Less Is Lost (Arthur Less #2)

by Andrew Sean Greer

You are seeing suffering, Robert used to say when confronted with a horrible person. You are seeing someone in pain.

I don’t care who you love, but if you love someone…if you love someone, you have to love them every day. You have to choose them every day.”

All sorts of wonderful things lie outside Arthur Less’s field of expertise—higher-level physics, disassembly and cleaning of rifle barrels, the clean and pure love of a woman—but over the past few days, he has had to educate himself in a field for which he is woefully unprepared: recreational encampment or, in the vernacular, camping.

It might be nice to be married to Byron or Shelley or Keats, with a love note nailed to a tree now and then, but living with a twentieth-century poet meant making do with “today / my scar / is pinker / than yesterday” (a literal quote from a valentine).

They used to say about her family”—and Miss Dorothy smiles—“they ‘couldn’t set a table.’ Meaning they had no matching plates or forks or anything. Ain’t that funny? To judge people like that.”

So be young, be foolish, but be happy

“As my grandma Cookie says, we’re all having different experiences.” We certainly are.

What could be more normal than to be out of place everywhere you go? What could be more American?

Realizing we are no longer in love is not the heartbreaking sensation we imagine when we are in love—because it is no sensation at all. It is a realization made by a bystander.

Fuck that. You don’t get that, Rebecca. This isn’t redecorating, this is house-on-fire shit. This is grabbing what to save. This is leaving shit behind. This is once-in-a-lifetime suffering and pain and heartache and yet it may be your only chance to decide what you really want. None of this I don’t want to change bullshit. Hell no—you’ve changed. That’s happened. Now what? Everything changes and this one fucking time, you’re in charge of it, my God, so choose! Make the wrong choice, that’s fine! That’s fine! But choose.’”

America, how’s your marriage? Your two-hundred-fifty-year-old promise to stay together in sickness and in health? First thirteen states, then more and more, until fifty of you had taken the vow. Like so many marriages, I know, it was not for love; I know it was for tax reasons, but soon you all found yourselves financially entwined, with shared debts and land purchases and grandiose visions of the future, yet somehow, from the beginning, essentially at odds. Ancient grudges. That split you had—that still stings, doesn’t it? Who betrayed whom, in the end? I hear you tried getting sober. That didn’t last, did it? So how’s it going, America? Do you ever dream of each being on your own again? Never having to be part of someone else’s family squabble? Never having to share a penny? Never having to bear with someone else’s gun hobby, or car obsession, or nutrition craze? Tell me honestly, because I have contemplated marriage and wonder: If it can’t work for you, can it work for any of us?

in real life, there are no protagonists. Or, rather, the reverse: It’s nothing but protagonists. It’s protagonists all the way down.

Because to love someone ridiculous is to understand something deep and true about the world. That up close it makes no sense. Those of you who choose sensible people may feel secure, but I think you water your wine; the wonder of life is in its small absurdities, so easily overlooked. And if you have not shared somebody’s tilted view of the horizon (which is the actual world), tell me: what have you really seen?