cohesion

Paul Pagk, Tete-à-Tete, 2023–25

Every year, familiar markers of time passing. New Year’s Eve, ski weekends, Valentine’s day, longer windows of daylight. I donate bags of clothes and trade long coats for leather jackets. I attend more parties in February than January. I slog my way through Dostoyevsky. I note recurrent rituals in my friends’ lives: the same meetings on the same weeks, the same work deadlines and the same conferences, same trips on the same weekends. We trade pictures from the California coast and text about the snowpack. Engage in furtive dinner table talk about AI dread, panic and excitement. I have my novel and my matchmaking and all the other projects that make life worth living. For the first time in a while the passage of time thrills me.

Adult life, I’ve decided, is about cohesion. Which is to say it’s about conflict, trade-offs. The ability to acknowledge parts of your psyche you aren’t proud of. The idea that sometimes in life you have to make a choice, and the choice is not only not a perfect choice, but often not even a particularly moral choice: that you can argue for it or argue against it, and both can ultimately be somewhat compelling, but ultimately you cannot escape the problem of identifying not only what you want, but what you want most. Because most of us want many things. I, at least, want many things, and quite a few of them contradict each other. Which leads to—well—hypocrisy.

I read this biography of Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath’s handsome, vital, troubled, Poet Laureate husband. Who was a compulsive womanizer and a sex freak and drove more than one woman (literally) to her death. There was one very funny passage in the book shortly after they got married (maybe engaged?) and were spending some time apart where he was very proud of the self-control he demonstrated by not cheating on her. There was this woman he was flirting with, there was always some woman he was flirting with, and he slept beside her every night but did not actually fuck her. And I just thought: this is such a familiar strain of bullshit, the kind of bullshit people find themselves constantly getting into when they have a lot of energy and cannot integrate their life in a reasonable way.