After the ennui of this disappointment her heart once more remained empty, and then the same series of days recommenced. So now they would thus follow one another, always the same, immovable, and bringing nothing. Other lives, however flat, had at least the chance of some event. One adventure sometimes brought with it infinite consequences and the scene changed. But nothing happened to her; God had willed it so! The future was a dark corridor, with its door at the end shut fast.Every so often you read something that hits you square between the eyes with such force it finally knocks some sense into your head. This is me, and this was me. Today, a passage from chapter nine of Madame Bovary about Emma's life falling fast apart.
She gave up music. What was the good of playing? Who would hear her?
Restlessness. Despair. Hopelessness.
A dissatisfaction with life ending in hopes and dreams leading you like a treasure map straight up onto the rocky shoals of disappointment.
This was me after I had lost my site and my voice. Sort of that, happily doing nothing of consequence but comfortable in the routine until it all falls apart and you realize your grand sailing ship is floating in the surf as piles of driftwood around you.
And that feeling sets in as you sit on the rocks and watch the waves crash around you.
Beautiful scene, isn't it?
Tragedy often is.
You can see Emma though and how she set herself up for this disappointment. And I too, can look back and see how I set myself up as well. the cold, harsh stinging reality of setting one's expectations too high and thinking hard work alone would create success. She thought marriage would liven up her life, but she didn't expect the life of a country doctor's wife to be so drab. I cant blame her, she has no friends and no other wives to hang around and distract herself with.
In fact, I still find her lack of supporting friends and associates as a weakness of the book in general. I know it would distract from the narrative, but I feel at least there is a need for the wife of a country doctor to be at least involved in some social circle. You know, other wives, other people in the town, and the like. As it is, Madame Bovary feels much more suited to being in today's world where you can live in a neighborhood and know no one there. Emma is the quintessential outsider in this story, connected to nothing yet dreaming of everything. Someone who stares out the windows each day at a neighborhood that could be any unknown place. Home is never home.
It is this disconnectedness though that serves as the fuel for her disappointment.
How similar some things are today. It seems the more we connect on social media the farther apart we become. Words can never replace a touch, a smile in person, or a gentle pat on the shoulder to console us in our darkest times. We build false worlds for ourselves to live in, friends who are not really friends, circles that if the social media platform were to disappear overnight would so as well, and connections that are not really connected. Perhaps I am too old fashioned. Perhaps I don't get this new world. But I have this feeling in my gut that things never really change.
How do we overcome our crisis of disconnection?
I don't have an answer for that.
Back on track. The book which seeds these thoughts. Emma. She needs to be a force of chaos though. To be the bad woman who ruins his life. That chasing dreams can be a destructive force. The almost slogan-like message of a young woman's head so messed up by fantasy that she plants the seeds of her own misery. To be the caretaker of her own garden of false hopes and helpless feelings of discontent.
And so she falls, and so do I.
As I said, right between the eyes. She set herself up for this and so did I. This feels like the chapter where you watch the drunk person get in the car. Her husband grows fat and distant. Her life turns to the gray haze of winter. The statues in her garden crumble and fall apart. The world is dead to her. She finds no enjoyment in the things which she used to revel in, the things which made her day, and defined her as a person.
If there is not a starker warning on the dangers of disconnectedness and setting your dreams up for failure it is this chapter. Expectations can drive us on, serve as a goalpost in life, and they can be the chain around our ankle. They can also drag us straight to Hell.
I still don't feel all that much for Emma though. She is disconnected and vaporous enough that I don't see her as more than an stand-in for a way of life and a culture of "me first" that I despise but never really say much about. She is the canary in the coal mine, a stand-in for thousands of people so affected by the siren's call of fantasy and a life lived through the rose colored glasses of romance novels that she can't appreciate what she has.
But, in a way, she has nothing.
When you live a life so disconnected from where you are, you might as well have nothing. I know no one, therefore I am no one. I live a second life on social media, therefore my life is has no real substance or meaning as well. There s something there, how one can look into a false mirror and see a false image of one's self.
All this sets up the fall.
All this puts the teacup on a higher and higher shelf, increasing the energy of the shattering when it eventually hits the floor. The more you build yourself up, the higher the teacup rises on the shelf. The more disconnected you are, the closer to the edge the teacup moves.
Until a point where it is all just inevitable.
This all sounds so depressing, but for a writer it is not. This is our fuel. This is the moment of realization. This is our truth. For us, finding the truth is like finding a solid patch of stone upon which we can begin writing again. The solid base upon which you stand. A place you can be sure of your footing and thus your words can have that certainty as well.
I know when my writing is off, and when my footing is uncertain. I tend to bitch and complain, and my views of the world seep into my writing - like some sophomoric diatribe a character goes on about the politics of the day and you come back later and just cringe at the amateur Facebook post as character dialog sitting in your book like a turd the writer laid there out of anger and frustration.
That is what blogs are for.
To get out the frustration. To expel the anger. But for all the bad that comes out, you do find that footing. You do look over that map, see where you went wrong, and chart the course you think you were on versus the one which brought your dreams to ruin. You can sit there on the rocks with the debris of your dreams around you and you can cry.
Or you can be the the person gathering the washed up wood to begin again.
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