Dictionnaire d'amour

"I sometimes wished someone would invent a dictionnaire d'amour—a lover's dictionary listing all the weird and wonderful ways in which humans show their love. An inordinate number of men choose to repair things; other people frantically rebuff compliments, and still others stubbornly conceal their love so as not to pester anyone. A dictionary—yes! Of course, it could never be comprehensive."

⸻ from Nina George, The Little Village of Book Lovers, p. 24

I got this book last week, as a Christmas present from Debbie. So naturally I have to wonder, … is "buying someone a book of fiction in which the story is actually narrated by Love" one of these "weird and wonderful ways" that would show up in such a dictionary?

See also choices like this movie here, not to mention our further discussion here or any of the posts that come after it.

          

Tolstoy on expert coquettes

“Ask an expert coquette who has set herself the task of captivating a man, which she would prefer to risk: to be convicted in his presence of lying, of cruelty, or even of dissoluteness, or to appear before him in an ugly and badly made dress — she will always prefer the first. She knows that we [men] are continually lying about high sentiments, but really only want her body and will therefore forgive any abomination except an ugly tasteless costume that is in bad style.”

Pozdnyshev, in “The Kreutzer Sonata,” chapter 6.

I don't know whether Pozdnyshev speaks for Tolstoy in this novella -- I think maybe he does -- but right now my interest is more whether this statement is true. 

I think D would have concurred, if pressed. Looking good was really important to her, and she studied it as a science. She thought it was genuinely puzzling that I was married to Wife, because (in her evaluation) I was so much more attractive than Wife was, and she considered it a scientific fact that on the whole spouses are of comparable attractiveness. I'd never heard about this until she told me, but she treated it as common knowledge, rather like knowing that the earth goes around the sun. 

One interesting thought is that there are plenty of misogynists who would agree with the first sentence -- that women are more concerned with their physical appearance than with their moral standing -- on the grounds that women are silly, vain creatures. Pozdnyshev (and by extension Tolstoy) affirms the same thesis on the grounds that men are all horndogs, and that women are perceptive enough to see through our bullshit to the reality underneath.

I sent the quote to Marie, without the comments about D. I wonder if she will concur that this sounds like her mother? We'll see ….

          

A sucker's game?

"Here is a moral problem. My ex-husband had not so much committed adultery as rode out into the night, pumped with nicotine, shining with watery red eyes, brain cells floating in alcohol, his words swinging like ropes across the room, tying all the pretty women into a group from which he picked one to follow home, night after night. He also roamed the streets looking for prostitutes, when he was drunk enough. He had explained to me that this was necessary for his well-being. He had to do this. His nerves required it. He did have to do it and I understood. But as I waited for him to come home in the early hours of the morning, I had come to feel that I was a fool, a lady-in-waiting in a court that didn't exist. If other women had my husband, I too could do as I pleased. This was not so much a moral choice as an abdication of morality. Fidelity seemed like a sucker's game. I had been betrayed by fairy-tale myths of happily ever after. My conscience ached but I ignored it.

"My father, who did not love my mother, took to bed in downtown hotels, in uptown hotels, in apartments on the maid's day out, on the nanny's day out, on the cook's day out, my mother's friends, Dorothy, Sally, Helen, Honey, and others whose names I cannot remember. How did I know? I knew because my mother told me. Ice packs on her swollen eyes, a double scotch by the bedside, she told me. And I knew by the time I knew anything that the marriage vow was like the little boy's finger in the mythical dike, in the real world it wasn't going to hold. And so I understood, divorced lady that I now was, that I was a menace, a threat to someone else's hope for a reasonable ever after. I looked at Doc and detested him for what he would do to his wife. I also understood that I would not be an innocent bystander but, like Dorothy, Sally, Helen, and Honey, I would be both greedy and ashamed. I felt uneasy at how easy it was to become the other woman or one of the many other women. But then I believed or tried to believe that everyone should be free and every free act struck a blow against a world so cramped and sad that I could not endure it, would not pass it on to my daughter.

