"The half-life of love is forever."
Junot Diaz is coming to Houston next week to read from his latest collection of short stories. Several weeks ago, his short story "The Cheater's Guide to Love" was published in The New Yorker, with the line, "The half-life of love is forever." In an interview, Diaz said that he wanted to write a story about "those heartbreaks that never seem to leave us—that stay in us like radiation—those heartbreaks where getting over it becomes an epic battle with ourselves." Of course, there are different ways of battling oneself. One could say that the very struggle to overcome heartbreak is a battle with oneself. But more interesting are those situations when we are ourselves are in some way the cause of our own heartbreak.
There is a long tradition in ethics which holds that men's lives are directed towards the good. What Diaz raises is the possibility that a life could become so broken that such direction becomes impossible, and that this brokenness could result from some relatively minor and trivial thing. Or--let me amend myself--that we do not realize the true importance and weight of things when we do them. And Diaz ties this lack of self-knowledge to our habitual inability or unwillingness to fully recognize another in his/her otherness (in Kant's words, to interact with another as an end in himself rather than as a means), i.e., an ethical deficiency. Diaz speaks of a "typical masculine deficiency:" an inability to see women as fully human, but I wonder how much we ever truly experience or treat any other person as fully an end in themselves. Only, it seems, when we love another selflessly and without self-regard, with "the love that overflows." But that, of course, is not the nature of erotic love. At least not at first blush.
Diaz quotes from Derek Walcott: "Break a vase, and the love that reassembles the fragments is stronger than that love which took its symmetry for granted when it was whole." Hegel taught that man is a perpetual falling-apart-and-coming-back-together-again; man is constantly broken and shattered and must always heal himself anew. Tagore taught that wisdom begins, not indeed in fear, but in abiding sorrow. All of these claims give a central place to personal suffering in the formation of a fully human life. Suffering reminds us of our frailties and vulnerabilities, which we are otherwise too apt to forget. It is a lesson in humility and gratitude.
We have none of us learned well enough the experiences of others, especially and above all their experiences of us.
There is a long tradition in ethics which holds that men's lives are directed towards the good. What Diaz raises is the possibility that a life could become so broken that such direction becomes impossible, and that this brokenness could result from some relatively minor and trivial thing. Or--let me amend myself--that we do not realize the true importance and weight of things when we do them. And Diaz ties this lack of self-knowledge to our habitual inability or unwillingness to fully recognize another in his/her otherness (in Kant's words, to interact with another as an end in himself rather than as a means), i.e., an ethical deficiency. Diaz speaks of a "typical masculine deficiency:" an inability to see women as fully human, but I wonder how much we ever truly experience or treat any other person as fully an end in themselves. Only, it seems, when we love another selflessly and without self-regard, with "the love that overflows." But that, of course, is not the nature of erotic love. At least not at first blush.
Diaz quotes from Derek Walcott: "Break a vase, and the love that reassembles the fragments is stronger than that love which took its symmetry for granted when it was whole." Hegel taught that man is a perpetual falling-apart-and-coming-back-together-again; man is constantly broken and shattered and must always heal himself anew. Tagore taught that wisdom begins, not indeed in fear, but in abiding sorrow. All of these claims give a central place to personal suffering in the formation of a fully human life. Suffering reminds us of our frailties and vulnerabilities, which we are otherwise too apt to forget. It is a lesson in humility and gratitude.
We have none of us learned well enough the experiences of others, especially and above all their experiences of us.
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