convents minus the religion) where characters spent their entire lives largely devoted to the study of science, math and philosophy. I wouldn't mind living like that, I think.

There were also repeating themes in the story related to various methods for finding happiness. As an example, there's a chemical called "allswell" which, if you ingest it and have enough of it in your system, will make you feel good in general. In my mind, I equated this made-up chemical with real-world habits like drugs, television and fast food. It wasn't a huge leap to make -- in the story, characters referred to the difference between working for your happiness and obtaining it the easy way, i.e., by some type of shortcut. Here's a snippet found early in the novel:

We moved on across the pavement slab. "Look," I said, "it's been understood at least since the Praxic Age that if you have enough allswell floating around in your bloodstream, your brain will tell you in a hundred different ways that everything is all right --"

"And if you don't, you end up like you and me," he said.

I tried to become angry, then surrendered with a laugh. "All right," I said, "let's go with that. A minute ago, we passed a stand of blithe in the median strip --"

"I saw it too, and the one by the pre-owned-pornography store."

"That one looked fresher. We could go pick it and eat it, and eventually the level of allswell in our blood would go up and we could eventually live out here, or anywhere, and feel happy. Or we could go back to the concent and try to come by our happiness honestly."

Sounds like happiness in an alternate cosmos is not much different from happiness here. If only for the fact that the story dealt with matters like these, I would say that I enjoyed the book (although, because of the length of the novel, I do wonder whether the author was using some sort of allswell himself). Still, it was a thought-provoking story all around.

 

Of Shunning Men And Women

Of 'shunning men and women', -- they talk of hallowed things, aloud, and embarrass my dog.

Emily Dickinson

Amen, sister.

 

On Wasting Time

... Everybody wastes time. A little here, a little there. You wake up in the morning, it's all bright and shiny, you get out of bed and say to yourself, Today is the day! Today I'm going to be a great man. Then you look out the window, you see a pretty girl on the sidewalk -- zoom, into the pants, into the shirt, downstairs, 'Hello, did you drop this?' And you say to yourself, All right, so tomorrow I'll be a great man. Who ever got anywhere by rushing? Tomorrow positively, Thursday for sure ...

... So let's say you marry this girl. All right, you can still be a great man. Look at all the great men who had wives. Go ahead, be a great man, don't let me stop you. Only first you should stop by the grocer and pick up something for the dog. Also for the baby, soft, because he's getting his teeth. To do this, you have to have a job five days a week, you can be a great man on week ends ...

Excerpt from A Fine & Private Place
by Peter S. Beagle

 

On Spring & Where To Be Happiest

Excerpt from "A Moveable Feast", by Ernest Hemingway:

When spring came, even the false spring, there were no problems except where to be happiest. The only thing that could spoil a day was people and if you could keep from making engagements, each day had no limits. People were always the limiters of happiness except for the very few that were as good as spring itself.

I don't think I'm one of the few who is good as spring itself, but I hope not to be a limiter, either. Also, I like this imagery of too many happy choices. Isn't that like any new beginning?

Happy Spring!

On "Enjoying the Day-to-Day Normalcy of Things"

She had always felt that the essence of human experience lay not primarily in the peak experiences, the wedding days and triumphs which stood out in the memory like dates circled in red on calendars, but, rather, in the unselfconscious flow of little things - the weekend afternoon with each member of the family engaged in his or her own pursuit, their crossings and connections casual, dialogues imminently forgettable, but the sum of such hours creating a synergy which was important and eternal.

Excerpt from Hyperion by Dan Simmons