Happiness Is...?

Vronsky meanwhile, despite the full realization of what he had desired for so long, was not fully happy. He soon felt that the realization of his desire had given him only a grain of the mountain of happiness he had expected. It showed him the eternal error people make in imagining that happiness is the realization of desires.

When you read great, older books, one of the things you need to get used to is the formulation of thoughts and concepts which have been parroted in the years since. Things which might seem obvious or concepts which we might have already encountered and accepted are at risk of being dismissed too quickly if we forget the context in which the original author wrote them.

I don't even know if Tolstoy was the first to express the above sentiment; he might have been, he might not have been. I definitely agree with it, though; it's a thought I've encountered several times and one which I can't find fault with. To desire is human, and yet achieving one's desires leads only to a new set of desires. This applies easily to physical phenomena: money, cars, houses and the like. But with relationships it's a little trickier.

Part of the problem, I think, is that people treat the people they have relationships with as objects, as static beings who will always remain the same. People act surprised when other people change, they cite it as a reason for relationships to end, when the reality is, everyone is always changing. Everyone, everything is always in a process of becoming. So by the time you "get" the person that you want, that person has changed, has become someone else. The only thing you've gotten is a shade, a memory of who they were a day, week, month or year ago. Worse yet, in pursuing what they were you are missing out on what they are, on the person standing in front of you.

I watched Bridges of Madison County on Valentine's Day (I inadvertently did a lot of romance-related watching that day, including the When Harry Met Sally commentary), and spent most of the movie pondering whether or not Meryl Streep's character was right - not to feel the way she did, since that can't really be controlled, but in the decisions she made. For those who haven't seen the movie, her character is married with two kids, and meets Clint Eastwood while her family is away for a week. They share a blissful, love-filled 4 days together, at the end of which he asks her to leave with him. She doesn't.

So one of the things I wondered was, is this sympathetic? Do I feel sorry for her character and her decision to stay in a respectful but loveless marriage and life? And in the end, I don't think I did; or perhaps it's more correct for me to say I don't think you're supposed to. Obviously, it wasn't a great situation. But she made her choice, and it was not a bad one; she stayed with the husband who had always taken care of her, who had always provided for her; with the kids she had raised, who she wouldn't have felt right abandoning. The point is made that loving Clint Eastwood's character the way she did was the only thing that allowed her to get through her life on the farm, that her perfect, unfulfilled love gave her the strength to stay, and that had she gone with him, eventually she would have come to hate him. Maybe the only reason she stayed in love with him was precisely because they were never able to be together.

It also makes you think - all those marriages that lasted for so long, how many of them were like that, in how many of them was at least one of the people filled with a secret identity, a secret longing for something more that they hid, how many of them had hidden thoughts that their partner never even came close to knowing? And I don't mean to suggest that you have to know everything about the person you're in a relationship with; in fact, I think there's (or there should be) an essential mystery to other people that you can never truly understand. But there's a difference between completely censoring a side of yourself and the aspects of yourself which are unknowable to anybody other than (sometimes even including?) yourself. How many people today live these sham relationships, pouring their affection into someone who doesn't exist, into someone they've created in their own mind, into some ideal they project onto the other person? What does it say about people if the only way the majority of them can stay together is through suppressing elements of their personalities? Is that even true? Am I being a bit harsh? I don't even know anyone who's been in a long-term marriage or relationship that I could ask these things to.

The Sound of Silence

1. The Rebel Sell: Why the culture can't be jammed, Joseph Heath & Andrew Potter
2. The Complete Grimm's Fairy Tales, Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm
3. Rabbit, Run, John Updike
4. Everything is Illuminated, Jonathan Safran Foer
5. Fast Food Nation, Eric Schlosser
6. Middlemarch, George Eliot
7. The Code of the Woosters, P. G. Wodehouse

So Middlemarch was good - very, very, good, worthy of many hyperbolic adjectives - but there was something in there that interested me above and beyond its merit as a book.

