Boys in the Trees

by Carly Simon

You will feel wealthy by giving. Giving to others without expecting them to give back to you is the most fully loving way a person can act.”

King Lear becomes a true monarch only when he is deposed. “Only and out of this misery comes his godliness … out of his fall comes a rise.”

There are some people who just do it to you, and you get them, and they get you:

Mark Twain once said, “Everyone is a moon, and has a dark side which he never shows to anybody.”

He would not have been as interested in me, I believed, if there hadn’t been an insurmountable obstacle between us. That is true for most men.

What is it about men that allows them to be at ease as the successful ones, without feeling any guilt if their wives come up short?

Last night James got drunk again. The problem is grave. He doesn’t know why he needs to get drunk, but says that he needs to at least four times a day. I don’t seem to satisfy much in him. I don’t understand him when he says he needs me. He’s so down on himself that he relies not at all on himself but on chemicals for happiness. He only seeks me out for affection when he fears its loss. I’m so sad. He is more physical toward me in the presence of other folk than when we are alone. He thinks when I say “I love you,” that I am asking a question, that I need something in return. Patience, I guess.

Diane Johnson, who once wrote in A Shadow Knows, “I often think that motherhood, in its physical aspects, is like one of those prying disorders such as hay fever or asthma, which receive verbal sympathy but no real consideration, in view of their lack of fatality, and which after years of attrition, can sour and pervert the character beyond all recovery,” a quote I identified with strongly enough to put in my diary.

Some core things stay the same. My stammer still comes and goes, unpredictably, as does my stage fright. I still believe wildly, wholeheartedly, in the power of love. I might add that losses aren’t entirely negative, either. Just as night follows day, sadness follows joy, and the underworld sometimes takes aim at innocence, a lifelong nemesis like my stammering turned out to be the very thing that made my music crucial to me in the first place. How does a person—me, or anyone else?—move ahead, push forward through life? The answer is that none of us does, not entirely. I have simply found a way of loving through whatever absences or dejections have fallen like tree branches in my path. I move forward by incorporating whoever or whatever is missing or vanished into my very being, my body, my breath. The psychologists call this introjection, but I call it surviving. I lost Daddy, and incorporated him inside me. I lost my marriage, and James became a part of how I look at life.