The Last Romantics

by Tara Conklin

It’s possible to exist under any number of illusions, to believe so thoroughly in the presence of things you cannot see—safety, God, love—that you impose upon them physical shapes. A bed, a cross, a husband. But ideas willed into being are still ideas and just as fragile.

Aaaaand there it is. The subtly insidious inference that God is a vulnerable human construct. Hello, post-modern atheism.

“I wrote a poem about love,” I began, addressing the crowd. “But there are certain limitations. There are certain failings. I’ve always been wary of love, you see. Its promises are too dizzy, its reasons too vague, its origins murkier than mud.” Here I heard a chuckle from the audience. “Yes, mud!” I called in the direction of the laugh. “When I was young, I tried dissecting love, setting it up on a table with a good strong light and poking, prodding, slicing. For years I believed it possible to identify the crux, the core, and that once you found this essential element you might tend it like a rose and grow something beautiful. Back then I was a romantic. I didn’t understand that there’s no stopping betrayal. If you live long enough and well enough to know love, its various permutations and shades, you will falter. You will break someone’s heart. Fairy tales don’t tell you that. Poetry doesn’t either.”

I love it when secular books write so beautifully about the human condition that I can't help but see Christ. If anyone knows the horrible cost of betrayed love, it's Him.

Our mother taught us how to protect ourselves from hurt but not how to determine what might be worth the risk.

Dog-day cicadas whined with a high-pitched keen, a cyclical sound so pervasive you didn’t even notice it until it was all you noticed, and then, at that very moment, the sound began to fade.

Wow, I hadn't thought about it, but it's so true!

I saw my sister struggle, the rubbing together of two versions of herself. The first was Caroline the mother, the nurturer, a woman who wanted the kittens to live, who cared for her family and bestowed emergency hugs and made pancakes from scratch, who was worried about Joe and wondered why he did the things he did, who was trying to protect him. But the other Caroline was worn out. She wanted to get rid of the kittens; she wanted Nathan to make the pancakes for once; she wanted nothing more than to sleep a full night in a hotel bed covered with sheets that someone else had washed. She wanted Joe to take care of himself. Why should she take care of everyone? When had she signed up for that? It seemed that every year her scope of concern grew wider and more unmanageable. Preschool, elementary school, home school, the new towns, the new mothers’ groups, Nathan’s new colleagues, Nathan’s new class schedule. No. Enough was enough. Caroline needed to draw a line or she might explode. She might lie down beside the mother cat and its dozen dozing kittens and never get up again.

Oh how I relate to this...

It didn’t matter how great a mother you tried to be; eventually every child walked off into the world alone.

Which is exactly why motherhood matters so much, contrary to what the author is insinuating. Motherhood is a job in which you are one of the primary sources of training and preparation.

Why didn’t people understand the responsibility that came with being the subject of someone’s love?

I believe now that certain events are inevitable. Not in a fateful way, for I have never had faith in anything but myself, but in the way of human nature. Some people will choose, again and again, to destroy what it is they value most.

To only ever have faith in yourself is to only ever have faith in something (someone) that (who) will fail you, over and over and over again.

“Times like these I’m happy the Second Amendment didn’t make it.”

Another subtle dig at foundational freedoms. Because surely the world would be absolutely safe if guns were made illegal. What's next after that? The pen is mightier than the sword, right? So is censorship justified too? I wonder how the first amendment made out...

“After the accident I searched for many years for reason and truth in a variety of different disciplines. I wanted to understand why people put their faith in things like palm readers, clairvoyants, mediums. Was it simply desperation, or was there something we didn’t quite understand? Magic or God or whatever you want to call it, something that explains those events that science cannot.” “Well?” the man said. “Well. I never found an answer. Only that people are gullible. And playing on that gullibility has given rise to a great number of professions. But”—I held up a finger—“I don’t believe there is anything wrong with offering a gullible person hope, so long as that person believes it to be genuine. In fact, I think hope, even if premised on a falsehood, can be a thing of great power.”

Boom. Marxism defined in a way that seems so innocent and wearily sad that it must be true. But it isn't.