by
Dana Spiotta
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He smiled broadly. “This is the purity of capitalism. There is no judgment about content. You have to marvel at its elasticity, its lack of moral need, its honesty. It is the great leveler—all can be and will be commodified. Besides, what’s wrong with Emma Goldman being sold at the mall as a cool accessory? It is still Emma Goldman, isn’t it?”
“A confused context is the essence of alienation,” Miranda said.
“I’m not going back to New York with you,” she said.
He started to laugh. “It is true that I enjoy making money, I won’t deny it. Thing is, I feel the same. I don’t think I am a materialistic person, you know. I never wanted stuff.”
She leaned her head against the window. Conversations in cars are the strangest, because you don’t look at each other even though you are sitting close enough to touch.
“What it comes down to is I just don’t want to look at other people’s garbage my whole life. There is always garbage blowing around the street outside our apartment. Life is too short. All I want is a clean, quiet place. Beauty and order and peace. If Allegecom contributes—as it most certainly does—to the world’s degradation, undermining, at least in a global sense, order and peace, as well as multiplying garbage, and—let’s face it—suffering, then it also mitigates, quite directly, my own contact with garbage and suffering.”
This wasn’t the usual indifference, but then what was usual? She resisted her impulse to push his hair back from his forehead. He was in an awkward stage, slightly pudgy and spotty. She didn’t mind if he shrugged her off when she put an arm around him. She couldn’t comfort him through his adolescence, but she could stay out of his way. She believed that if she didn’t interfere, her talented, brilliant son would get everything he needed from the world. She also knew that the day would come when he would find her out, but she refused to think about it. Two weeks of his schizoid scrutiny unnerved her. When he finally confronted her, it shouldn’t have been a surprise.
First, at some point enough time will have gone by of not listening that I’ll listen again and it might sound fresh and new. It could again totally engage me, maybe in even deeper ways because I’ll be an older, and presumably deeper, person. I might find things in it I never was able to hear before in my younger life. I might become just as enchanted, just as joyously captivated. I could fall in love all over again. All of that could come to pass. It is possible, isn’t it?
The second reason I feel compelled to keep these artifacts is because of something I am quite certain will transpire. I need these records because one day, years from now, I will listen to this music and I will remember exactly what it was like to be me now, or me a year ago, at fifteen, totally inhabited by this work, in this very specific place and time. My Beach Boys records sit there, an aural time capsule wired directly to my soul. Something in that music will recall not just what happened but all of what I felt, all of what I longed for, all of who I used to be. And that will be something, don’t you think?
I started keeping a diary twenty-five years ago. It’s eight hundred thousand words long.
I didn’t want to lose anything. That was my main problem. I couldn’t face the end of a day without a record of everything that had ever happened.
I wrote about myself so I wouldn’t become paralyzed by rumination—so I could stop thinking about what had happened and be done with it.
More than that, I wrote so I could say I was truly paying attention. Experience in itself wasn’t enough. The diary was my defense against waking up at the end of my life and realizing I’d missed it.
Imagining life without the diary, even one week without it, spurred a panic that I might as well be dead. ♦
Living in a dream of the future is considered a character flaw. Living in the past, bathed in nostalgia, is also considered a character flaw. Living in the present moment is hailed as spiritually admirable, but truly ignoring the lessons of history or failing to plan for tomorrow are considered character flaws.
I still needed to record the present moment before I could enter the next one, but I wanted to know how to inhabit time in a way that wasn’t a character flaw.
Remember the lessons of the past. Imagine the possibilities of the future. And attend to the present, the only part of time that doesn’t require the use of memory. ♦
My relationship ended for any number of reasons, but a dearth of affection wasn’t one of them. I was unhappy for reasons that felt trivial when I said them out loud, which was almost never; I barely had the language to describe my predicament in the first place. More than anything else, my uncertainty manifested as a physical sensation, a gut-level insistence I no longer had the option to ignore. I was privileged enough to recognize a value in my own happiness and the integrity in making a sacrifice to achieve it. I also knew that to do otherwise would be, at the act’s core, a selfishness of its own.
You could say that our cultural understanding of women’s autonomy isn’t totally in sync with the logistics of twenty-first-century partnership, and the internet would appear to agree. A 2015 thread on Reddit’s TwoXChromosomes board opens with a PSA: ‘You can break up with someone for any reason, or for no reason at all,’ it reads. ‘You don’t have to have a “good reason” to end a relationship.’
Posting under the handle MissPredicament, the page’s writer muses over the observation that an astonishing number of women in Reddit’s relationships forum seem to be mired in the same existential conundrum. They are unhappy in relationships that don’t really have anything wrong with them. ‘I wish someone had told me when I was much younger that I didn’t have to have an airtight legal case for a breakup – all I had to have was a desire to no longer be in that relationship,’ she writes. ‘I would have saved myself a lot of time.’ The post received over a thousand replies.
Married Love, a 1918 treatise by the British scientist Marie Stopes, changed that. Stopes’s book was one of the first popular texts to propose that women’s sexual desire was not only natural and universal, but an attribute that husbands would do well to attend to. Stopes didn’t mince words; most men entered into marriage not knowing how to sexually satisfy a woman, while most women didn’t grasp what the sexual encounter should entail. Stopes describes how sex should involve a real pleasure ‘which should sweep over every wife each time she and her husband unite. The key which unlocks this electric force in his wife must reverently be sought by every husband.’ In the same breath, Stopes made the bold hypothesis that men who had lost their virginity to prostitutes prior to getting married were inclined to mistake their paid sex partner’s yawps and quivers for a testament to their own sexual prowess; these same men were also likely, in turn, to blame their future wives’ lack of sexual arousal on what they perceived was her frigidity instead of their own shortcomings in the sack. (A hubristic misconception that many straight women would surely affirm has stood the test of time.)
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