The Paris Review's Blog, page 63

Love Songs: “Aguacero”

Photograph by Carina del Valle Schorske.

This week, the Review is publishing a series of short reflections on love songs, broadly defined. 

The first time I felt tropical rain was an erotic revelation: I was nine, visiting family in Puerto Rico on a Carnival cruise. At home in California, rain was cold feet and flooded freeways. But on the island, rain came fast and hot, soaked through my cotton dress, then—sliced by sun—revealed a rainbow. Aguacero. The revelation was erotic not only for my body (the sound, the feel) but also for my mind: now I knew that something bad could also be good—depending on temperature, timing, timbre. My friend Luis Alba calls tropical rain “the secret rhythm beneath all our music”—the windy scraping of the guiro, the shifting pebbles of the shekere—but Bad Bunny’s “Aguacero” begins with ten seconds of literal downpour. Then, the fuckboy’s serenade: me tienes el bicho ansioso.

“Aguacero” is not a proper love song. It’s reggaeton lite (smooth production, raunchy lyrics), one of the more predictable tracks on Bad Bunny’s latest blockbuster. But I can’t lie about what’s on repeat—in the kitchen, on the beach, on the ride home from his place. As with love songs, so with love: we don’t always desire what we deserve. For a long while—longer than we said we would—I had a lover who was in the middle of a messy divorce. He wouldn’t have me for real, and I wasn’t even sure that’s what I wanted. But I was sick, I was tired, I hadn’t fucked with feeling for several years. So I went ahead in the rain. Si el calor es de noventa, el aguacero es de cien. The chorus was both invitation and warning: if the heat’s at ninety, the downpour’s a hundred. This wetness won’t make you less thirsty. 

“Aguacero” wants to keep things light—baby dale easy, easy, sabes que soy piscis—with a languid dembow barely fast enough for dancing. But this restraint only intensifies the song’s sensuality, soliciting a slow grind your body might remember from “Cool Down the Pace” by Gregory Isaacs or “Rock the Boat” by Aaliyah. Bad Bunny comes so close to the mic you can feel the spray of s’s in your ear—now he’s Benito. The lyrics, meanwhile, vacillate between ostentatious detachment (don’t worry, I won’t say I love you) and ardent romantic roleplay (when you want it, I’m your husband). The anxiety confessed in the first line returns to trouble the lovers: she needs a doctorate in psychology to understand his intentions, she’s got him desquiciado, scrolling through archived messages. Still, he insists on a fundamental equality of purpose between them that I recognize from conversations with my lover—yo soy un cuero, y tú también—as if the intense mutuality of sexual desire could serve as a solvent for whatever inequalities emerge down the line. The terms of their arrangement remain unclear, and he seems to like it like that: if they ask, say we’re distant cousins. My lover was also reluctant to name in public what we couldn’t even name in private; we never found the right line.

It’s possible to eroticize almost anything, and the quip about distant cousins makes me wince then smile, admitting how I did feel a queer kind of kinship with my lover: we were both children of short-lived cross-cultural relationships between bohemians, trying to invent sustainable forms of intimacy from the ruins of the nuclear family. Like Puerto Rico, New York is an island: there’s nowhere to hide from the connections that bring us together even once we’ve turned away. There’s tenderness there, if you’re willing to taste it. Yo soy un cuero, y tú también, the men sing, and we dance—but do we all understand the desire that sustains the exchange the same way? The words feel impoverished to me; they do not seem to honor the rich mystery of the mornings he would wake early to touch me in the sun, like I wanted. They’re drowned out by the steady pulse of precipitation that saturates the song. In “Aguacero,” there’s a certain tension between words and music, communication and sensation, as if what transpires between bodies encodes a reality that runs counter to our stated expectations—that exceeds them. 

Or was the song making things worse, naturalizing arrangements that I struggled to sustain in my everyday life? Was it only, as my mother often warns, perpetuating a patriarchal program that objectifies women, evades emotional responsibility, and ultimately blames us for our confused complicity? Quédate en cuatro, que se ve precioso. I was reading Annie Ernaux, Gillian Rose, Luisa Capetillo, and Simone White, eager to interrogate my heterosexual pleasures but reluctant to relinquish them completely. I texted my lover a passage from Simone White: “dancing is not an endorsement of violence but of course it is /// … when dancing i do feel spread out / i feel helpless and resent the sense that separating myself from feelings of love and enjoyment for the sake of so-called liberation is fucking us all up.” At night I would dance alone in my bedroom and post the videos to my Instagram stories, and if I swiped up—the app had a new feature designed to profit from feminine torment—you could see who’d watched them. I tried not to use it, but I couldn’t forget it was there.

When we said goodbye, finally—it was too cold to stand on the street for the time it should have taken—he told me he’d wanted an escape and he thought that was okay. Now he was going home to someone else. In the moment, still bewildered by desire, I lost my will to litigate. But later, back in Puerto Rico, I wondered over the resonance between that word—escape—and the touristic desires that develop our shorelines, uproot our mangroves, and slowly turn predictable seasonal storms into unnatural disasters. I know I’m being dramatic, letting my metaphorical imagination run wild. But no person or place can be an escape: escape is just the rhythm of the one who’s running.

Last night, walking down to the beach in Luquillo, I saw two men with shovels at the mouth of the river that feeds into the sea—or should, because just then it was choked by sand, so the river was rising and flooding their homes. They were trying to dig out the channel, to restore the flow. Their project seemed impossible to me, especially at such a late hour—and wouldn’t the force of the tides always be stronger than the force of the current? But the next morning, I saw they’d opened the channel into a wide delta, and I realized how many times they must have come down to do this work by hand. They had already committed to finding a form that might accommodate the downpour, that might mitigate—if not eliminate—the damage of the deluge.

 

Carina del Valle Schorske is a literary translator and a contributing writer at The New York Times Magazine. Her debut essay collection, The Other Island, is forthcoming from Riverhead.

Love Songs: “I Want to Be Your Man”

Talk box. Photograph by Carl Lender. Wikimedia Commons, Licensed under CCO 2.0.

This week, the Review is publishing a series of short reflections on love songs, broadly defined. 

I liked spending evenings in my friend Zack’s living room when I moved to Los Angeles. I would make the short drive down Sunset in the dark and park in the lot behind a ceviche stand, then climb a flight of stairs to his apartment and set up on the couch. Zack produces music for rappers and vocalists, mostly Angelenos like him, and his living room was a deconstructed studio, with sequencers and MIDI samplers occupying his coffee table and clusters of new speakers mushrooming every few weeks, filling vacant corners. This was in the fall of 2020; when we would hang out, he would show me the dregs of his midday Ableton foolings, scraps of beats that mostly never coalesced into songs. I think Zack and I became friends years earlier largely because we snagged on musical details similarly. He knew I liked to hear the drafts. 

