O melancólico

Yearning, indecision, impossibility—the frustrated agency of romance proves endlessly fascinating to the longing man. He believes in soul mates, in beloveds and in the inevitability of cultivating his feelings for them, in cultivating his feelings through them. “Men who belong to the tribe of this myth can find their other half in every tree and every flower,” writes Georg Lukács in “Longing and Form.” “Every encounter in their lives becomes a wedding.” Married, mostly married, incidentally married—what is marriage anyway? It’s all so bewildering to the longing man, who knows that his emotions are uniquely complex and will seize every opportunity to make sure you know it too. Only novels and poems are elevated enough to offer the appropriately aestheticized correlative to his being. Turning to them, he frequently conflates life with literature, people with texts. “‘The women one meets—what are they but books one has already read?’ Merton tells Kate. “‘You’re a whole library of the unknown, the uncut.’ He almost moaned, he ached, from the depths of his content. ‘Upon my word I’ve a subscription!’” It is essential to the longing man that the women he meets remain unread (and that they keep producing the content that he refuses to read). If he were to read them, if he were to know them, he might discover all sorts of realities inconvenient to his desire.