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February 17, 2005

when she's ajar

Cold men ... woo [women] with something personable that they bring out for show, something annexed to their souls like a fake greenhouse, lead you in, and you think you see life and vitality and sun and greenness, and then when you love them, they lead you out into their real soul, a drafty, cavernous, empty ballroom, inexorably arched and vaulted and mocking you with its echoes--you hear all you have sacrificed, all you have given, landing with a loud clunk. They lock the greenhouse and you are as tiny as a figure in an architect's drawing, a faceless splotch, a blur of stick limbs abandoned in some voluminous desert of stone.

... That is what is wrong with cold people. Not that they have ice in their souls--we all have a bit of that--but that they insist their every word and deed mirror that ice. They never learn the beauty or value of gesture. The emotional necessity. For them, it is all honesty before kindness, truth before art.

Love is art, not truth. It's like painting scenery.

^{Lorrie Moore, "What Is Seized," from Self-Help (Alfred A. Knopf, 1985)}

Posted by JudyLa at 06:00 AM | Comments (0)