"In other words I was unmoored, uncertain, and violated the only religious precept I really believed: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. But those untos in the phrase marked it as ancient news from an ancient world that couldn't survive the things we knew, the things we did, the terrible monster that was mankind. It wasn't so much desire that led me as my intention not to live like a coward. I was determined to take what life would offer. I didn't want to be the only woman of my generation to hold to standards everyone else had long ago abandoned. I do not excuse this because of youth or anger or past history. I think that no one knew, was really sure, whether it was better to snatch what sex one could from passersby or to remain faithful to a love and miss the party, miss the circus and grow old and bitter. I wasn't sure what was right or wrong or if it mattered. I considered Simone de Beauvoir. She was not impressed by the Lord's commandments.

"I had the morals of a four-year-old."

 

-- Anne Roiphe, Art and Madness: A Memoir of Lust Without Reason, pp. 18-20.

I wonder whether Wife ever thought through her infidelities with this level of discernment and exactitude. I think not. If she had, I think she would have been more of a libertine and wouldn't have tried to hide so much.  And in fact I have written here before that I would have liked that better than what she really did do. It might have been tough in it's own way -- Anne Roiphe's memoir makes it clear that this life was tough on her and her daughter -- but it would have been bracing, a challenge.

Right now I'm not sure what else the passage makes me think. But I'm certain it's important and I wanted to share it.
       

"The Power and the Glory"

On my trip to Sticksville, I took along Graham Greene's The Power and the Glory, at the recommendation of Son 2 who had read it in English class last year.  Of course it's a great book, but I loved the way that Greene shows us what good there is, hidden though it be, in the whiskey priest where many more upright and pious people are missing it.  After I finished the book, Son 2 asked me what I thought of it.  I tried to explain this, and quoted back to him what I thought was one of the most insightful lines of the book:

"What an unbearable creature he must have been in those days--and yet in those days he had been comparatively innocent. That was another mystery: it sometimes seemed to him that venial sins--impatience, an unimportant lie, pride, a neglected opportunity--cut you off from grace more completely than the worst sins of all. Then, in his innocence, he had felt no love for anyone; now in his corruption he had learnt."

Son 2's answer?  "That's the line I wrote my paper on."

Nice to know we are struck by similar things, I guess .... 

"Reality is a good mistress"

No special reason for these quotes just now, but I was thumbing through a book and chanced to find them.  They are overwritten in a magnificent way ... if you don't know the author search him out, because he's good at this sort of thing.

"We build our fantasies and surrender to them.  Auto-intoxication.  All inside our fucking heads.  A form of narcissism.  But I never jettison my long friendship with reality.  Reality is a good mistress.  She allows me infidelities because she knows I know the value of a cold shower and will come back shivering, but unscathed."

Or again:

"The past is not revered for truths it has revealed and tested at great cost, but is dragooned and corrupted to go bail for the crimes of an arrogant present."

-- Owen Ulph, The Leather Throne, p. 468-9

P.S.  If you actually want to take my advice on someone so crazy, start with The Fiddleback: Lore of the Line Camp.  It is shorter and therefore way more accessible than The Leather Throne.

Monday evening

Already today I've posted about Debbie's farewell letter.  Also, I took my reply, broke it into four pieces, and posted all those ... with a delay so that they appear one after another on subsequent days.  But I've also said that none of that should count as writing anything today, not in a "journal" sense, because it was all written days ago.  The thinking all happened back then; only the formatting happened today.

So where do I start?  I thought maybe this evening I would copy out of Ella Price's Journal the instructions that the main character is given on the first page.  Also, if I feel energetic enough, I might rummage through lists I've made in the past of things I intend to write some day and tally those up as well.  Not that I ever run out of things to say, God knows ... just out of the self-discipline, enthusiasm, or gumption to bother saying any of it.

Anyway, the book starts off as follows:

__________

Use a 6x8 notebook. Paste these instructions on the inside cover. Fill at least one page a day, every day. Date each entry and concentrate on one incident or idea that is important to you that day. Don't worry too much about grammar and spelling but about clarity and honesty. I'll cllect and check journals at least twice during the semester, and I'll grade solely on your persistence.

Suggestions for people who need priming:

1. Your honest reaction to something that happened in class.
2. Your reaction to something you read.
3. A quotation – copy it and comment on it.
4. A problem you are struggling with.
5. A new word. Copy a definition from a big dictionary. Try some sentences using the new word.
6. Description of an interesting sight or incident.
7. Suggestions for improving the college.
8. A summary of something you read.
9. A mistake or failure from which you learned something.
10. An idea you disagree with – tell why.
11. A question you can't or won't ask in class – leave room and I'll try to answer it.
12. A dream.
13. A favorite fantasy.
14. A description of a person.
15. An important experience.
16. When all else fails, a bit of your autobiography.

