David Shields - How Literature Saved My Life

Walter and Lila’s love is both impossible and possible for the same reason: she’s on the verge of dying. The impracticalities that long-term lovers suffer don’t concern this couple, as they do most of us. That is, when finally you’ve grown bored but are stuck with each other, the promise of death feels too far away. It becomes the new impossible dream.

What if Romeo and Juliet had lived? Soon enough, at the ripe old age of fourteen, they would have been arguing about whose turn it was to empty the dishwasher.

Movies love to imply that the man and woman held each other all night long, but you can’t do it. You have to roll away…

Love is illusion

ICAN SEE WHY you’re a Miss Nude USA regional finalist. You have beautiful long silky blue-black hair, a perfect pout, and a gorgeous body. Please send me the color photos you mentioned of yourself in fur, leather, lingerie, garter belt, and heels. Thank you. Payment enclosed.

Love is illusion

AGNÈS JAOUI’S The Taste of Others is the smartest, saddest movie about sex I’ve ever seen. Clara, asked by her student what the most difficult part of acting is, says, “To depend on another’s desire.” Valérie, surprised that she’s going out with Fred, says, “I would have never guessed it. We have nothing in common.” When Clara says about someone who likes her and the play in which she’s starring, “I don’t like his kind,” her friend Manie asks, “Is there anybody you like?” The film, which is also known as It Takes All Kinds , knows that what we love and hate about other people is how different they are from us: we’re disgusted by this difference, and we’re excited by it. Jaoui looks at otherness in a multitude of ways: bourgeois/bohemian, misbehavior/obedience, kindness/cruelty, blonde/brunette, actor/audience, teacher/student, brother/sister, sex/love, life/art. A bodyguard spends weeks protecting his client from Iranian kidnappers, but his client is mugged by local French thugs.

It’s myself I must be on guard against, because I always eroticize the person who isn’t in my life. As soon as she’s in my life, she’s as unastonishing to me as she is to herself. The Greek word eros denotes “want,” “lack,” “desire for that which is missing.” The lover wants what he doesn’t have. By definition, it’s impossible for him to have what he wants, since as soon as it’s had, it’s no longer wanting.

In the greatest book ever written, child Marcel’s hunger for Maman is indistinguishable from Swann’s jealousy over Odette, which is indistinguishable from adult Marcel’s desire for Albertine. The human animal never, ever gets what it wants; it can’t.

Before a single image of The Taste of Others appears, we hear a clatter of voices, as if a party is occurring in a room just out of sight: all the appeal of the not quite overheard. Throughout the film, the camera swivels away from its ostensible subjects to follow someone new, some new object of attention. In life, in love, otherness is sexy but unbridgeable. Art—literature, theater, visual art, opera, music—provides a framework to contemplate otherness and at least imagine a collapsing of distance.

Pornography is not, in my experience and opinion, a substitute for closeness; it’s a revel in distance.

We are all so afraid. We are all so alone. We all so need from the outside the assurance of our own worthiness to exist.

Love is a long, close scrutiny

HANDWRITTEN IN PENCIL on the back page of a library book I checked out:

“I understand your feelings about wanting to continue the relationship. However, my life is going in a different direction. I have other plans, and the motivation to continue the relationship is not there on my part. You, too, have new things ahead of you. There are nice things to remember from our relationship and I know we’ll remember them. It also scarred us both. I know you have problems to work out from it. I have my problems to work out from it. The bottom line is that it was not a happy relationship. My plan is to work on my problems and move on with my life, and I hope you’ll take on the same attitude. I wish you good luck.”

Love is illusion

THE MOST DRAMATIC sexual experience of my life was a yearlong relationship with someone whose entire philosophy, or at least bedroom behavior, was derived from the sex advice columns of racier women’s magazines. She wore extremely tight jeans tucked into catch-me/fuck-me boots, and she applied lipstick and eye shadow in such a way as to create the effect that she was in a perpetual state of arousal. Once, as I walked several paces ahead, she told the couple we were walking with that I had a great ass (I do!—or at least I did). In the missionary position, she would whisper, “Deeper,” and wrap her legs tightly around me. When she was on top, she would rub her breasts together, lick her lips, and run her hands through her hair, encouraging me to pull, hard, on her gold choker. When being penetrated from behind, she would suck on my thumb and look back at me with googly eyes, as if to prevent herself from losing consciousness.

Before performing fellatio, she’d moan, “Give me that big thing.” Although my equipment is only standard, she called it “porno penis.” (The first time we had sex, I’d just masturbated, imagining her, and I was at half-staff; she nevertheless said I was “the perfect size,” which is Cosmo 101.) She would kneel, gaze up at me as if with reverence, swallow, and at the end, wink. She’d slurp my semen as if it were maple syrup atop pancakes, which she made one Sunday morning in her underwear. Whenever I went down on her, she’d wrap her fingers—with brightly lacquered nails—around my hair, tug, and pretend to come almost immediately, thanking me profusely afterward. Once, when I licked her from behind, she exclaimed that she’d never been anywhere near this intimate with anyone before. Anal sex, with requisite screams. Her voice occupied a middle register exactly halfway between Baby Doll and Dominatrix. At dinner parties, she would mouth “I love you,” looking at me as if I were the president. I swear I’m not making this stuff up.

Her goal seemed to be to burn images of herself into my retina forever. Mission accomplished: I could never quite tell how much genuine feeling there was in her brilliant performance, and yet I still have quite specific sense memories of these events, which occurred more than twenty-five years ago. Humankind cannot bear very much reality.

Life/art

BENNA CARPENTER, the protagonist of Lorrie Moore’s best (and least appreciated) book, the antinovel Anagrams , says, “There is only one valid theme in literature: Life will disappoint you.” Love, in Anagrams , is never not seen against the background of death, never not seen in the context of physiology, evolution, devolution. Benna thinks about some birds, “From four blocks away I could see that the flock had a kind of group-life, a recognizable intelligence; no doubt in its random flutters there were patterns, but alone any one of those black birds would not have known what was up. Alone, as people live, they would crash their heads against walls.”

Why is she (why am I) so sad? On the upside, Benna obtains pleasure as well as terror from the mutable nature of language. “I’ve always been drawn to people who misspeak,” she says. “I consider it a sign of hidden depths, like pregnancy or alcoholism.” (When I first read Anagrams , I developed a crush on Moore, as do so many other male writers who read her work. Her punning and acidity make her seem like some fantasy sparring partner for the language- and irony-besotted. She gave a reading at her alma mater, where I was then teaching, and I hoped, a little naïvely, that she’d find my speech impediment irresistible.) Anagrams is suffused with varieties of misspeaking, and the central passage of the book, the last argument Benna has with her ex-husband, is organized around her mishearing “I never want to see you again” as “I want to see you again.”