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Oct. 2nd, 2006 10:26 pmWhat Shelley knew was that you don't give up the image of what you want based on your inability to get it. If you can only get aspects, portions, approaches you welcome that but stay alert for how you might get more. Adjustment of desire to what is presently attainable is a terrible and abiding loss; an initial limit is drawn, then further limits are drawn within that as possibilities ebb, boxes inside boxes, tinier and tinier--while opportunities, and all manner of other things, teem without. You gain, of course you gain, you wouldn't do it otherwise. You have something all round, close up, complete. It is a sight that eats your eyes.
Boxes. But multiple boxes at once, isn't that the exact problem? Compartmentalization of satisfiable desires, the choice addiction of middle age. The limits are drawn all over, the connections are lost, the push and poetry. There's your matrix for you. A picture of life as people in a place in a story, is what you relinquish.
Part of aging is finding how easy it is to not do things, or anyway just how little one needs to do. You don't need to succeed, you don't need to have integrity, you don't have to be happy. You don't have to help, think, fight, make sense, leave town, account for who you are, remember who you are.
Keeping your desires united is a terrible pain--in the exasperating sense, in the deadly serious sense. It's not like you have heaven in your head in some gold-lit snowglobe, and barter with the outer world to shut it up, so you can privately enjoy. The real thing is all about, scattered over and through everything. One hopes it is one side of everything. One hopes it is the only side to everything--and why not hope that? But meanwhile it's around, superimposed, underimposed, imposed. A wandering flavor, in some dark times. Something you actually are truly walking in and breathing in, some Sundays.
Agonizing, no? Undistributed pain is agony. Letting yourself feel how far you are from where you might be is agony.
Morality is simple or it isn't morality. I, who have such trouble explaining, at least know that. Our reason for curling in on things is simple, and good by its own lights. But those are dimmer lamps, and light the path to dimmer still. Daylight contains all unpleasant things there ever could be, but it's the only light from far enough away.
Boxes. But multiple boxes at once, isn't that the exact problem? Compartmentalization of satisfiable desires, the choice addiction of middle age. The limits are drawn all over, the connections are lost, the push and poetry. There's your matrix for you. A picture of life as people in a place in a story, is what you relinquish.
Part of aging is finding how easy it is to not do things, or anyway just how little one needs to do. You don't need to succeed, you don't need to have integrity, you don't have to be happy. You don't have to help, think, fight, make sense, leave town, account for who you are, remember who you are.
Keeping your desires united is a terrible pain--in the exasperating sense, in the deadly serious sense. It's not like you have heaven in your head in some gold-lit snowglobe, and barter with the outer world to shut it up, so you can privately enjoy. The real thing is all about, scattered over and through everything. One hopes it is one side of everything. One hopes it is the only side to everything--and why not hope that? But meanwhile it's around, superimposed, underimposed, imposed. A wandering flavor, in some dark times. Something you actually are truly walking in and breathing in, some Sundays.
Agonizing, no? Undistributed pain is agony. Letting yourself feel how far you are from where you might be is agony.
Morality is simple or it isn't morality. I, who have such trouble explaining, at least know that. Our reason for curling in on things is simple, and good by its own lights. But those are dimmer lamps, and light the path to dimmer still. Daylight contains all unpleasant things there ever could be, but it's the only light from far enough away.
