The Vaunted “Real” World

Now and then it strikes me that the tumultuous, romantic—the adventurous, daring, dramatic, and tense—the sort of thing that fills romances like Poldark or seem to characterize the lives of femmes fatales like Alma Mahler of many lovers, say—is ultimately quite unpleasant when actually lived. The pleasures are brief, the turmoil huge, and the inner state fragmented and of necessity troubled—troubled if the individual even briefly thinks about the people who’ll be hurt. And if this awareness is absent, the person is being lived by passions rather than living a life.

The reason why dramas work is because the spectator can experience successive emotions in a necessarily foreshortened and compressed form but is spared the full, wretched experience. That experience is surely filled with agonies or, if awareness is absent, has the character of stupid, passive tumbling, falling, and spinning like some leaf blown by the wind.

The experience of life is quite different from the fictional “real” world people long to taste. The vaunted “real” is a mirage—or, put another way, is a servitude to passions, always wanting something, wanting to grasp it, hold it, to consume it—and when denied it suffering and writhing in the lack. The thought occurs that all of us inhabiting this realm were drawn to it by some such immature desire—only to learn that we were going down rather than up; we cannot find it here either, except in artful dramas; but those soon end. Longing of the lower sort is never fully satisfied in this life or, if satisfied, simply grows more virulent—while the hair thins so that that it must be combed over the bald spot, the thickening body is strangled by corsets, the sagging face lifted, the grey hair painted blue. Even the saints do not escape it—although they learn the lesson sooner. Dryness plagues them and the dark night of the soul…

When it comes to pearly gates the gate that led into this world, it seems to me, was the problematic one. It probably has a sign that says: Thus Far! No Farther! Those tempted to stray beyond into the borderzone, where passions writhe seductively tempting them to keep on going, may cross the border. Then the re-education of the stupid finally begins. At that crossing is another sign. It probably says: Welcome to the Real World.