THINQon : With another

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Morgan Milford, young

With another

Latest Post: August 19, 2010 at 5:52 PM

21 followers

I have a feeling that the first time my parents spoke truthfully in a very long time was when they got divorced a year ago. I mean maybe at night when they were lying in bed did they reveal to one another their deepest intimacies the way young lovers do, at once afraid of their nakedness but also daring of it. But more likely they would lay in bed unspeaking and read and fall asleep at different hours withholding and without holding and unholding.

What happens to a relationship when the two stop being completely open and honest with another? I mean I'm sure there are plenty of real and true and happy relationships out there where neither party is emotionally intro or extrospective and care little and know little about the depths of their souls and their partners. How I wish I could be happily naive. But what about the rest of us that can find relationships agonizingly difficult where both people are in a constant state of emotionally personal bedlam ? What happens when all these pestering minuscule truths aren't shared with our partners?

My parent's relationship didn't crash and burn all of a sudden, it festered and decayed over many years. They grew apart unknowingly and unconsciously and quietly and eventually one of them realized that the only truth they shared anymore was us, their children.

Should I be afraid that in my own search for love I'll forget what it means to be completely honest with another human being? And in every relationship do you think it is necessary to be so?

What does it mean to grow together and how do two people avoid growing apart? Is my hypothesis correct? That it is all about the unhindered sharing of emotional breadth? And if it is impossible to avoid growing apart then how do we notice when the trough is too deep and wide to mend?

If you can't tell already, I'm rather afraid of breaking someone's heart.

Penelope Rose tagged this post as Essential.

Reply to:

Molly Bloom

July 30, 2010 at 6:23 AM

37 followers

Morgan,

I'll respond to something which seems to me inherent in your post; you've raised many hard questions, and this is just one of them, perhaps not the most important. It's this question of how to write one's own story -- whether and in what sense it is possible, what kind of freedom one has once one has seen the reality of the world. How does one's deep need for love, and happiness, and freedom push against what appears to be certain disappointment in the narratives at hand? And why do the stories of others seem, at times, to take such a large place in our own, for better or worse -- especially when they are the people from whom we learned language.

James Woods has a passage on Chekhov which gets to the heart of things. I'll quote it at length, and not just because of the wonderful phrase "laxly calendared."

"Chekhov's characters forget to be Chekhov's characters. We see this most beautifully in one of his earlier stories, 'The Kiss,' written when he was twenty-seven. A virginal soldier kisses a woman for the first time in his life. He hoards the memory of it, and bursts to tell his fellow soldiers about his experience. Yet when he does tell them, he is disappointed because his story takes only a short minute to tell, "yet he had imagined it would take until morning." One notices that many of Chekhov's characters are disappointed by the stories they tell, and somewhat jealous of other people's stories. But to be disappointed by one's own story is an extraordinarily subtle freedom in literature, for it implies a character's freedom to be disappointed not only by his own story but, by extension, by the story Chekhov has given him. Thus he wriggles out of Chekhov's story into the bottomless freedom of disappointment. ... And yet it *is* a freedom. We see this so finely in 'The Kiss'. The soldier forgets that he is in Chekhov's story because he has become so involved in his own. His own story is bottomless, and yearns to last all night; yet Chekhov's story "takes only a minute to tell." In Chekhov's world, our inner lives run at their own speed. They are laxly calendared. They live in their own gentle almanac, and in his stories the free inner life bumps against the outer life like two different time-systems, like the Julian calendar against the Gregorian. This was what Chekhov meant by 'life'. This was his revolution."

Books Discussed

The Broken Estate: Essays on Literature and Belief
by James Wood

This post is referenced by the following other contributors:

Mia Vialti

in "On the problems of translation"

(Library)

Reply to: or

Arthur Mont

In response to Molly Bloom

August 5, 2010 at 11:45 AM

70 followers

I've been meaning to write an explanation of this post for a while. While first reading Molly's post it seemed to me to have nothing to do with Morgan's question, only after thinking about it a bit I understood what you meant and thought it would be good to give further explanation of it. I'll write then my interpretation of your post which might coincide or not with your thoughts.

First, what a beautiful quotation! An interpretation of James Woods' passage:
Checkov describes 'life' as being two simultaneous existences (or 'stories) which run in parallel, with different time-systems, exterior-life and inner-life. A quick way to describe it for people who saw Inception is Inception's way of dreams being a different time-system than real life: 1 minute in real life=8 minutes in dream-world. That's a basic example of two different time-systems, but we can also think of more complicated ones where certain seconds in real-life, aka exterior-life, take days in our inner life (the moment we first saw/kissed a lover etc.). Life then is these two concurrent lives, two concurrent stories, of inner-life and exterior-life.

Connecting this quote with Morgan's post, Molly describes how we want to transfer to our lover our inner story but are constantly disappointed by this impossibility of transferring the inner-story, and then perhaps little by little give up, and our contact with them is through the exterior-life, the exterior-story. Our truth is our inner-life, that's where we really live, but we can't transfer that. Still, we always live in hope of transferring this, through a leap-of-faith. Perhaps that's where the element of trust is so important.

Does time always lesson the interest in both sides of telling and hearing the inner-life-story (where truth some feel really lies)? Does it lessen the promise of where this leap of faith might lead us? I don't know. It's definitely the usual case.

Reply to: or

Julie Sabatier

July 30, 2010 at 9:50 AM

22 followers

Hi Morgan,

I don’t quite see the difference between the danger of heartbreak (or divorce) while entering a relationship, and the danger of dying in an unfortunate accident while walking the street. I think that in both cases, one can make a set of security rules which will be most effective but are not a guarantee against misfortune.

The difficulty about being honest with another human being starts with the difficulty to be honest with yourself. It is a necessity to be honest with yourself, and most of the time it is recommendable to be honest with others. Just be careful : “If you want to tell people the truth, make them laugh, otherwise they'll kill you.” (Oscar Wilde)

Good luck to you and don’t be afraid to walk out of your house:-)