These flotsam sessions would fade into trading favorite songs, newly discovered or resurrected for driving playlists. One night, Zack showed me “I Want to Be Your Man” by the late Roger Troutman, the star boy of the electro-funk family band Zapp that emerged in the late seventies. Roger and his brothers—he was the fourth of nine, growing up in Hamilton, Ohio—set themselves apart by using the talk box, a device both futuristic and analog in its time. A talk box delivers sound from a source, like an electric guitar or a synth, into a player’s mouth through a plastic tube. The player, clenching the tube with their teeth, shapes the sound by mouthing lyrics, and it is then picked up by a microphone. The result is a tinny, soulful kind of proto-vocoder tone produced by a musician who looks like they’re siphoning gas. Roger built his first talk box with the tubing from a meat freezer in his family’s garage; the “Electric Country Preacher,” as he called the tool, defines the relaxed but fevery ballad that he wrote in 1987. Roger’s bare tenor croons the verses of “I Want to Be Your Man” over bouncy bass, declaring his love for a woman who may or may not want him back. His talk box’d voice careens in for the chorus, pleading the titular phrase four times in a row. I would leave Zack’s and drive back to my house, yanking the emergency brake to park on a steep incline while Roger descended the scale sappily through the aux: “My mind is blind at times I can’t see anyone but you / Those other girls don’t matter, no, they can’t spoil my view / I must make you understand, I want to be your man.” 

I had gone to LA in the wake of a breakup, the end of a long relationship with the first, and still the only, person I’ve been in love with. This love was not so much the pining kind that Roger feels in the track, but one that materialized between us in the dark, or wholly outside of demarcated time, like a warped fact in a dream. I knew how to love only him and often thought that would be the case until I died. We finally came to terms with the fact that we wanted radically different lives and that we had each failed to persuade the other. We doctored a rental car contract so he could drive back across the border to Canada, and I increased the distance between us by moving further west. I felt a numb relief that muffled my sorrow.

Being alone is sometimes easier than imagining feelings of that magnitude again. How dramatically I had been shaped by that person—an experience I worried would make me somehow unable to accommodate future attachments. There is something about Roger’s syrupy song of desire that has helped me understand this idea to be cowardly and false as time passes, though. “I Want to Be Your Man” revels in the pleasure of wanting someone and wanting to be changed by them, as well as in the unavoidably destabilizing effects of falling in love. Vision blurs and communication fails—“I tried, I tried, I tried, I tried to tell you how I feel, but I get mixed up.” (“Sooooooo mixed uuuuuuupp.”) These chaotic pursuits are still generative in the world of the song, in which a plastic tube can let a man possess the soul of an electric instrument and let a silently mouthed word transmit inhuman timbres. Lately I’ve been trying to allow transformations of the heart on small scales, embracing flings or swells of naive yearning. Drafts of myself spawn in front of me, then eventually walk off and die in some emotional outback, but I guess that’s where we all emerge from to begin with. In How to Wreck a Nice Beach, a book about the history of the vocoder by Dave Tompkins, Roger’s collaborator Bootsy Collins explains that, even for masters, the process of the talk box isn’t entirely comprehensible. “It is a special gift, and it is forbidden for you to know the secrets,” he says. “It will always be a mystery.” 

Elena Saavedra Buckley is an associate editor at Harper’s Magazine and The Drift.

Love Songs: “Hang With Me”

Robyn. Photograph by Lewis Chaplin. Wikimedia Commons, Licensed under CCO 2.0.

This week, the Review is publishing a series of short reflections on love songs, broadly defined. 

Someone I recently kissed sends me a PDF of a rare, out-of-print book by John Ashbery. The fragment I tug from Fragment: “Seen from inside all is / abruptness. As though to get out your eye / sharpens and sharpens these particulars; no / longer visible, they breathe in multicolored / parentheses the way love in short periods / puts everything out of focus, coming and going.” It’s been a while since I’ve been in love, and, most of the time, the idea fatigues me: I can see the end before anything’s begun. But these lines make my clarity of vision briefly undesirable; I miss the blur.

When I was nineteen, an anxious wallflower at my first literary party, Ashbery barked at me to fetch him a gin and tonic. Now these lines of his wind back the tape to adolescence: when everything is seen from inside even as the self strains outward and time exits its usual shapes and the imagination knows no end. Teenagers make love and ontology anew. I remember the smell of wet grass on long night walks with the first girl I loved. The matching pale green stains on our white sneakers. Our long hair mingling, dark brown and red, in the stairwell, the party we’d just left still loud down the hall. That this was the most surprising thing that had ever happened to my nineteen-year-old body, though it was also the culmination of months of cloaked flirting as well as—it seemed—the culmination of every desire ever. Yet I also glimpsed how much more wanting there was to do.

Since I am time-traveling back to that relationship, my first queer one, which careened to a slow disintegration I didn’t see coming, I am listening to “Hang With Me,” Robyn’s dance-pop love song that forbids love. “Will you tell me once again / how we’re gonna be just friends?” she begins, a plea that morphs into command in the chorus: “Just don’t fall recklessly, headlessly in love with me.” This is the brinkmanship common to teenagers and lovers, feigning control over feelings.

“And if you do me right, I’m gonna do right by you,” Robyn sings before she gets to that other condition, the one that gives the song its title: if you don’t fall in love with me, you can hang with me. These are the stipulations of a contract that’s never going to work. It’s clear from the ecstatic production and obsessive insistence that Robyn herself is already in love. And in her demands, I hear seduction, the kind that plays out when you’re already in bed with someone, whispering “we can’t” while you do.

Wild requests, wild promises, nothing that can be kept—going as it comes. The “heartbreak, blissfully painful and insanity” that Robyn is worried about speeds toward her. It strikes me that this song is, like me, revisiting adolescent passions from a distance. The time travel is imperfect. “Heartbreak” is the tell. For falling in love to become possible, I’ll have to forget that heartbreak is equally possible, but the anticipation of pain worms into love that hasn’t yet earned the name. 

The internet reveals that “Hang With Me” hadn’t yet been released during the short period of love I’ve just described. At first, I am sure that there’s a mistake. The song is overlaid on so many memories of her. But it seems I made a sequential connection simultaneous. At some point that I don’t remember, I heard this song and remembered my ex, and then, at Ashbery’s instigation, I remembered the song and the story together. Now that I’ve written this down, they’ll never be separate. Such a teenage word, never. Like: Don’t worry, I’ll never fall in love with you.

 

Elisa Gonzalez is a poet, fiction writer, and essayist whose work has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, and elsewhere. She is the recipient of a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer’s Award. 

Love Songs: “Up in Hudson”

Hudson, New York. Wikimedia Commons, Licensed under CCO 3.0.