__________

Also, I've got a collection of little notebooks that I carry around with me to jot ideas in.  I may go for months without jotting anything at all, and then have a streak of several ideas in a day.  I started keeping these after reading an article by Peter Drucker about how executives should keep track of their own performance, watch where they do well and badly, and then follow up these realizations so that they can place themselves more often in the situations where they perform well.  My first entry was towards the end of October 2006, and filled several pages trying to evaluate myself at work.

The second entry is kind of interesting, especially in view of my remarks – was it yesterday? – about wanting to figure out what I want to be when I grow up.  It starts off as follows:

Drucker also talks about the importance of planning for the "second half" of your life, because an executive will probably be peaked out by 45. (How depressing!) But part of what he alludes to is the importance of starting the second career early – if someone hasn't started volunteering before he is 40, he probably won't do so after 65.

I trust the ages are a little approximate – after all, I'm not going to start a second career when I still have kids at home [Remember this was six years ago.] and I may not have peaked because I started comparatively late. But clearly it is still something I should be aware of. And equally clearly, if this "second career" is going to be something based in what I'm already doingI can tell what it is. Not, e.g., volunteering or anything related to schools or church or whatever – but writing ideas. This has one way or another been my sideline all along ....  

Then there's a multi-page mini-essay on the meaning of the word "liberalism", some speculations about Nietzsche and the New Testament, a lengthy discussion of some problems at work, and ... oh good heavens.  Here we are less than three weeks into the first of these little notebooks, and I've got a detailed account of one of Wife's violent rages, back when Son 1 was ten years old and Son 2 was eight.  Have you heard enough of these by now?  Or are you game for another?  It doesn't meet the criterion of new writing or new thinking, but I realize it's something I meant to post before this.  I'll write it up tonight ... in a new post (not stretching this one out) and then call it a night and go to bed.  I can pick up the thread of the rest of this later.

Hosea meets Ella Price

A week ago I griped about how I don't like work, and about how updating this blog looks and feels like work.  Sounds like the logical place to go from there would be to stop updating, wouldn't it?

But maybe I need to think about it a little longer before I let myself do that.

A couple weeks ago, ... or something like that, I don't quite remember when ... I went on-line impulsively and ordered a bunch of books by Dorothy Bryant. (Incidentally, if you don't recognize the name you should run, not walk, to your favorite place for ordering books -- be it an on-line site or a real-live store -- and get anything you can find by her.)  For years I had read only two of her books: Miss Giardino and The Kin of Ata are Waiting for You.  I kept telling myself that "some day" I would buy some of the others, and so a couple weeks ago I ordered a bunch of them.  They have started dribbling in, and while I am well into one of the novels (Confessions of Madame Psyche) I have been riffling through the other books as they arrive.

One of these is her very first book, Ella Price's Journal.  It purports to be the daily journal of a middle-aged woman who goes back to school and takes a writing class which requires that the students write something every day.  She does it because she is supposed to, and of course the journal records how she changes as she pursues her education.

But the whole point of keeping the journal, in the context of the story, is that it's a vehicle to help you think.  By writing down whatever happens to be going through your head, you unfold it and see things in it you didn't see before.

This is hardly a surprise.  In some ways it is just what I said when I first started this blog back in December of 2007.  It is similar to the explanation I have often heard for why to meditate, viz., that just by sitting still and being quiet you allow yourself to hear the ranting going on in your head that you'd been ignoring up till now.  And it's borne out by an exercise my current therapist had me try recently, in response to a good-bye letter I got from Debbie.  (More on that in my next post, I guess.)

The only thing is that these reflections make my whining about "work" sound a little childish.  If the whole point is to help you think, then choosing not to write means ... what, choosing not to think?  Sure, I can do that.  Booze would help too, come to that.  Only somehow I have to wonder if that's really the direction I want to go.  Have I done all the thinking I need to do these days?  Do I understand everything I need to understand?  Well, I don't so much care about understanding my relationship with Wife any more, because I don't really have one (or not much of one).  That's why I started writing in the first place.  But I do have to admit there are things I don't understand yet.  I don't know what I want to be when I grow up, for one.  And the prospect of never knowing is kind of unattractive.  My father has never figured out what he wants to be, and he's 78.  He has spent the last two or three decades dithering unproductively, and at this time he spends most of his time either trading jokes online with his old Army buddies or attending seminars on how to get rich quick by selling insurance.  It's a little pathetic.  So maybe that's not where I want to end up.

