4073. Helping a Stranger Feel at Home
Pope very nearly succeeded in doing the impossible, in
naturalizing an alien literary tradition and form.
Reuben A. Brower, Alexander Pope: The Poetry of Allusion
It’s the love that you show by how you construe, for someone from somewhere else, the feeling of being at home. It’s the respect that you show by admitting you know that she never really, fully will.
Note:
Color of context, imperceptibly
Rustling with its angel
(James Merrill, “Lost in Translation”)
4081. “In the vast literature of love”
John Updike
there has never been, nor will be, a love quite like ours. That’s what all of the literature of love believes. Otherwise it wouldn’t be vast. Otherwise it wouldn’t be love.
Note: “Love you, man” (sentence abbreviated).
4094. “She touched—she admitted—she acknowledged the whole truth”
Jane Austen, Emma
Those of us happy to call ourselves her friends will scarcely be surprised by the unstinting intellectual availability that marks our heroine’s brightest days. Such open-mindedness is, after all, part and parcel of the hospitality well bred into her being.
Welcome, she will say to all who visit her at Hartfield (you know: where she lives) as she touches, admits, and acknowledges as much of them as she feasibly can.
Those who talk too much. Those who talk too little.
Those special deliverers who arrive unannounced, out of nowhere you can see; and, bypassing the usual set-pieces of parlor-room settlements, proceed straight to her heart, with breakthrough news, straight from the underside of the field of her heart.
“It darted through her with the speed of an arrow, that”
Note: “we never discover a ‘no’ in the unconscious” (Austen, Emma; Freud, “Negation”).
speed of an arrow; force of the id
4098. “To wait”
O ecstatic
Receiver of what’s there to be received,
How we belabor thee, how much better
To wait and to prepare our waiting
John Ashbery, “Becalmed on Strange Waters”
In your frenzy for the results of that test (sickness or health; life or death; up or down; love or loss), you can sometimes forget that you’re never waiting alone. There’s always at least one other person in the room who needs to be calmed more than you do: the Frenzied Receiver, sitting there, just on the edge of yourself, on edge; as near to you as anyone you’ve ever loved could ever possibly be; the Frightened Receiver, with whom you are so closely crowded together that it’s easy to confuse her with your own ache; overlook her as nothing more than more of your own ache (hard not to, what with all the overlap of one with the other—the genetic, generic material you share); the Fearful Receiver, for whom you rouse yourself from the stupor of your sole self, to address with whatever compassion and courage you have at your command to convey.
And then, look!, it’s the two of you, together—and there’s room to breathe, room to wait,
Note: “world enough and time” (Marvell).
The presence or countenance of the beloved one—whom he was
resolved never to leave even though he did not possess her …
the angel … [upon] whom [Benjamin] … casts his wide-open
eyes … like the melancholy view that discovers … the infinite
depths of allegories, without however being able to complete
the step over the transitory into the religious sphere …
Gershom Scholem, “Walter Benjamin and His Angel”
—which brings me to Fernando Torres. Now, I’m as certain as I am of anything under the sun that Young Torres has only the vaguest idea that I’m alive. There is little reason for me to believe that a somewhat shy-seeming Spanish Striker, playing, however uneasily, on the brightly lit field of international celebrity, knows or cares about me, personally.
I can live with that. Why should he, really? Although I entertain my share of outlandish ambitions, I do not count amongst them the desire to annex, as my own, the attention of a distant Star; even one whose remote influence has tided me over my darkest nights and granted me title to my brightest days. The lunacy of my greed has not, at least last I checked, thus far extended that far.
Here’s something else I can live with: truth is, just as I’m pretty sure he doesn’t know much about me, I really don’t know much about him. That is, I don’t know what he’s like in real life, and I have never been especially concerned to find out. Give the man his space—that’s what I say. Also, I’ve never been especially interested in figuring out, with the help of this or that mythological, methodical key of comprehension, any bright, particularly distinct, defining quality and destiny, situated in some heavenly abstraction, beyond the trapping feelings of everyday life, to which such a Star would show me the way.
I’m just really grateful he’s around—the kid, I mean: the Spanish Striker. Catching sight of him in the midst of his beautiful game, all I care to think is
Note: “He comes to save” (John Henry Newman, “Consolation”).
Allegory of Love—“wild emotional loyalty” (Walter Ong, SJ).