There was a month in spring several years ago when I rode Amtrak ten times in two weeks, taking the 7:05 a.m. out of Boston Back Bay and returning from Penn Station on the latest train possible. I had to be in New York for various reasons and obligations, but the person I loved was in Boston and my logic was simple: I did not want to spend a night apart from him.

I spent many hours with my forehead pressed against the cool glass of the train window, taking in flashes of the Connecticut coastline, mouthing the words to the Dirty Projectors’ “Up in Hudson,” a song David Longstreth wrote as part of his 2017 breakup album, which chronicles his split with Amber Coffman, former bandmate and partner.

Why was I so obsessed with a breakup song while experiencing a love that made me feel like I’d been hit in the solar plexus with a bag of cement? It’s the chorus that was stuck in my head, for reasons I wasn’t totally aware of. “Love will burn out, and love will just fade away,” Longstreth sings over and over, bitterly interrupting his own melody, cutting through parts of the song that describe falling in love (“In a minivan in New England, our eyes met / We said yes and we said yes”; “First time I ever kissed your mouth, we both felt time stop”). 

What I couldn’t see then—or didn’t know I saw—was that the end with this person I loved was drawing near. It’s in the very structure of the song, how it alternates between their love story and that distressing chorus (“love’s gonna rot, and love will just dissipate”). Though when I hear those lines now, I can’t help but think of the verse that follows: “Now we’re going our separate ways / But we’re still connected.” Maybe that’s just Longstreth trying to console himself with a generic, post-breakup line. But now, I still find myself asking what the nature of that connection is—if absence really can still hold two people together years later, and what claims that makes on the heart.

“I’m just up in Hudson, bored and destructive,” Longstreth sings in the last verse, “knowing that nothing lasts.” On one particularly long Amtrak ride, I spent the hours compulsively scrolling through my camera roll, zooming in on photos of us, smiling faces frozen in time. I see now that I was already, even then, trying to reassure myself as to what I had—and as such, admitting its loss.

 

Camille Jacobson is the engagement editor at the Review.

Love Songs: “I’m Your Man”

Leonard Cohen, 2008. Wikimedia Commons, Licensed under CCO 2.0.

This week, the Review is publishing a series of short reflections on love songs, broadly defined. 

The other night I streamed Hallelujah: Leonard Cohen, a Journey, a Song, a documentary by Daniel Geller and Dayna Goldfine. In most of the footage, we see a Leonard who’s reflective and doubting. As I watched his Jewish man’s face age and his dark hair turn gray, I wondered what I could learn from him about drawing no conclusions. That might be the motto of his life and music—draw no conclusions. It’s a sexy, freewheeling stance. I’d like it to be the motto of my life, except I draw conclusions all the time. They happen to be wrong, which saves me.

I always wondered what women wanted from Leonard. I think they wanted what they thought the songs were about. In the songs, a man is thinking about how to get the woman, and he thinks he can get her by figuring out what she wants. Leonard is imagining what it would be like to be a woman with a man coming on to her.

This is great. This is basically the opposite of every other song written by a man about a woman. For example, in his entire life, Bob Dylan has never imagined the effect of his lyrics on a woman, or else, you know, the words would not be so sneering, and he would give us a picture of the woman and not just her effect on him. Bob doesn’t address women. He writes to men about women. He can do what he likes. But not once in my life did I think Bob would be a good fuck. Every woman on the planet has thought Leonard would be a good fuck.

There’s a clip in the documentary of Leonard singing “I’m Your Man,” the title song of an album he released in 1988. The gravel in his voice has settled. In interviews, he said he felt he could sing at that point with the “authority and intensity” the song needed. He’s trying to win back the woman. He’s screwed up in some way. Gee, I wonder how? He’s grown aloof? He’s slept around? He stands there, holding the mic like it’s her hand, and he lays himself out. He doesn’t care if he looks vulnerable. Actually, he doesn’t. He’s in control of the show. The song is the blindfold. The song is going to lead you to the party.

The music has a jaunty, Kurt Weill bounce that builds without laying on too much of the old-world schmaltz Leonard likes to play with in other songs. He’s alone, with no chorus or backup singers. Just Leonard promising anything to turn her on. The file box of possibilities, itself, is the turn-on. He’ll wear a mask for you. He’ll let you strike him down in anger. He’ll go into the ring for you. He’ll explore every inch of you. He’ll have a baby with you. He’ll drive you like a car. He’ll let you drive him like a car. He’ll move off if you want to be alone.

Let’s get back to the “I’ll explore every inch of you.” He’s been with enough women to know this is the hook. He will make you feel he could drown in you. He’s drowning in something, and in sex it’s easy to think it’s you. Until the feeling wears off.

In 2008, when Leonard is seventy-three, he hits the road again to perform. He needs to reinvent his life and he’s broke. A woman who isn’t named in the documentary has stolen all his money while he’s spent five years in a Buddhist monastery. When he plans the tour, he’s afraid of the reception he’ll get, although it turns out tons of people love him. He doesn’t know how this has happened. He doesn’t believe he has anything to say except this is the way an artist makes a life, by staying in the game. And he hopes to give pleasure.

Onstage, he tells the audience he’s grateful to perform for them. He feels honored. You think it’s authentic. He’s so sweet and also severe in his restraint. In his whole life, Bob Dylan has taken very few breaks from performing. Onstage, Bob doesn’t look at the audience or tell them more than he needs to. You want to look at me, he’s saying; well, here I am. This is what you get. With Leonard, it’s all: Take me. What is it you want that I can give you?

 

Laurie Stone is the author of six books, most recently Streaming Now, Postcards from the Thing that is Happening (Dottir Press), which has been long listed for the PEN America Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay. She writes the “Streaming Now” column for Liber a Feminist Review, and she writes the Everything is Personal substack. 

The End of Love

Illustration by Santeri Viinamäki. Wikimedia Commons, Licensed under CCO 4.0.

I’ve had a hell of a time with online dating. I haven’t had much fun, and I haven’t found a mate. I hadn’t been able to understand fully why it “wasn’t working” until I read Eva Illouz’s book The End of Love: A Sociology of Negative Relations. Illouz has studied the relationship between love and capitalism for twenty years,  and in this book she describes the ways that consumer culture has shaped social bonds. She focuses specifically on what she terms “scopic capitalism”—how the modern free market creates economic value primarily through images. On practically every page I underlined some insight that matched my own experience; my personal travails began to make more sense.

Choice—sexual, consumer, or emotional—is the chief trope under which the self and the will in liberal polities are organized.