And this leaves me with the thought that maybe, just maybe, I should get my ass back in gear and start posting regularly.  Not necessarily about this or that -- not necessarily about anything -- but just forcing my mind to push my thoughts through my fingertips and out onto the screen. 

It would be a lot more restful to kick back and forget it all, but it's probably not a good idea.  Well, hell.  

Thoughts on failure 3, Tony Webster

A while ago, D sent me a copy of Julian Barnes's recent novel The Sense of an Ending. Finally yesterday afternoon I started to read it, and I finished it last night: not quite in one gulp, but almost. At one point a little over halfway through, the narrator, one Tony Webster (now in his sixties, at least), muses as follows:
__________

I remember a period in late adolescence when my mind would make itself drunk with images of adventurousness. This is how it will be when I grow up. I shall go there, do this, discover that, love her, and then her and her and her. I shall live as people in novels live and have lived. Which ones I was not sure, only that passion and danger, ecstasy and despair (but then more ecstasy) would be in attendance. However... who said that thing about "the littleness of life that art exaggerates"? There was a moment in my late twenties when I admitted that my adventurousness had long since petered out. I would never do those things adolescence had dreamt about. Instead, I mowed my lawn, I took holidays, I had my life.

But time ... how time first grounds us and then confounds us. We thought we were being mature when we were only being safe. We imagined we were being responsible but were only being cowardly. What we called realism turned out to be a way of avoiding things rather than facing them. Time ... give us enough time and our best-supported decisions will seem wobbly, our certainties whimsical.
__________

Sweet dreams.

What the hell does Donald Shimoda know?

This evening as I was folding laundry, I was thinking about the risks that all of us in the infidelity racket run (and especially in little niches like infidelity blogging) ... meaning mostly the risk of discovery, of the wrong people finding out what we have been doing or saying. And all of a sudden, totally unbidden, a quote popped into my head, expressing what must be the most useless possible advice for this sort of situation. It's lifted out of Richard Bach's Illusions, which some of you may remember as a font of 1970's-style "spiritual wisdom," ... or what passed for wisdom back then. (God, but youth is a wonderful thing!) And it runs:

Live never to be ashamed if anything you say or do is published around the world -- even if what is said is not true.

The first clause, of course, sounds like sturdy, old-fashioned Victorian moralizing: you know, ... never ever say or do anything that could look even the slightest bit wrong. The second clause blows that meaning to Hell. Taken as a whole, all that epigram can possibly mean, then, is "Don't give a good goddamn what anybody says about you: no matter who, no matter what." And that advice, too, has a respectably hoary antiquity about it, although it is hardly Victorian. "Classical" comes closer. I'm sure Diogenes would have approved.

Of course, Diogenes was homeless, lived in the streets, and saw no reason not to masturbate in public. It may not be the easiest way to live.

It may not be the easiest advice to hear.

It might also be wrong. Or at any rate, your mileage may vary. Now why did that even pop into my head? It's not like I have thought about Richard Bach in ... decades ...?

Very strange.

The bane of honor

"Love is the bane of honor, the death of duty."

-- Maester Aemon to Jon Snow, A Game of Thrones, by George R. R. Martin

Thoughts on failure 2, Pancho Piquet

The following is from Robert Pirsig's book Lila:
__________

"Here's to Pancho Piquet."

"Who is Pancho Piquet?" she asked.

"The carpentero de ribera. He was an old Cuban. He spoke Spanish so fast even the Mexicans had trouble understanding him. Looked like Boris Karloff. Didn't look Cuban or Mexican at all.

"But he was the fastest carpenter I've ever seen," the Captain said. "And careful too. He never slowed down, even in that jungle heat. We didn't have any electricity but he could work faster with hand tools than most people do with power tools. He was in his fifties or sixties and I was twenty-something. He used to smile that Boris Karloff smile watching me try to keep up with him."

"So why are we drinking to him?" Lila asked.

"Well, they warned me, 'El tome!' He drinks! And so he did," the Captain said.

