My little cup brims with tiddles
Here's an excerpt from a letter I once wrote:
"I’ve mentioned before in passing, owing to no real appropriate opening in any conversation (because the natural ebb and flow of conversation is an art I haven’t and never will adequately grasp), that one of my greatest literary loves is the novel Lolita. I’ve often tried to explain the reason for this to people, but given my propensity to sometimes develop inappropriate infatuations with persons many years my senior, I’m sure that most of them draw a shallow parallel between the pathology of my own desire and the novel’s plot. This doesn’t upset me; how could I blame them?
[The very fact that I kept my own secret diary detailing my own consuming desires often causes me to dismally wonder if they’re right.]
But, the real reason it has affected me so deeply for so many years is akin to the reasons why David Foster Wallace’s fiction affects me: it artfully unearths an important aspect of human nature that goes unnoticed and unmentioned by most people. It’s nothing preachy or clever, and nothing morally imperative…it’s only a simple truth, which is this: love is not always a glorious, wonderful, freeing thing, as our great poets and philosophers would have us believe. Sometimes, love can be hideous. And it can cause us to do hideous, uncontrollable things for its sake. It can be a devil that propels us toward acts that violate others’ freedom. It can be a tireless, invisible hand that imposes our slobbering, throbbing desires onto an innocent person. That Humbert’s atrocities are spawned by what human beings have lauded for centuries as being the highest, purest, best emotional state is a poignant thing to contemplate. He loves every literal centimeter of that girl’s being. So much so that he consistently forgets that she is a being, and loses himself in worshipful reveries that reduce her to an abstraction. She becomes the perfect corporeal manifestation of the sexual and emotional bliss he so desperately craves, and as an acutely sensitive and isolated individual that knows of no other means through which to find contentment, he is willing to risk everything to possess it.
And as laughable and melodramatic as it may seem, there are times in my life when I feel acutely empathetic to that. There are times when I read those agonized, lovesick passages in which he vivisects Lolita’s every movement, and describes in great detail the elation and frustration he experiences in her presence, and I feel as though I am staring into my own soul. I have known that kind of obsessive, all-encompassing longing. I have known what it means to burn white-hot with unrequited love for a person that I am relegated to watching from a distance. I have known how bizarre and perverse it is to harbor that kind of intense fixation on a person that I am barely acquainted with, have barely conversed with, and whose inner world I am categorically barred from entering. And I have known the paradoxically hellish and paradisiacal transcendence that such a fixation can produce. "
And the context of this excerpt is none of your business (thank you very much), but I figured I'd share it in order to preface the lukewarm musings of tonight, which concern yet another subset of people I've misused: those I've had "crushes" on.
Let me be clear when I say that the very word "crush" is a misnomer. "Blind, pathetic, groping obsession" is a term closer to the mark. I've never had a healthy liking for anyone that I've ever really, really liked. It's always a desire that rapidly inflates itself to epic, Petrarchan proportions, and frightens away the already shy object of my affections (because, don't forget, sexually forward women are terrifying to any given male, no matter how "enlightened" and non-Neanderthalish he might be) with its overbearing aura of wanting. I have idealized and idolized people I'm attracted to in a big, bad way, and I've never reached a good understanding of it. It just...happens. Simple as that.
Where the guilt comes in is when I fail to realize that my amorous feelings are not only unreturned, but are making the unfortunate soul that aroused them incredibly uncomfortable. I guess the easy way to articulate that would be to say that I "don't know when to quit."
BUT. That isn't accurate, really, because my own shy nature has never allowed me to actually pursue anyone. All I've managed to do, from the age of fourteen, is either gush my guts to friends that might go behind my back and tell the person I like that I like him, or write some cowardly letter that attempts to seduce him with wit and mystery. Needless to say, both those strategies have always come across as très creepy, but until my era of massive alcohol consumption, I was never able to find another way. So, in essence, I was never really doing anything at all. It's like, I was just some weird, quiet, funny-looking girl hovering around some poor boy that knew I wanted him, but didn't want me back, and neither of us was well enough adjusted, socially-speaking, to ever mention it. Awkward City, USA!
I guess you could look at this and think, "So what? A lot of young people are like that. It's not a big deal."
Except that it is a big deal, insofar as the people who were objectified by my intense, wandering lust will never forget it because it was so damn intrusive.
I can't help but view this as yet another facet of my unwitting misanthropy.
As time passes, I find that I'm increasingly thankful be domesticated.