In the fall of 2016, my second marriage ended in spectacular concert with the presidential election. My second husband was running for office, and we couldn’t tell people we were splitting up until after the election because it might have disrupted his campaign. He lost anyway. The night of the election, I was at home alone with our dogs, mourning the end of my marriage but thinking At least at the end of this horrible night we’ll have a woman president. In April of 2017, I started dating. I was thirty-seven. I had moved from Texas to Los Angeles, where I knew almost no one, so online dating seemed like a promising approach, especially in a metropolis of ten million people. The pool of prospects would be both deep and wide.

Consumer culture—arguably the fulcrum of modern identity—is based almost axiomatically on the incessant practice of comparison and choice.

 

I have been on first dates with 107 people in the past five years, without securing a long-term love relationship with anyone, which was always my goal. It wasn’t my goal to go on dates with a lot of people, or to carry out some anthropological or sociological study. Yes, I’ve had some interesting experiences that make good stories: the first date where the horse ran away with me and I thought I would die. The first date where the guy drank himself unconscious at the bar, after going on and on about “authentic enlightenment.” The first date where the guy started crying and said he felt like he knew me. The first date where the guy took a nap. The first date in a botanical garden in Pasadena, where the guy told me he could hear the plants in the garden screaming. He’d just come back from Peru, where he’d done a lot of ayahuasca. The first date I flew to Tucson for, which ended in my crossing the border into the US from Mexico on foot, three days later, and taking a Greyhound from Calexico back to Los Angeles. The many first dates where the guy failed to ask me a single question, while I kept the “conversation” aloft by asking him about himself. The part where I moved to Israel during a global pandemic, thinking I’d convert to Judaism and have an IVF baby at the age of forty-one, both of my children already grown. People laugh when I say, “The first one is the only one whose name I don’t know,” or when I talk about how I’ve been on dates with so many people in Los Angeles that I see them everywhere now—I even saw one guy I’d dated at a funeral. But it was never my goal to write about online dating, or accumulate interesting experiences; all along, I’ve told myself to think of it as a terrible means to an end.

The end has never come. So I mostly thought about my experience of online dating with a bewildered sense of personal failure, before I read The End of Love. Now I think something more sinister, like I should walk out of this casino, because the house won.

 

While pre-modern courtship started with emotions and ended with sex that could produce guilt and anxiety, contemporary relationships start with (pleasurable) sex and must grapple with the anxious task of generating emotions.

 

I had not really dated, online or offline, before this period in my life. I got pregnant when I was nineteen years old, by the second person I’d ever had sex with; we married, had two children, and when we divorced four years later I was too busy working all the time, trying to survive financially, to date. I also experienced myself as not so appealing to men I might be drawn to, because I was only twenty-three and already had two young children. I was already divorced, already a fallen woman. Around the edges of multiple exhausting restaurant jobs, taking care of my kids, and volunteering for an abortion fund, I did meet a man I became entangled with for five years. From the time I was twenty-five until I was thirty I didn’t date because I hoped this man would give me the love relationship I wanted, even though from the beginning he was always clear that he wanted only sex, an intellectual exchange, and no public association with me.

 

Men have not been compelled to use sexuality as a leverage to receive social and economic resources and thus have no reason to implicate their whole self in sexuality … Casual sex entails detachment, which in turn provides power and as such is a trope of masculinity.

 

I haven’t had sex with most of the people I’ve gone on dates with. I couldn’t be less interested in casual sex, at this point in my life, but unfortunately I couldn’t be more interested in intimate sex, or good sex.

 

Heterosexuality organizes inequalities in an emotional system that places the burden of success or failure in relationships on people’s psyche, mostly women’s … Men and women, but mostly women, turn to their psyche in order to manage the symbolic violence and wounds contained in such emotional inequalities: Why is he distant?

 

I cut things off with the man who didn’t want to be in a relationship with me and went to grad school when I was thirty, hopeful that a new chapter in a new state would yield new prospects for love. But I was older than most of my colleagues; and again, I had young children. I also kept waiting tables and working for the abortion fund, in addition to my coursework, writing my first book, and teaching undergraduate creative writing classes. I still had more free time than I’d had before, so I went to parties, I flirted. I made substantial eye contact with potential mates, both at school and around town. But I didn’t go on a date with anyone during my two years of graduate school. No one asked me out, and I didn’t ask anyone out either.

 

This splintering of the emotional and sexual encounter into different regimes of action is a chief effect of sexual freedom and has had tremendous consequences in making men’s and women’s interactions far more uncertain.

 

When I returned to Texas after grad school, I moved in with my ex-husband, my children’s father, to save money; we had been divorced for eight years, but we couldn’t both afford to live in the good school zone if we rented separate places. I longed for romantic partnership but recognized my situation as unusual and probably unappealing, at least in a conservative place like Texas. But after only a few months, I met my second husband through my first, at a house party in the neighborhood; my second husband lived with his ex-wife too. How about that.

 

Psychological self-management is nothing but the management of a pervasive uncertainty in interpersonal relationships where sexual freedom and pleasure, both organized in the grammar and semantics of the market, have been traded for psychological certainty.

 

Five years later, my second marriage ended because my husband fell in love with someone else. Or it ended because we started sleeping with other people, with no clearly defined rules; it wasn’t infidelity, and it wasn’t polyamory. It was just a mess. Or it ended because he’s an alcoholic and I’m co dependent and it was always destined to explode. Or it ended because I felt safe with him and I loved being married but I didn’t obsess about him the way he obsessed about me. We didn’t know how to talk about sex and we didn’t know how to talk about money and we were both too naive, selfish, and entitled to humble ourselves in the trench of relating. It ended because we got caught in a feedback loop of avoidance and insecurity; I discovered that being the avoidant one is so much easier than being the insecure one, until the insecure person really leaves you, and then you feel like you’re dying. It ended because we couldn’t manage our own selves and it turned out we had different ideas about marriage. It ended because when he finally said he wanted to come back, I was too hurt to imagine trusting him again, and I knew I had betrayed him too. It ended because there was too much uncertainty in the system.

 

[ Anomic desire] is devoid of an internal normative peg around which one could build an overarching narrative structure.

 

Since this online dating era began, I have been on only thirteen second dates. Usually what happens on my first dates is: I’m uncertain about whether I’ll like the person in real life, but I decide I can’t know if I don’t try, so I meet the person. And I know immediately I’m not into them, but I have a drink with them anyway, staying only as long as I have to to be polite. Or I don’t know immediately that I’m not into them, but by the end of the first drink I’m sure I don’t want another drink or another date. But this pattern was disrupted by the one boyfriend my online datinghas yielded thus far: we matched on Tinder, and after our first date, I didn’t know what to make of him. I couldn’t tell if he was a little weird, or just nervous. I wasn’t sure if I was attracted to him, even after being around him in person for a bit. He said We should do this again and I said Yeah that sounds good even though I didn’t want to, because it’s hard to reject someone to their face.