"One night a big Norte, a norther, blew in off the Gulf of Mexico and it blew so hard... Oh, it was a big wind! Almost bent the palm trees to the ground. And it took the roof off his house and carried it away.

"But instead of fixing it he got drunk and stayed drunk for more than a month. After a couple weeks his wife had to come begging for money for food. That was so sad. I think partly he got drunk because he knew everything was going wrong and the boat would never get built. And that was true. I ran out of money and had to quit."

"So that's why we're drinking to him?" Lila said.

"Yeah, he was sort of a warning," the Captain said, "Also, he just opened my eyes a little to something. A feeling, for what the tropics is really like. All this talk about going to Florida and Mexico brought him back to mind."

"What do you want to go back there for?" she said.

"I don't know. There's always that feeling of despair from there. I can feel it now just thinking about it. 'Tristes tropiques,' the anthropologist, Levi-Strauss, called it. It keeps pulling you back, somehow. Mexicans know what I mean. There's always this feeling that this sadness is the real truth about things and it's better to live with a sad truth than with all the happy progress talk you get up north."
__________

While you are at it, you might be interested in this comment posted to some discussion site, commenting on the very same passage.

Sex at Dawn

Since when have brand-new books been published with websites already set up to advertise them? Have I missed something here?

I just bought a new book that I learned about via its website. It is called Sex at Dawn: The Prehistoric Origins of Modern Sexuality, by Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jethá, and you can find its website here.

The thesis looks interesting -- that we evolved under conditions of casual promiscuity, and that therefore it is this (and not monogamy) which is natural to us. There is more, and I don't think they say that it would necessarily be all that easy to get back again. But I want to read the book before I critique it.

I think I have mentioned that I have a business trip coming up soon, and I am saving it for the airplane. I'll let you know what I think of it when I am done.

Palinurus on obesity

A month or more ago, when D and I were visiting on our Ninth date, I picked up a lovely book in a second-hand bookstore. The author is Cyril Connolly, writing under the name "Palinurus" and the book is called The Unquiet Grave. It is a commonplace book, of sorts: or at any rate, while most of the scattered thoughts are Connolly's, they are nonetheless interleaved with quotes from a variety of other authors. (In some ways, actually, it resembles a blog! This is a theme that could be teased out into a full post on its own, I think.) But I thought it remarkable that, while D and I have been discussing issues of eating and drinking (and over-eating and over-drinking) -- most recently when we started discussing this night here -- I sat down one night to read a couple of pages of Palinurus before falling asleep and ran across this following:

New-year resolution: lose a stone [14 lbs.], then all the rest will follow. Obesity is a mental state, a disease brought on by boredom and disappointment; greed, like the love of comfort, is a kind of fear. The one way to get thin is to re-establish a purpose in life.

Thus a good writer must be in training: if he is a stone too heavy then that fourteen pounds represents for him so much extra indulgence, so much clogging laziness; in fact a coarsening of sensibility. There are but two ways to be a good writer: like Homer, Shakespeare or Goethe, to accept life completely,or like Pascal, Proust, Leopardi, Baudelaire, to refuse ever to lose sight of its horror.

Does conversation matter?

Marriage as a long conversation.— When entering a marriage, one should ask the question: do you think you will be able to have good conversations with this woman right into old age? Everything else in marriage is transitory, but most of the time in interaction is spent in conversation.

-- Friedrich Nietzsche, Human All-Too-Human, aph. 406

And actually, we used to talk a lot. For many years, this quote gave me hope that things would turn out fine even if they were bumpy along the way. Too bad we don't have anything to talk about any more ....

Speaker for the Dead

I'm on a business trip this week. I thought that would give me a lot of time to get caught up writing posts I have thought about but not committed to text yet. So far it hasn't worked out that way.

In the meantime, though, to beguile the hours on airplanes, I have been reading Orson Scott Card's Speaker for the Dead. When Wife's good friend D visited us, she strongly recommended it as a meditation on The Other. (That's a big theme in her life.) OK, it is that ... but what I see in it is far more basic, and has a lot to do with the themes of this blog. One thing the book traces in a lot of detail is the absolutely poisonous consequences of chronic lying, and the painful healing that is made possible only by speaking the truth for all to hear.

I want Wife to read this book. I'd recommend it to others too, but in particular ....