Evanston: unfulfillable desire
Evanston: unfulfillable desire
I finished UNDERGROUND and liked it well enough to search for some reviews on the Internet, which was a mistake. Even though most of the reviewers, both professional and amateur, liked the book, after reading them, I liked it less. Nevertheless, there are parts I admire and which have left me thoughtful, though not enough for me to seek another of his books.
Two lines near the end: ‘Most of our longings go unfulfilled. This is the world’s wistful implication--a desire for something lost or fled or otherwise out of reach.’ reminded me of something I wrote several years ago, and my MacBook’s search found it as the entry in the original self-portrait in the present sea for August 9, 2002:
The quintessential human experience is unfulfilled desire. You see it on the faces of children and women at V&A, looking at things they can’t buy in shop windows. I saw it on the face of a lonely older woman there yesterday, looking at people, longing for I know not what, but for something. For her children to be young again, or children she never had, or a deceased husband, or a lover she had never known. I see it in the face of the shy, too quiet young man singing there.
Unfulfilled, unfulfillable desire is an evolutionary force. To have more, to be more. More makes you safer, makes your progeny more likely to survive. So billions want beauty they will never possess. Movie stars, singers, and at present a tennis player. Or they want to be those celebrities, or sports heroes. Around the world tens of millions want to be Ronaldo. Hundreds of aspiring musicians audition for a single place in a symphony orchestra. In South Africa 10,000 appeared at tryouts for a five-person made-for-television pop group. Like billions of sperm and hundreds of eggs for every berth, millions are called and few are chosen. Throw enough of anything—poets, adventurers, scientists, businessmen--against the wall and some will stick. The competitive, the greedy, the aggressive have prevailed and their progeny—us—will multiply. It is a cruel, wasteful, inefficient, powerful force.
And as for me, when I was a boy I formulated my desires clearly: I wanted to have something I wrote last forever, and I wanted to be loved by one woman. At 60 I have been loved by many women; and everything I wrote will be forgotten.
I was at the time in Cape Town, South Africa. V&A stands for Victoria and Alfred, an area of the waterfront redeveloped into shops and restaurants.
Wednesday, September 13, 2006