I breadcrumbed him for three weeks, during which time I went to Portland for a writers’ conference and, instead of going to craft talks, I went on dates with four people. One of whom said he could tell from my skin tone that I ate a very anti-inflammatory diet, and one of whom had the most entertaining and smart online dating profile I’ve ever seen, and may have been a spy. When I finally went on a second date with the man who would become my only boyfriend, back in Los Angeles, I discovered he was a fascinating person I wanted to know. I felt so attracted to him. I couldn’t wait to see him again, and I said to myself, Of course you can’t know someone after one date, Merritt.

 

The economic-sexual subject is the proper subject of modernity. It enacts its individuality through wants and desires, through choices, and, increasingly, through non-choices that all take place in a consumer sphere saturated with intimacy and in a private sphere that is commodified.

 

I do not choose men who present themselves via car selfies. I do not usually choose white men who present themselves hanging out with crowds of smiling Black children. I do not choose men whose profiles include bathroom mirror pics or men who say they are religious. Sometimes I do not choose men shorter than 6’3” or shorter than 6’ or shorter than 5’10” or shorter than 5’8” or shorter than I am. I do not choose men who claim sarcasm as a virtue; I do not choose men who mention sarcasm at all, and this alone eliminates a remarkable number of men. So many men think it is important to announce that they like ice cream. Who doesn’t like ice cream? I unchoose the many men who say they want a “partner in crime.” And I never choose men who say they want a woman—or more often a “girl”—who doesn’t take herself too seriously.

 

Evaluation has become an ordinary feature of the cognitive orientation of actors, geared to the identification of worth, with actors being simultaneously evaluators and evaluated in the same way that they are consumers of images and turn themselves into images for the gaze of others.

 

I matched with a scientist on Feeld (a dating app), and figured out that he runs a lab at a prestigious university. I evaluate intelligence to be a feature I am seeking and I have been on dates with professors of English literature, Spanish literature, marine biology, landscape architecture, gerontology, economics, geophysics, quantum physics, mathematics, philosophy, film, religion, conservation biology, sociology, biomechanics, psychology, and ecology, though of course there is no absolute correspondence between academia and intelligence. The man in Portland with the smartest dating profile I’ve ever seen worked as a security guard at a mall.

I evaluated the Feeld scientist’s work to be interesting after I read one of his white papers. I asked him about his work, and he asked to see more pictures of my face, even though he didn’t yet know my name. I sent him eight more pictures of my face. He disconnected from me, without explanation, but I assume it had something to do with an evaluation about my face.

 

Because potential partners are decontextualized, that is, disembedded from their social frameworks, agents become purely selecting and evaluative agents, trying to understand the worth of a person in an abstract context that has itself an abstract commodity form (in the same way that corporations are abstract spaces, cafes, bars, or restaurants are standardized abstract consumer spaces).

 

When I was arranging a first date with a man named Jack (not his real name), I suggested a bar near my house. He texted that he liked that place and I joked, “Me too, I meet all my dates there!” But then when I got there, a few minutes before he did, someone I had been on a date with was actually there, and I didn’t want my previous date, Yusuf (also not his real name), to see me on a date with someone else. Yusuf had told me, on our only date, that he was divorced because when his wife turned thirty she also turned beautiful, and realized she could be with someone more attractive than he was. Jack was sympathetic about my desire to avoid Yusuf, and suggested a different bar, which happened to be the bar where I had first met Yusuf, and was also the bar where, ten men later, the man who would become my only boyfriend would kiss me passionately in front of his colleagues, for no reason other than we hadn’t seen each other in three days.

I do meet many of my dates at one particular bar, though not that one, or the other one. It’s a tiny nook of a bar where my only boyfriend and I went on our second date, but I’ve been on dates with sixty-five more people since then. So now, no matter where I’m sitting in the bar, I’m surrounded by myself; I can remember feigning or losing interest from every single seat at the bartop, and at every table in the room, except for that one booth in the middle. That one is where, on our delayed and pivotal second date, four years ago, my only boyfriend is telling me about his life, and for once I am realizing I don’t want to be anywhere else.

 

Traditional companionate marriage was replaced by a view of marriage as the sharing of consumer leisure.

 

I don’t want to meet someone so we can share a life of leisure. I do like going to the movies, I do love experiencing art and music with someone, I do enjoy hiking, I would love to have someone to cook with. But I would rather meet someone because we are running an abortion medication supply chain, or because we are joining an ecocommune in South America, or because we are building something worthwhile, growing something, teaching something, helping some people, or otherwise doing something hard together. Please let’s not play board games, let’s not get comfortable, let’s not talk about opening the relationship so our bourgeois lives can become even more prosaic. Please God don’t let’s try new restaurants.

 

The sharing of consumer tastes functions as an emotional and sensorial platform to forge intimacy.

 

One recent man had a lot going for him. In fact he was the most promising prospect I’d had in some time. But then he mentioned that he got his daily coffee from Starbucks, and I found it hard to imagine dating someone who liked Starbucks coffee; or even if they liked the coffee, didn’t find Starbucks so odious and soul-diminishingly ubiquitous they would never go there. I judged this a stupid reason to stop messaging him, given his other, surely more important qualities, so I continued messaging him. But then he said he mostly watched Marvel movies, and the combination of Starbucks and Marvel was too much, so I stopped messaging him, even though I judged my own judgment in this case to be ridiculously shallow and flimsy. If he hadn’t been American, I might have excused it or interpreted it differently. Or if I had met him in another context, his consumer tastes might have barely figured in my estimation of him. But he was just an overeducated, emotionally available American, with many winsome attributes and poor taste in coffee and movies; I myself didn’t even understand why I lost interest in him, and recognized it was a bug in my programming, rather than anything to do with him. Or perhaps, the obvious ominous thought goes, it wasn’t a bug but an actual feature of the programming—not mine, but the app’s.

My second ex-husband and I did not share the same taste in music or food or books; I chose not to let that mean anything. Or rather, I chose to let it mean he was a different person with his own preferences and idiosyncrasies, like the fact that he wore the same pair of shorts every day. I wasn’t looking for a copy of myself, because that would be boring. But in retrospect, maybe the fact that I thought I could be with someone with whom I had so little aesthetic and sensual overlap could have been a glaring sign that I was so desperate to be in a relationship I wasn’t paying enough attention to other important realities about our connection. On the other hand, maybe the fact that I think I can’t be with someone who goes to Starbucks means I’m making the opposite error.

 

Women [bear] the main psychological burden of coping with [the devaluation of their bodies and selves] by using, for example, self-help literature or seeking psychological advice.

