Valentine

<p style=”clear: both”>If one is mindful one can wake up on Valentine’s Day and be grateful for the abundant loves in one’s life. I go reflexively into an abstracted third person doing it, as if superstitiously deflecting the evil eye, because there is no rationale behind how tremendously fortunate I have been in love, a husband who is my other half, the boys who are better than reflections of the best in the two of us, an extended family that we couldn’t have chosen better if there had been choosing involved, friends that inspire and support and understand. So how is it that in such a profusion of love the love that I find astonishing on this day commemorating romantic feelings is the love that exists in the writing and reading of a book?

It seems almost metaphorical, this love. After all, it is profligate and hardly monogamous, books being sold by millions, so that there is no claim to exclusivity in the relationship, only in the personal reading experience. Buying a book is a commercial transaction, and if a book were mere entertainment, the act of falling in love with a book would have the weight of a crush on a movie star. And still, I don’t mean that the experience of reading a book has been like love, I quite mean it has been love. It has reshaped me and the flash of deep recognition has momentarily broken the boundaries of self, and this is the only definition of love that works for me right now.

I argue out definitions of love with myself after writing that. I haven’t mentioned how the act of reading, the act of writing bear the same elements of risk and trust and vulnerability as any other form of love, or how being anonymous doesn’t make it impersonal, it just makes it personal differently. Or that I sometimes find myself slightly cynical that the more traditionally “personal” loves of familial relationships and friendship have transactional qualities, are as rooted in domestic economy as in deep passions and maybe this is why I go questing after a love that asks only for openness, for understanding.

“When I was six or seven years old, growing up in Pittsburgh, I used to take a precious penny of my own and hide it for someone else to find,” writes Annie Dillard in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. She describes the joy of chalking arrows on the sidewalk and the anticipation of the penny being found, but also, how she didn’t stick around to see who picked the penny up. It strikes me, on the one hand as an act of astonishing purity, to ask nothing of the finder of the penny but the imagined delight in good fortune, but, on the other hand, perhaps the not sticking around was also a protection against disappointment, a defense of the imagined delight. The anonymity allows the finder of the penny to be a perfect Everyman.

I turned off the comments on my blog last week, turned off the stats and tracking tools that would allow me to know who is reading, if someone is reading. This was hard; I have forged a few friendships by blog with people whom I might never have gotten to know if geography had its way, if we had to suffer through small talk forever to get to know one another. I have cherished the conversations in the comments on my blog, the joy of an enlarged perspective, and the thrill of feeling understood. But I woke up one morning and tripped over the realization that I cannot write for comments, that I must write, but I must write for my own version of the anonymous perfect Everyman, someone who needs to read the words I write just as I need to write them. I must write without expectation of anything except the tremorous sensation of finding the right words, the shaped truth, that come as a physical thrill, like any act of love.

I exercise listening to the radio and a story aired in anticipation of Valentine’s Day leaves me gasping, stops my workout. It’s the story of Carl Sagan and Annie Druyan falling in love in the midst of working on the recording to be sent out on the Voyager space mission, a recording with the quixotic noble mission of capturing the best of what it is to be a human being, Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan’s Ultimate Mix Tape. She is interviewed and describes the phone call where he went from being someone who had always been a professional colleague and friend, only, and this eureka moment of realization that they were in love, so intense, so profound that they were engaged to be married by the end of the call; furthermore, a sound recording of the electrical impulses of her nervous system as she meditated on the wonder of this newfound love was included on the record, with the notion that perhaps someday an alien civilization could translate those sounds back into though. She has survived her husband but describes the consolation of knowing that this recording yet travels outward. What a bright penny they have sent out into the universe!

And I still hold that if writing is an act of faith that someone out there will understand precisely what you mean, so is reading an act of faith that what was meant was meant for you. And it seems like a larger, deeper form of the acts of faith that go into being in relationship with all the people in your life, that whatever misunderstandings arise will be worked through, maybe even transcended, that the penny will be seen for the bright and shiny object of deep value that it is to you.