something about this just makes me feel old.

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love is blue

Published 8.15.2007 by matt o | E-mail this post

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'I have often noticed that we are inclined to endow our friends with the stability of type that literary characters acquire in the reader's mind. No matter how many times we reopen "King Lear," never shall we find the good king banging his tankard in high revelry, all woes forgotten, at a jolly reunion with all three daughters and their lapdogs. Never will Emma rally, revived by the sympathetic salts in Flaubert's father's timely tear. Whatever evolution this or that popular character has gone through between the book covers, his fate is fixed in our minds, and, similarly, we expect our friends to follow this or that logical and conventional pattern we have fixed for them. Thus X will never compose the immortal music that would clash with the second-rate symphonies he has accustomed us to. Y will never commit murder. Under no circumstances can Z ever betray us. We have it all arranged in our minds, and the less often we see a particular person the more satisfying it is to check how obediently he conforms to our notion of him every time we hear of him. Any deviation in the fates we have ordained would strike us as not only anomalous but unethical. We would prefer not to have known at all our neighbor, the retired hot-dog stand operator, if it turns out he has just produced the greatest book of poetry his age has seen.'

-- Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita
because we want our friends to be happy, but not so happy that they no longer need us. at some point last night and at various points this afternoon it hit me over and over again how scattered my infrastructure is becoming. i can build myself on the now, but most of myself rests on a series of past events, solid enough in their original grounding (though some of them took place only in my mind), but not constants, not unending lines that can form support girders to keep me up indefinitely. people change, and in the electronic age we can see it from afar without actually contacting anyone. is that worse, to see it gradually? it's an ugly human impulse, this; this wanting to deny happiness-- not actively, not willfully, but simply that any uneasiness exists on such a selfish level.

it's a tendency i've had-- catherine called me on it once and shook me up for a spell. i denied it, but i catch myself sometimes-- the breath catching in the throat and the hot full-body panic sensation that goes along with finding out someone has deviated from their supposed trajectory.

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