 

Since I began dating I have read or listened to: Where Should We Begin, Mating in Captivity, Healing Your Attachment Wounds, The Polyvagal Theory in Therapy, Lost Connections, Relationship Rx, Awakening Shakti, The All-or-Nothing Marriage, Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents, Getting the Love You Want, Polyvagal Exercises for Safety and Connection, Facing Love Addiction, Greater Than the Sum of Our Parts, Facing Codependence, How to Not Die Alone, Therapist Uncensored, Positive Intelligence, Attached, More Than Words, Us, I Don’t Want to Talk About It, Conscious Uncoupling, Cured, The Untethered Soul, Out of Touch, Your Brain on Love, Emotional Inheritance, The Power of Partnership, Sacred Pleasure, Hold Me Tight, We Do, Wired for Dating, The 5 Love Languages, Repressed Memories, Why Does He Do That? , Boundary Boss, Emotional Agility, The Verbally Abusive Relationship, Healing the Shame That Binds You, The Divided Self, No Self No Problem, Attachment Disturbances in Adults, Connection, Personhood, The Awakening Body, The Lucid Body, The Body Keeps the Score,  Rosen Method Bodywork, How Emotions Are Made , Altered Traits, and Women, Sex, and Addiction,  among other books and podcasts. I’ve eaten up every episode of Orna Guralnik’s Couples Therapy , and I’ve read as much of her academic writing as I’ve been able to find. I have sought help from a marriage and family therapist, a cognitive behavioral therapist, a Somatic Experiencing®   bodyworker, a psychoanalyst, a Hakomi  therapist in Israel, a trauma therapist who specializes in EMDR, a Reiki practitioner in Portugal, a Hakomi therapist in Los Angeles, a self-development coach, another marriage and family therapist, and a Hungarian psychiatrist who told me, twice, that he had drawn Flannery O’Connor’s  blood when she was hospitalized with lupus. I had five appointments with him and he told me at each appointment that I was the most depressed person he had ever seen. I wasn’t that depressed. I mean, I drove myself to the appointments. Still, I took the anti-depressants he prescribed, but they made something spark and sputter so darkly in my brain that I realized I could easily become the most depressed person he had ever seen if I didn’t stop taking them. Though I suspected my treatment-resistant depression had something to do with men, or with being a woman, I tried to address it with ketamine infusions at a clinic in Los Angeles. When infusions alone did nothing to wash it away, I tried ketamine-assisted psychotherapy with a DO in San Francisco. I tried microdosing psilocybin and LSD. I tried a ten-day silent meditation retreat. I tried spending time on a radical anarchist commune dedicated to sacred love and sexuality in Portugal. Finally, I attended an all-day love addiction workshop on Zoom. When the other participants turned on their cameras one by one, they were all middle-aged white ladies too.

 

The entire economy of visual attractiveness relies on the constant renewal of looks through the equation of attractiveness with fashion and youth …  Here is a striking example of the built-in obsolescence entailed by visual evaluation: Terry is a thirty-four-year-old French woman.

            … TERRY: …  [Bursts into tears.] I don’t think I am pretty. Even though I loved him like mad, and gave him all my money, and now they came to take my furniture, because I got into debts because of him. But I still feel it is my fault.

            INTERVIEWER: I am sorry you feel this way. Why do you feel it is still your fault?

            TERRY: Because maybe it was easy to fix. Maybe it was easy for me to give him what he wanted. It was easy to be the kind of woman he wanted and I didn’t do it.

 

I briefly dated a French economist I met on OkCupid, who told me openly that he wasn’t as attracted to me as he needed to be, because of mimetic desire. He said if he was going to be sent to a deserted island and had to choose between me and “someone gorgeous,” of course he would choose me, because I would be more interesting to talk to forever and he could still have sex with me too. But in the real world, surrounded by other people who’d be looking at him-with-me, he knew he would feel ashamed of me because he could have been with a more beautiful woman.

 

Katya is a sixty-one-year-old French woman, divorced for nine years …

            KATYA: When I go out on dates, it feels really high pressured … You are constantly asking yourself: “Is it him or not?” and you use anything to decide that he is not. Any small mistake would disqualify him.

            INTERVIEWER: Like what kind of mistake?

            KATYA: There are so many ways … You give them a pass or fail grade … It was not this way in the past. Say you know someone through work or friends, you would have many opportunities to give them a second or third look.

 

I tell myself Why don’t you try to meet someone through the things you already do, the activities you already care about? So I go to protests and hiking meetups and friends’ parties. I know several artist/writer couples who’ve met at artist  residencies like Yaddo or MacDowell; I love going to residencies. MacDowell is one of the most romantic places I’ve ever been in my life. They give you a gorgeous cottage in the woods, and they feed you delicious nourishing food, and you have no responsibilities except to work on your art in the beautiful forest and fraternize with the other residents if you want. Though I’ve had the great fortune to go to MacDowell twice, hoping as much for love as artistic inspiration, I’ve had nary a fling there either.

All of this is what the psychotherapists call “efforting.”

And while I grok the futility of mooning over such counterfactuals, I still can’t help thinking that if I had efforted more in the realm of, say, a foreign language, and spent the same enormous investment of time (and not insignificant investment of money), I’d certainly be fluent in one of the Category I languages by now (Spanish or French). Perhaps, with the same five years of dedicated effort, I could have even respectably tackled one of the Category IV or V languages (Farsi, Hebrew, Arabic, Russian), and thereby given myself more opportunities and access as a writer, which might have also, in the end, led to a relationship with someone interesting. I could have learned to play the guitar, or given those hours of my time to some worthwhile other-focused work, like volunteering for a sexual assault hotline. Whereas I have nothing to show for my effort on the apps, aside from a nauseating fluency with the boring, homogenous, unconsidered, narrow lingo by which many men narrate themselves online; and this essay.

 

If the capacity to objectify others, men and women, is widely commercialized by a vast industry of sex and is somewhat endorsed by many strands of feminism, it is because it is recoded as subjectification found in pleasure, empowerment, and detachment. As Stephane … a strategic consultant for an investment firm put it [about his use of Tinder]:

            [T]here is something exhilarating about swiping right and left. It gives a feeling of power. I think the designers of Tinder work on this feeling. You have a feeling of omnipotence on your romantic destiny …

 

