Only what is that thing? Why am I made the way I am? Why do I care about all the wrong things, and nothing at all for the right ones? Or, to tip it another way: how can I see so clearly that everything I love or care about is illusion, and yet–for me, anyway–all that’s worth living for lies in that charm?
A great sorrow, and one that I am only beginning to understand: we don’t get to choose our own hearts. We can’t make ourselves want what’s good for us or what’s good for other people. We don’t get to choose the people we are.
–Donna Tartt/the Goldfinch
Sometimes, a book stirs up all sorts of things. This one did. All the big questions, swirling around in my head like the world’s worst Word Drunk Bender. I’m not going to even try to rein it in. I’m just going to throw it all up in the air. Let Donna Tartt control it, she’s the one with the Pulitzer for using words.
The million dollar question. The question that keeps us up at night. The question that breaks our hearts. The question that breaks the heart of people who love us when we don’t love them back. The one that keeps us in jobs we don’t like. The one that keeps couples together or tears them apart.
What’s the thing every self help book says, the thing that I find so entirely full of shit? “Follow your heart.” Or “follow your passion.”
What’s that other cliché? The one that is so true?
“The heart wants what it wants.”
Can we make ourselves want what is good for us? Bring ourselves to a point where we naturally stop loving what is bad for us and genuinely want the good?
And who gets to decide that whole “good” thing, anyway? And how do you even know what’s good? Is there even such a thing as good? Are our very ideas of good and bad part of what limits us and makes us unhappy, or at least less happy than we could be?
Is being happy even the main thing?
The peculiar heartbreak of people who know they could never really live with someone too broken, too untrustworthy, too drug or alcohol loving, not enough whatever, but can’t make the love go away.
You can’t turn it off. I can’t anyway. Maybe some people can. Should you even try?
You can stay away from someone who hurts you. Can you stop loving someone once you’ve started? Or can you only distance yourself.
Do all these questions apply to things you love as well as people?
All I have about this are questions and it’s too important to answer them incorrectly. Yes, I am a little fixated on it lately. Not lately, always. But reading something that got stuck in my brain has made it worse. Temporarily, I hope.
Blame it on a more severe book hangover than usual from “the Goldfinch” and the contrast between Theo trying and always failing to be a good guy, and Boris who flings himself into the world like a Tasmanian devil and devours life whole. Who will probably die young, all used up.
I suspect Van Gogh was doing what he loved. Consumed by it, maybe even maddened by it. Could he ever paint what he really saw? Was he already mad before the paint took over his life or did the paint drive him insane? Or did the paint keep him alive longer than he might have been otherwise? Did the paint give him a little bit of peace?
Then when you lose it..like Fitzgerald and Hemingway lost the writing. What’s left? They lose the writing, the holy rage, then they lose the people it attracted…then…what’s left for them? They don’t know how to live without it.
Can we escape who we are?
Should we try to, or should we learn to accept who we are?
Do questions ever have answers or only more questions?