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Me leaving is not the confirmation of all your fears about me. It is not. It’s because of them.
Put your picture of yourself on the goddamn back burner for once in your life.
how pathetic such a need for reassurance might come off to someone, how it could all too possibly be heard not as an open invitation to get off the telephone but actually as a needy, self-pitying, contemptibly manipulative plea for the friend not to get off the telephone, never to get off the telephone.
Unless I’m just rationalizing. Unless I’m some kind of psychopath who can rationalize anything and can’t even see the most obvious kinds of evil he’s perpetrating, or who doesn’t even care but wants to delude himself into believing he cares so that he can continue to see himself as a basically decent guy.
That I don’t want to get all testy or hypercritical or pull away and not be around for days at a time or be blatantly unfaithful in a way you’re guaranteed to find out about or any of the shitty cowardly ways I’ve used before to
This flood of reassurance and nurture would once again seduce me into [f.f.] trusting her and revering her and ceding emotional power to her, rendering me vulnerable to devastation all over again whenever she might choose again to turn cold and look at me as if I were some sort of laboratory specimen she’d never inspected before.
Because if you can really see somebody just as a thing you can do anything to him, all bets are off, humanity and dignity and rights and fairness—all bets are off.
Maybe Y is basically spineless and pathetic and has noplace else to go and nobody else to hang out with. Or maybe Y’s one of those quietly iron-spined people who are internally strong enough not to let any kind of abuse or humiliation get to them, and can see (Y can) through X’s present pique to the generous and trusted friend he’d always been to Y before, and has decided (Y has, maybe) that he’s just going to hang in there and stick it out and keep coming around and stoically allow X to vent whatever spleen he needs to vent, and that eventually X will probably get over being pissed off so
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‘This thing I feel, I can’t name it straight out but it seems important, do you feel it too?’—this
If you step out and ask her what and whether she’s feeling, there can’t be anything coy or performative or sham-honest-so-she’ll-like-you about it. That’d kill it outright. Do you see? Anything less than completely naked helpless pathetic sincerity and you’re right back in the pernicious conundrum. You’ll have to come to her 100% hat in hand.
At any rate it’s not going to make you look wise or secure or accomplished or any of the things readers usually want to pretend they believe the literary artist who wrote what they’re reading is when they sit down to try to escape the insoluble flux of themselves and enter a world of prearranged meaning.
Realizes that true wellsprings of love, security, gratification must originate within self
What modern feminists-slash-postfeminists will say they want is mutuality and respect of their individual autonomy. If sex is going to happen, they’ll say, it has to be by mutual consensus and desire between two autonomous equals who are each equally responsible for their own sexuality and its expression.’
rather than observing the pseudo-sensitive niceties of euphemism
Note the rhetorically specific blend of childish diction like Hi and fib with flaccid abstractions like nurture and energy and serene. This is the lingua franca of the Inward Bound.
am watching you forming judgments based on the openings of things I’m describing that then prevent you from hearing the rest of what I try to describe.
Werther’s Axiom, whereby quote The intensity of a desire D is inversely proportional to the ease of D’s gratification.
