George Saunders on Breaking the Patterns That Break Our Hearts – The Marginalian

Although it is true, as generations of psychologists have discovered, that “who we are and who we become depends, in part, on who we love”—a process known as limbic review — it is also true, as generations of connoisseurs have discovered, that who we love depends largely on who we already are. Our early wounds, our formative attachments, our patterned desires all shape how we engage with those we choose to love, to the point that we choose them at all. “Sadly people can't invent their mortgages, their lovers and their friends, any more than they can invent their parents,” James Baldwin wisely observed when pondering the paradox of freedom. Life gives these and takes them and it is very difficult to say Yes to life.

The great difficulty, too, is how those life-extending Yees can open up great vistas that may otherwise be hidden as Nos, or how those life-sustaining Nos prevent us from entering into experiences that are too damaging or too small for us to bear the pressure of the Yees placed before. So we reveal who we are and what we need to those we love, and find in them demonstrations of what we long to be or fear what we might be, shake and shake ourselves in all the blooming confusion of our unfulfilled needs.

This is not to denigrate and reduce love as a mere process of speculation – Stendhal's delusion which is the seven stages of polishing and crystallizing – or just a process of thinking – Ortega's brilliant but limited and limited theory of what our lovers reveal to us – but to respect the fundamental fact that each relationship is not between two people, but between their patterns of love and the loss of each, between the patterns of love and 3: the third existence of the relationship itself – intersubjective co-creation becomes a third partner, empowered to deepen those patterns, or change them.

The greatest danger and greatest possibility of all love is that this third partner can be a self-representing therapist, and equally a therapist in disguise, obscured beyond recognition by our patterned way of seeing. Much of our suffering comes from this confusion and much of our sanity is redeemed when we finally throw off our blinding masks and kneel at the source of clarity.

That's it George Saunders explores in his vivid and sensitive descriptive reading of Chekhov's short story “The Darling” – one of seven classic Russian short stories that he examines as “the seven most quickly created models in the world” Swimming in a Pool in the Rain: When Four Russians Give a Master Class in Writing, Reading, and Life (public library), each is used as a practical laboratory for the key to good storytelling.

After the beautiful translation of “The Darling” — a story about a woman who loves four very different people in the same pattern, the only way she knows, which is completely related to her educated understanding of love and has nothing to do with its things, and so she suffers a lot when each of these loves leaves her in the same lonely place; A story whose essence Saunders captures well as “about the tendency, which is present in all of us, to misunderstand love as 'total absorption,' rather than 'full communication'” – he stops to marvel at Chekhov's subtlety in challenging our thinking about the two laziness, his intelligence in training, ingenuity, indiscipline – which is our only intellectual course to grasp and enjoy the full Yes of life. Saunders writes:

We see Olenka's way of love, from another angle, as a good thing: in that mode, independence disappears and all that remains is love, consideration for the beloved. On the other hand, we see it as a bad thing, the indiscriminate use of one note of love robs it of its love: Olenka, Olenka, loves a dullard, who feeds vampirically on whoever she chooses as her lover.

We see this way of love as strong, realistic, pure, answering all questions with its unwavering generosity. We see it as a weakness: her true self, and independence are nowhere to be found as she molds herself into the image of any male around her (unless he's a cat).

This puts us in an interesting state of mind. We don't quite know what to think of Olenka. Or, we feel so many times about him, we don't know how to judge him.

The story seems to ask, “Is this aspect of him good or bad?”

Chekhov answers: “Yes.”

The story, like every great work of fiction, becomes a mirror for reflection on the most intimate realities of life. Saunders writes:

We want to believe that love is unique and special, and it angers us to think that it could be renewed and relapsed into its habits. Would your current partner call his new partner the same pet name he used for you, when you are dead and buried? Well, why not? There are only so many pet names. Why should that bother you? Well, because you believe it is youespecially, who is loved (that's why dear Ed calls you “honey-bunny”), but no: just love is somethingand it happened that you were on your way. When, dead and hovering above Ed, the feeling calls that rat Beth, your former friend, “the bee-bunny,” as absent-mindedly she puts her treacherous finger into his belt-belt, you, in a state of spirit, will think a little of Ed, and of Beth, and perhaps of love itself. Or will you do it?

Maybe not.

Because don't we all do a version of this, when we're in love? When your lover dies or leaves you, when you are there, you are still there, in your own way of loving. And there is a world, which is still full of loving people.