It's funny to read books from that (the Victorian) era, and to realize how little society has changed since then. To be sure, women are allowed far more independence now than then, but when reading the conversations and the relations between men and women one sees the same mixups, miscommunications and plain lack of communication that can be found today.

I don't really know what this says. It's not a bad thing, I don't think, so much as it is unavoidable. There will always be words which miss their mark, which are said with one intention but interpreted with another, until the day when we're able to read each other's minds (and won't that be fucking terrifying, knowing exactly when that guy is thinking about sex and - perhaps worse yet - when he isn't). What is important is to talk about them, and to not let them just sit there, an open wound waiting to be prodded. Because that's what people (well, I) do, when they have imagined hurts or slights; future comments are reinterpreted with that bias in mind, with the thought that you are somehow lacking in that area, that the other person is constantly picking on your shortcomings. And that's neither fair to yourself nor that person.

My life and my relations seem to be characterized more by silence and the words not said than the things I did say. Something in me finds that sad. Sometimes silence is right and sometimes silence is good, but sometimes silence hides fear and shame and doubt. And how can you know when silence is best? How can you know when her quivering rage hides a need to be reached out to and when you just need to shut the hell up and go away?

I feel like my relations in the past have gone too far, that they've been silent too long and I don't know how to change them, I don't know if the other people involved want to change them. Maybe I'm just too scared to make them change. But I do know that in the relations I invite into my life now, I aspire to something different, to something more open. I'm not talking about wholesale apologies for anything and everything I can think of any time I think the other person's upset; that defeats the whole purpose of an apology. If you're not truly sorry about something, if you don't really think you've done something wrong, then saying you're sorry is even more insulting than saying nothing. But when someone is important to you, you owe it to them to try to see things from their perspective, to understand what and why they are feeling a certain way.

From time to time, I trample on a lot of feelings. I think it's another reason why I come across as arrogant; I sort of like to hear my own cleverness, I get caught up in discussions and don't necessarily consider how my words might affect the people I'm speaking to. I think I'd rather be interesting than nice. I mean, interesting and nice would be cool, and I think on the whole I am, but if I had to pick it would definitely be the former.

You can't ever know what would have happened if you'd said whatever you wanted to say unless you say it. Personally, I would rather err on the side of saying one thing too many than not saying enough. Words are important; they are the only bridges that can be built to link two people together, in any kind of a relationship.

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So, I just realized I typed up that whole post about the witty back-and-forth and then didn't talk about the content of the quote at all.

One of the things I love about reading older literature, which I tried to communicate in a previous post, is the recognition of themes and thoughts which have become dominant today, which might not necessarily have been at the time of their writing; in this case, the idea that a relationship legitimizes you, makes you somehow a better person because you have someone who supports and pushes you to be the best person you can be.

I don't know how I feel about that. On the one hand I think it's accurate; we always want to please the ones we love. But it's very dangerous territory to tread, and I certainly don't think Eliot is necessarily positing such a perspective as good; it's simply an observational truth. Who among us hasn't changed to fit our perception of our lover's wants, only for them to turn around and say that we've changed, that we aren't the person that they fell for anymore? And then what are we left with, what remains of our identity, where do we go from there? Why do we do that to ourselves? And is there any way to avoid it?

I like to believe that there is. There will always be conflict in relationships, and there will always be temptations to do whatever is necessary to avoid those conflicts. I feel this in particular; due to my own history, I am intensely conflict-averse, and would often rather endure incredible inconveniences rather than create conflict. But maybe conflict is what defines relationships, maybe there is a healthy level of conflict which is vital to a successful relationship. Maybe if we accepted the inevitability of conflict and, instead of trying to avoid it, concentrated on apologizing, understanding and then moving on from it, we would never fall into the dance of trying to please, of mortgaging everything about ourselves that makes us dangerous and beautiful for a pair of pretty eyes.