"it requires a long performance and there is nothing, by definition, between the acts"

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Christopher Wool, Untitled, 2018

When you get to know someone intimately and keep knowing them for several years, you’re sometimes fortunate enough to have a disquieting realization. The realization is: This is only the beginning. Suddenly you are staring down the barrel of a very long stretch of unknown time.

The same thing might happen if you write, er, a Substack about emotions and interpersonal relationships. One day you will realize that you’ve been doing this for over three years, and there’s really a lot more you could be doing with it. You might have a lot of ideas. And this sense of possibility, of all the future directions your work could go, might inspire joy. It might also inspire this sense of: oh God, I have to keep going for how long? And then you look at someone who’s been doing it for twenty years and you want to beg them for advice but you do not. In the same way that people who’ve been married for twenty years tend to give out pithy aphorisms when asked what’s the secret, there are certainly types of knowledge that simply can’t distilled very effectively.

I’ve been thinking recently that the long haul is simply not very sexy. Perhaps this is what Robert Hass was referring to in Against Botticelli when he wrote:

The myth they chose was the constant lovers.
The theme was richness over time.
It is a difficult story and the wise never choose it
because it requires a long performance
and because there is nothing, by definition, between the acts

I’ve always found this part of the poem very funny.

For a long time, maybe because I’m particular or maybe because this is just universal, my life involved more endings than continuation. So many things were just pretty obviously not for me. I felt this way with college and with jobs and in my relationships. As soon as I finished getting in, I started thinking about getting out. At the time I thought this was because I was avoiding commitment or afraid of hard work. Now I see that I simply am not compatible with a lot of different things. It felt incredibly validating to find a couple things I am compatible with, but I feel a new kind of terror: the pressure to keep going and keep going.

Another way of saying this is: a few years ago, I thought the saddest thing in the world was wanting something and not getting it. Desire is so romanticized, especially in the context of girlhood. But I think I’ve come around to realize that most of the hard parts of life are actually around getting what you want and struggling to live up to it.