Alexander Pope Was Wrong

Somewhere between Emily Dickinson and Jean Rhys lie most of the rest of us. Between knowing too little about love to know what to hope for and knowing far too much about it to find hopefulness anything but otiose. Between adolescent longings for the miracle that will save you from having to go to sixth period and the eminently adult realization that nothing is going to save you from anything ever again except God as you construe Him/Her/It/They/Us and what scant measure of caution you are still half-able to muster while getting ever more looped in the loops of her hair.

People always talk about jadedness, and much of our discourse makes it sound like an utterly inevitable concomitant of aging: reach a certain year, and not only are you compelled to vote conservative, buy a sportscar, take up yoga or Italian, set at least one of the presets to 'soft jazz' and attempt in largely unsuccessful and risible ways to reclaim your lost youth, but you also arrive at the hitherto unthinkable position that the vast majority of people are irredeemable asses. I don't believe it's age, though; I would venture it's experience, which is not at all the same thing, at least for some people. If you could live in a pleasant box up to that age (which assumes, of course, the complete lack of both 'soft jazz' and middle-aged adolescents in that nice box with you), then you wouldn't be jaded at all. If you never fall in love, never get tromped on or kicked in the teeth, I fail to see how you could manage to be cynical when contemplating your odds for either of the last two happening simply because you were considering doing the first. There would be no correlation for you, let alone the suggestion of causality.

So it's experience, then, and if you have rather little, you may not be cynical -- but the cost is that you are not especially wise, either. And I suppose this is where I find myself. Not quite Emily Dickinson, since I at least get out of my room sometimes, but certainly not Marlene Dietrich or Coco Chanel, either. When it comes to men, or love, I have no idea what I am doing, and so most of the time I do nothing at all.

I've been single most of the time: take my thirties, for example. Or my teens. It's not the same as reclusive, but it's certainly non-average. There were a couple ill-starred, brief marriages in there, and the rare relationship, and a bunch of me going about my business not worrying about coupling, or love, or whether I was starting to become Greta Garbo. No especial yearnings for something I could have felt I was missing, as I was traveling, or going to school, or running a little business, or whatever.

But I'm starting to feel that both the cynical people and the Dickinsons and Garbos of this world are perhaps on to something. That really, frankly, if you can't know what anyone means by anything they say, it doesn't sound like a very sensible idea to listen to any of it. At least in business meetings people offer up flowcharts and spread sheets to back up their point. At academic conferences you cite page numbers, and offer caveats in advance of your (purposively, of course) too-literal translation, or you have slides with the artworks on them glowing behind you while you argue whatever it is you mean to say about the changes in mudras in 18th-century Thai Buddhas. You back it up with something, in other words, because you have to, because that's how it's done.

Not so in the personal realm. I wouldn't hire a mailroom boy just because he insists he is nice, but that is how it works in dating. I'm not going to call your references, even if you were to proffer them. What I get is 'face value,' and no matter how much I like your face that's not very much. And since I don't know you, I have only a general history of interacting with all the humans I've ever encountered to draw upon in figuring out whether I think you're lying about your wife's affair or your girlfriend's craziness or your catharsis in Mumbai or epiphany in the Bronx. And since even a stopped clock is spot on twice a day, there are times when any of us can get it right, or at least not hideously, egregiously, flamboyantly wrong, using our intuition and experience to come up with the right sensation.

But Dietrich would be better at it. And perhaps some modicum of cynicism is actually called for. I could call it scrupulousness, caution, objectivity, reason, or wisdom and make it sound better. But I never do that, take that approach: that's what I do when I'm thinking about a new car, or whether I should use thyme or dill, or if I need to stop at the rest stop or can make it another ninety miles. I don't want to analyze everything a date says! What if we do enjoy each other, and begin to date, and fall in love -- will I then have to continue checking everything he says against observable facts? God save me I should prefer to die now.

Even with trivia it runs counter to my nature: if it is genuinely something I could never care about, and you really want me to believe it, fine. I could never care, so that means I don't now, too. If it has more weight it will always come out, and generally sooner rather than later. If I am to get the sort of relationship I would hope for, it has to be predicated on radical, utter, full, and deep trust. Starting out by checking the alumni register or Googling anything about a date other than best driving routes isn't me. I can't help feeling that if it is my business to know who you are, I will.

And perhaps the same is true with the reticence I offer you in return for all your putative facts and the biography I fail to investigate and countercheck: I could tell you all about me, all I could give you, all the ways that I am, and the things that I've done, and the beauties and terrors that I've seen, and what it is that makes me cry and what it is that I want more than anything -- but however attractive or repellent any of them may be, they don't matter if you can't take them in context, can't take all of me and let each of them emerge in a graceful, organic, meaningful pattern...