Hinge says it’s “designed to be deleted,” but if that were true, it would not be a great business model. Sure, a lot of people find a partner on the apps, but how many don’t? And how much is our capacity to evaluate, trust, and bond with other humans degraded along the way? The corporations that make the apps have only one incentive, which is not making connections but making money. If the apps never worked, no one would use them; but if they always worked, the companies would make less money than they do if the apps work sometimes, unpredictably, or magically, after you pay to upgrade to premium or majestic or boost your profile or buy three roses. 107 people sounds like so many people, and I worry that publicizing that number is not wise, with respect to my future prospects. Believe me, I know I’m the common denominator. Who would want to date a woman who talks about all the men she’s interviewed for the position? Maybe it’s not attractive. I imagine how I would feel about dating a man who wrote about such an epic online dating quest, and it seems like so much pressure, to consider oneself the proverbial needle. It took me forty-two dates to meet the man who became my only boyfriend, but then I went on dates with thirty-two more people over the year and a half I spent hoping and pining, patiently cajoling and then openly begging the forty-second man to be in a relationship with me, and trying to attach to someone else while he resisted, so we could both be released from my fixation on him. Because he was the forty-second man, I hoped that by some law of online dating math, I would encounter someone I liked as much as him by the time I got to—at most—the eighty-fourth man. I haven’t met anyone I want to be with more than I want to be with him, and I’m now past eighty-four. But is 107 a large number? is my question. My question is how many strangers would you have to put into a room to be sure you could form a lasting connection with just one of them? How many people over six feet tall with graduate degrees who don’t smoke and drink only socially or not at all and either already have kids or don’t want kids and live within fifty miles of you who aren’t polyamorous and designate themselves as active, with liberal politics and no bathroom selfies or rote clichéd philosophizing? I thought I might stop at ninety-nine, or one hundred. Those seemed like significant numbers. I thought I might stop at one hundred and one, since that seemed definitive. So when I say the house won it’s because I’m still at the table, and my question has changed from, When will I meet someone? to When will I stop?

 

Merritt Tierce is a screenwriter and the author of the novel Love Me Back. She lives in Los Angeles and is developing various film and television projects about abortion.

Love Songs: “Being in Love”

Jason Molina. Wikimedia Commons, Licensed under CCO 2.0.

I am not a terribly romantic person. An ex once described me as “stable,” which is hardly the most erotic quality. It’s not that I’m unfeeling, per se. I just prefer to keep these particular feelings at a slight remove, a step or two apart. So in those rare periods when love enters my life, the results are disastrous, consuming every private moment of my day. Even something as simple as a text message can make my body feel like it’s falling apart. Yet what other agony gives so much pleasure? For “being in love,” as Jason Molina sings on his song of the same name, which he put out under the moniker Songs: Ohia, “means you are completely broken.” When he sings of breaking, it is as the prelude to being remade. “And for the first time,” he croons with delight, “it is working.”

Molina, who died ten years ago, makes this statement of ultraromance sound like a dirge, all creaky organ and quaking drum machine with a single electric guitar keening softly overhead. The song exults even as it prepares to mourn. For as he notes, this passion—all-consuming, overwhelming—can burn through the fuel that fires it. I think back to Gillian Rose’s description of desire as something monstrous, driving the lover onward, onward, until they burn out or their beloved withdraws. It can be a pitiless sensation, love, especially love unreturned, love held in suspension. “There is no democracy in any love relation,” Rose writes in Love’s Work, “only mercy.” And there is no guarantee.

This is what makes love monstrous: it invests loneliness and disappointment and hope with significance, even pleasure. Yet Rose also declares: “Let me then be destroyed. For that is the only way I may have a chance of surviving.” Her work testifies to the inexhaustibility of passion, a thing forever reforming itself.

There is another version of “Being in Love” on an out-of-print live album. When Molina sings “If you stick with me you can help me / I’m sure we’ll find new things to burn,” his voice booms and the band surges, providing their own fuel for the song, pushing it through a full three minutes of overdriven guitar swells—like proof that “the heart is a risky fuel to burn,” proof enough that it’s worth the risk. There is no safe distance here, no step or two apart. You must set fire to yourself—you must let yourself be consumed.

 

Robert Rubsam writes fiction and nonfiction. His work has been published in the New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic, The Baffler and elsewhere. 

Love Songs: “Someone Great”

LCD Soundsytem in Chicago, 2017. Wikimedia Commons, Licensed under CCO 2.0.

This week, the Review is publishing a series of short reflections on love songs, broadly defined. 

Out of nowhere, like an ambulance approaching from a great distance or a bedside alarm boring a hole through your sleep, a sound fades in, so subtle and liquid that at first you might mistake it for your own thought—a mid-tempo drone. The first time I heard it, at a sweaty dance party in a cramped room at the tail end of college, I wondered for a moment if this sound would last the entire song. Then the drum kicks in, heavy on the backbeat, a steady thump paired with an agitated tapping that skitters ahead of and behind itself, as if that initial sound were an object of worship to be chased but not quite approached. That sound, gathering momentum, amounts to a test—how far can a collection of tones speed up, fall back, pitch rising and falling, and still remain whole and anchored to their original pulse? How far can a series of relations be stretched before they break? When James Murphy’s baritone finally enters, glockenspiel chimes cling to his every syllable: “I wish that we could talk about it / But there, that’s the problem.”

“Someone Great” sounds very much like an elegy for a lost relationship, and in a sense that’s what it is. But it might be more accurate to say it’s an elegy for a way of relating. The album it appears on, Sound of Silver, is dedicated to the memory of Dr. George Kamen—Murphy’s longtime therapist, and an innovative practitioner of group therapy. Kamen died in 2006, the year before the album’s release. Narrating the feeling of a dreaded, ill-timed phone call, Murphy sings, “To tell the truth I saw it coming / The way you were breathing / But nothing can prepare you for it / The voice on the other end.” The way the synth works, slinky and mournful, you could be forgiven for thinking of it as a love song.

While some dance music hits you with everything at once, some opens with a drip, doling itself out element by element, teaching you how the different parts of the beat work together. LCD Soundsystem nearly perfected the latter approach, and in so doing taught a generation of kids who had grown up blasting Nirvana alone through their headphones how to move together in a dark room. It was a gift—group therapy—that many of us didn’t know we needed. In the concert film Shut Up and Play the Hits, at what was supposed to be the band’s final show at Madison Square Garden in 2011 (they would reunite in 2016), Murphy turns from the ecstatic capacity crowd at the end of “Someone Great” and approaches bandmate Nancy Whang as he wipes his face with a black handkerchief. She regards him with a warm, quizzical smile. It’s difficult to tell if he’s wiping away tears or sweat. Then they laugh, and he turns back to the audience.

I wished that we could talk about it, but there, that’s the problem. Having fled New York mid-March 2020, half because of the pandemic and half because I was reeling from the dissolution of a nearly decade-long relationship, I returned in July to pack up my stuff from the apartment we’d shared, just in time for a brutal heat wave. During the day I chugged ice water and sweated, truly alone for the first time in years, and in the evenings I walked to the park with my headphones, where I would wait until the sun went down to start weeping, so that I could do it surrounded by other people. Like dancing, crying felt less humiliating in the dark, and doing it around other people somehow made it feel more purposeful. After a period of protracted isolation, people were coming back to one another in public parks. Being there was helpfully incommensurate with my free- falling sense of loneliness and grief for “the voice on the other end,” a sense that the only good part of myself—my better half, as it were—had been extracted; if I sat there on the lawn for long enough, maybe I’d hear it coming back.

