Crystallized, Not Accidental
On a few popular notions
Stendhal wrote in On Love that affection deepens by a process akin to crystallization. After the first prick of admiration and the first startling fantasy, oscillation grips the heart. One comes to know more about the beloved as they draw nearer to them. Deformities appear in their character. These challenges to the ideal we have inevitably constructed cause us to doubt whether we can truly have any love for this person. But, in Stendhal’s metaphor, just as a log lowered into a cave for the winter and drawn out in spring is covered in brilliantly dark mineral growths, the heart embellishes love, grows around or through these doubts.
When writing about his protagonist Albert Corde’s qualities as a husband in his novel The Dean’s December, Saul Bellow observes, “he was perfectly straight with [his wife], an erratic person, a strange talker, but a secure husband – a crystallized, not an accidental husband.” This sentence propels my thoughts as these Bellovian sentences often do. Crystallization as the opposite of accident – somehow this seems to promote Stendhal’s pattern from a love-process to one of the dichotomies through which we pass all our lives. And the fact that doubt and reapproval have confirmed Corde’s security in spite of his over-intellectual nature – that too gives me hope. But this is an essay, not a confession box.
Attention and patience are by no means the virtues of our age. To remark on this has become a cliché and one I have very little interest in expounding. Suffice it to say that we find ourselves in the midst of programming, content, and messages which fly so thick they seem more like a celestial force, the plague of locusts, than they do an immaterial cloud of data. The commonality and depth of this experience need not be vivified when it is our daily atmosphere. What is needed is a little thought as to why it should be so objectionable to live without the conditions for crystallization.
When we are deprived of patience and attention we are our of sorts with our most natural selves. The erraticism and ‘talkativeness’ of existence win out over our affection for being. The fantasies that would otherwise flourish into reality are stunted. We feel a fuller human life would be possible if it were not for our habitual abandonment of what we know is most important. To elaborate upon Wordsworth, we feel that we are greater than we know – yet we make no further investigation into this sensed magnitude. Eventually we learn to tune out the guilt that grumbles after us for not following through. It is much simpler to be accidental.
Certainly what doesn’t help our situation is the glut of theories and solutions, itself a part of the locusts. Minimalism peddles a more elevated, streamlined noise, that of an ideological lifestyle whose central principle is getting-rid-of. Its emphasis on sterilization is even less comforting than the crush of the mainstream. Every month there seems to be some new costume donned by the spiteful authoritarians who advocate this sort of thing. Yesterday, van-life; today, quiet quitting; tomorrow – one can only guess, but I envision them promoting the righteous acceptance of TV dinners as the height of cuisine.
Life is not to be quarreled with, not rounded-down, not minimized.
Regarding the inverse – what life is – we cannot ask for our modern skepticism to be appeased. Crystallization begs vulnerability, a willingness to be duped or dumped. Seeing the bare inhumanity of our noisy lives drains us. It depletes our happiness. Viewing a loved one in honesty will do the same, for a time. But afterwards – and there is always an afterwards – the previous state of affairs looks unlivable because we have a feeling in our breast dwarfing it. That I need not name. When the trite acknowledgements of contemporary dissatisfaction and the meager severity of ‘solutions’ are dismissed, the real life begins in earnest.