A late night/early morning ramble. NG and I have been talking a lot recently about things like dreams + love. When you are a child, you are told that this is what makes the world go round. When you get older, you see that its not that simple. NG, maintains it really is that simple. And I–it’s not that I don’t believe in that stuff anymore, but I don’t buy into it blindly either. Like dreaming to be an astronaut doesnt mean that just because you dream it, it will automatically happen. It can happen if you put the work into it, but dreaming is not enough.
Like love. I don’t think love is always enough. It should be the reason and motivation and ultimately what ties people together, but none of my past relationships ended because I didn’t love the other person or the other person didn’t love me. Say what you will about that, but love can’t stop people from dying or changing or leaving or staying.
I guess the question is–is it naive to think that a relationship based on idealism will survive? Is that how we should approach life/love? Or is it more pragmatic than that? Can 2 people conquer the world with nothing but a pocketful of dreams and hearts full of love?
I’m not saying I have an answer–just that I wonder–i go back and forth. At 21 I would have whole-heartedly agreed with the above statement. At 29, I think the above statement is a bit too simplistic.
It made me think of a passage from a book I am currently reading:
…his mother was a fantasist, who in spite of her eternal apron…read novels and magazines and dreamed for herself and her son: of wider vistas, of glittering cocktail parties…and travel to Europe. And all the while, his father and sister were mired in the there-and-then, in Watertown…
And yet his mother: even in the last days, still the apron…For all her dreams she’d been no different, in the end, and all she’d succeeded in doing was turning her boy into someone, something, she couldn’t understand…
And so, to guard against that life…never an office, never a timetable, never an alarm clock, always a new day, a new city, a new person, a new drink, another discovery, always more life, more.
…It seemed childlishly simple, as a philosophy to live by, and clearly he was not a simple man. Wasn’t irrelevance, smallness, the dutiful petty life what everyone ultimately wanted to shed? And wasn’t shedding as important as embracing, in the formation on an adult self?
And then he thought of Marina, raised as he’d wished to have been raised, and stymied, now, by the very lack of smallness, by the absense of any limitations against which to rebel. Should she then be shedding the life of privilege, moving to some Watertown of the heart, and begin again, her lot, on account of her birthright, to be a…figure, in whom merit would accrue merely because she’d given up all she’d been given? Nonsense. But he’d told her himself to get a job, advice he would neither have given himself, nor taken…”
–excerpted from The Emperor’s Children
by Claire Messud
these are the things that run through my head at 3am in the morning. I shouldn’t have had that soy latte so late in the day.
