from the May 11 NYTimes review of “Lives of the Novelists: a history of fiction in 294 lives.”
My posting title is originally from a collection of poems by Guy Davenport, now-dead Professor of English at the University of Kentucky—a title which became an attitude of mine toward child development, teaching, romances, and how learning never ends, from one era of life growing and going into an other.
I don’t know where exactly you are among trees on the woody street. Some window you’re near, as if serenely singing to the quiet dark without need of being held or bowed.
I should have some expansively poetic pithiness in complement, something prepared for days or weeks to which you’re a preface.
What I have is having given lots of time to a new web-based discussion group that’s very unique, and lovely—which I can’t fairly depict briefly. But they’ll be implicitly integral to writing I’ll link to, from here later.
One member of the group wrote earlier this month (which I quoted in my comments for one post tonight, in part) about her: …soulmate....the one your heart, body, mind, and soul are screaming out for, and that love really is something so special, that so many others will never find.
—which I mourn a little [I replied], as I wanted that so much in the loves I had—loves I’m no less thankful for, yet—
I’m a creature of my own romanticism. Where you all (some of you) found your soulmate …and made it the love of your life, I wanted the love of my life to be the other side of myself I never found, which I idealized as a sister I didn’t have.
So, I support the best in others, and enjoy my romanticism as something known to be realistic for the hopes of those who haven’t yet found The One.
It’s not that the Love of your life should be like Love [you’ve found], but that Love be what is expressed at best here. Lovers’ experiences will always be so varying, at least in the terms we choose. Yet, what we want is what’s expressed here—which is something never finished! It’s always to be reached or kept thriving. We fall away and journey back wiser, better mates. I know that. I found that. But I didn’t find the soulmate. That’s OK!
[…]
…because knowing The Gift can be given whatever way we can.
...though my confessional posture was fiction.
Life is rough, when you’re trying to have fun and life’s business unwittingly throws wrenches in the works.
