BoldUlysses.com

I cannot get my hands warm today. Even after watching the game on television inside and eating a bowl of soup they’re still cold. The warm water on the hands trick is next on the list.

Growing up I never understood why marriage is so hard. My dad always impressed upon me the seriousness of the institution, how it wasn’t something to be undertaken lightly, and so on and so forth, and would always include a stanza in his speech about how “hard” marriage was, how he and my mom really had to “work” at it. I remember as a teenager casually telling him that marriage really didn’t seem all that hard–to me at that time it just seemed like two people living together all the time working through various relationship issues and difficulties, none of which really seemed all that overwhelming, at least not from what I’d seen. I never had anybody with whom I really didn’t get along, at least nobody I couldn’t avoid, so I didn’t have a prototypical situation in mind. He was borderline indignant and emphatically reiterated his position that marriage really was hard. He obviously didn’t think I took the matter seriously enough at the age of 14 or 15. I never did get a specific example from him about what made marriage so difficult. I don’t know why I didn’t press the issue–I think I just assumed that those were private matters between he and my mom.

And to this day it’s still somewhat of a mystery. I’ve been through relationships and there were always issues to work through, misunderstandings and miscommunications and snubs and forgiveness and all of that, but nothing that’s really lined up with my mental conception of what my dad meant when he used the word “hard.” He would use that word in other contexts like physical exertion and religious persecution and such like–things that it was easier for my mind to visualize as “hard,” and that’s the sense of the word that I latched on to.

* * * * * *

I love the movie The English Patient, the books Great Expectations and The Grapes of Wrath. I don’t really know why I love these things. They’re about heartbreak, hardship, unrequited love, and have nuances of storytelling that have no connection with anything I’ve ever experienced. Granted, I’ve certainly been through some degree of those things, but I respond to some films and books in such a way that I only experience with others if they consciously mine some vivid part of my past.

It leaves me wondering whether there are events that we experience in our past that blend together with other events to create our present personality, but lose their identity as individual events in the process, severing their connection to the present. It’s like mixing together yellow and blue to create green. The original colors lose their identity in the process of forming the green, and the green may not obviously have a bluish or yellowish tint, nothing that would betray its origins. Or visualize a ship on the ocean that puts a dinghy to sea. If you lost all memory of the dinghy setting out from the larger ship you’d know, perhaps by its insignia or livery or some such, that it had a connection to the ship, but the precise nature of that connection may not have been immediately obvious.

I feel the same way about certain experiences, books, movies, and music. I’m sure they connected to my personality at some point in the past and influenced it, which is why I respond to them so strongly, but I can’t trace it on the top level of my mind. Perhaps I felt more deeply when I was younger, when I first read those books and watched those films, and the color of unrequited love washed over me day and night–emotions whose memory has since ebbed away, but lives on underneath to burst through in untraceable upwellings when I watch scenes from a movie or read pages out of a book. Who knows.

It sounded more deep when thinking about it during my run last night. Oh well.