I hadn’t paid much attention to the lyrics of “Someone Great” until then: “There’s all the work that needs to be done / It’s late for revision / There’s all the time and all the planning / And songs to be finished.” It was true. There were people to see and poems to write. It was now necessary to revise my sense of self—and yet, sobbing so hard that I saw stars, I wondered about the lateness of the revision. I was thirty-five, about the same age Murphy was when he wrote the song. Of course I knew that finding love again was still possible, likely even, but I also had the thought that after a certain point perhaps time cauterizes rather than heals us.

I have fallen in and out of love since then, and I’ve also been out dancing. A little chime approaches—maybe from within yourself, maybe from somewhere else. And it keeps coming till the day it stops.

 

Daniel Poppick is the author of the National Poetry Series winner Fear of Description and of The Police.

Love Songs: “Water Sign”

Mosaic in Maltezana. Wikimedia Commons, licensed under CCO 3.0.

This week, the Review is publishing a series of short reflections on love songs, broadly defined. 

Parliament’s “(You’re a Fish and I’m a) Water Sign” is an unabashed ode to passion, to the base and the sensual, to the possibilities of love in the juiciest ways it can exist between people. The song moans into being, a beseeching follows, then there’s a bass so low you can’t possibly get under it, and finally the central question is posed: “Can we get down?” In true Parliament fashion, the tune doesn’t follow a traditional verse-chorus-bridge structure; it consists of an ever-evolving chorus that departs from the lines “I want to be / on the seaside of love with you / let’s go swimming / the water’s fine.” The arrangement is magnificent and the execution velvety, and the soulful, overlapping ad-libs of George Clinton, Walter “Junie” Morrison, and Ron Ford are just romantic lagniappe. Add the production of the track itself, with its big band-y rise of horns and whimsical flourishes atop the funky bassline, and the song is a liquid love affair that pulls you under and takes you there. It’s orgasmic.“Water Sign” is the B side to the much more well-known “Aqua Boogie (A Psychoalphadiscobetabioaquadoloop),” from Parliament’s 1978 hit album Motor Booty Affair. While “Aqua Boogie” is told from the point of view of a person who is afraid of water, having never learned to swim, “Water Sign” shows us how beautiful and liberating it can be to get swept away.

Addie E. Citchens is the author of “A Good Samaritan,” out in the Review’s Winter Issue.

My Boyfriend Nietzsche and a Boy Like a Baked Alaska

Hans Olde, from “Der kranke Nietzsche” (“The ill Nietzsche”), June–August 1899. Goethe- und Schiller-Archiv Weimar.

After two vodka tonics and a cosmo, my ninety-year-old grandmother lifts her glass and says, “But you know that Nietzsche is my boyfriend?” 

“He is?”

“He’s my boyfriend.”

It’s all right—we’ve shared boyfriends before. The actor Javier Bardem. Errol Louis, anchor at NY1. Her new neighbor. Her many doctors. She tells me that Nietzsche is her boyfriend because Nietzsche also hates the German composer Richard Wagner. I tell her Nietzsche hates a lot of people. She nods. “That’s good in a man.” 

Earlier in our dinner I’d mentioned I was finally reading Nietzsche’s Twilight of the Idols and The Antichrist—two white-hot texts that serve, in part, as the ecstatic summation of much of Nietzsche’s previous work. Both works glow with special invective. The usual targets are abused (Socrates, Kant, et cetera). So are George Sand, George Eliot, and, of course, generally happy people: “Nothing could make us less envious than … the plump happiness of a clean conscience.” It’s in Twilight that Nietzsche announces, “The man who has renounced war has renounced a grand life.”

Would he be a good boyfriend? He’d be a fierce one, often railing at the “radical and mortal hostility to sensuality.” He’d remind you: “When a man is in love he endures more than at any other time; he submits to anything.” Would he wink? Probably not. 

Freud claimed, apparently, that Nietzsche “had a more penetrating knowledge of himself than any man who ever lived or was likely to live.” In these final writings it is clearer than ever how Nietzsche’s “hate” evolves out of a prolonged annoyance at knowing people—and history and philosophical systems—better than they know themselves. You sense the loneliness of this awareness. Nietzsche needs his supernatural, self-generating heat, lest his flame down there wither in the wild pits of instinct. (“Nothing ever succeeds which exuberant spirits have not helped to produce.”) If he was your lover, he’d remind you, his torch high, that “one must be superior to mankind in force, in loftiness of soul—in contempt.” Those who cannot achieve this are “merely mankind.” 

I look at my grandmother, whose awareness—as Nietzsche might recommend—seems to recede from the outside world as it advances internally. She closes her eyes. I think she’s slipped under when she points at me. “First it’s our Spanish fellow. Then that other fellow. Then Nietzsche.” 

—Sophie Madeline Dess, author of “Zalmanovs”

A friend whose taste I trust recently recommended Denton Welch’s 1945 novel In Youth Is Pleasure, a beautiful little book and one of my favorite discoveries of 2022. Welch’s writing is impressionistic, playful, homoerotic, dreamy, often hilarious, and at times ecstatic. What plot there is centers on the fifteen-year-old Orvil Pym, who is spending the summer holiday with his father and brothers at a hotel in Surrey several years before the outbreak of World War II. Orvil’s mother has died; his feelings for his siblings and for his father (who has bestowed upon him the nickname “Microbe”) range from vague fondness to childish terror and loathing. Often Orvil is left alone. He eats pêche Melba (“‘It’s like a celluloid cupid doll’s behind,’ said Orvil to himself. ‘This cupid doll has burst open and is pouring out lovely snow and great big clots of blood’”); he spies jealously on a schoolmaster reading Jane Eyre to two boys, one of whom appears to be taking a particular kind of gratification from the experience; he desecrates a church with libidinal glee, throwing himself on a brass statue and kissing its face “juicily.” At the end of the day, Orvil always seems to be consuming oozing cakes in the hotel dining room, dressed in mud-stained clothes. 

This is a lonely book, and a remarkable one for the way in which its sensuality emerges: from inside this loneliness. Orvil takes an aesthete’s pleasure in the physical world but also in the eruptions of his own consciousness; much of the novel’s eroticism arises from his encounters with a kind of other within the self. Desire, enchantment, the delights of reverie and of metaphor—these spring from within. Floating alone along a river, Orvil thinks, “I’m like one of those Baked Alaskas … one of those lovely puddings of ice-cream and hot sponge.” Here, loneliness can be devastating, mischievous, grotesque, monstrous, thrilling—but it is never grim.

—Avigayl Sharp, author of “ Uncontrollable, Irrelevant ”