xkcd asks: Why do we romanticize young love?
Spoilers alert!
Ha Jin's novel, Waiting, winner of the 1999 National Book Award, follows an army doctor named Lin Kong who must wait 18 years, under the rules of Communist China, to divorce Shuyu, the wife he has never loved. His real partner is Manna Wu, a nurse at the army hospital.
So he waits. But then, 18 years later, when he and Manna finally wed, he remains unfulfilled. His problem is not simply that his first marriage was arranged; it's that he had never developed the capacity to love. On one occasion, Lin Kong laughs while reading love letters left to Manna by her former boyfriend, Mai Dong. “I feel my heart is about to explode,” Mai Dong wrote. “I cannot live for long if this situation drags on.”
Ha Jin narrates:
Yet having read all the letters, he felt a doubt rising in his mind. What troubled him was that the desperation Mai Dong had described was entirely alien to him. Never had he experienced that kind of intense emotion for a woman; never had he written a sentence charged with that kind of love. Whenever he wrote to Manna, he would address her as “Comrade Manna,” or jokingly as “My Old Lady.” Maybe I’ve read too much, he reasoned, or maybe I’m too rational, better educated. I’m a scientist by training—knowledge chills your blood. (252)Later in the mind of Lin Kong:
His instinct and ability to love passionately had withered away before they had had an opportunity to blossom. If only he had fallen in love soulfully just once in his life, even though it might have broken his heart, paralyzed his mind, made him live in a daze, bathed his face in tears, and drowned him in despair! (296)Better to have loved and lost, I guess, than to have never loved at all.
When I wrote about compassion/"giving a damn" as a capacity to be developed - by incorporating others' wellbeing into our own - I was thinking of a friend Hope's comment on love. She wrote last week that love isn't simply something we find; it's something "we can choose to cultivate":
I have a wonderful friend who had an amazing love of his life, and he’s scared he’ll never fall in love again. ... I remind this friend (and should remind myself): among other things, love is a capacity. And the ability to fall madly, maddeningly, terribly in love with someone isn’t just about meeting someone who tickles your fancy, it’s about your ability to feel that kind of love... And I encourage him to take heart in this–the fact that he’s had that kind of intense love doesn’t make him less likely to have it again, rather it proves he’s got that capacity. And another thing: lovingness is something that we can choose to cultivate, and the more we do, the more love we get to have in our lives. It’s not all chance.She wrote something related, I think, about self-discovery vs. self-determination:
I’m sick of all this American tragic myth about “finding yourself”. People my age (and people having so-called “mid-life crises”) seem so attached to the notion. They say they’ve got to travel around and find themselves, or work in a coffee shop in some liberal city for a year and find themselves, or not date anyone and find themselves, or go to therapy and find themselves. They’re got to “figure out” who they are. Talking that way makes it sound like “who you are” is some unmalleable, pre-made item, like a TV dinner Salisbury steak. And so narcissistic–this obsession with the idea of “self”, or worse, “true self”. But we don’t “figure out” who we are; we decide.I think there's a parallel between the empty rhetoric of finding one's own "true self" and finding one's own "true love." And so I thought of this passage from Richard Russo's The Risk Pool:
‘He’s such a good man,’ my mother said [speaking of a suitor]. ‘How I wish I loved him.’I can't possibly provide the deeper exposition these snippets deserve. Not only do I lack the vocabulary, but I have little idea of what I'm talking about (really, why are you still reading?). But briefly, I'm thankful for Hope's push for love as a capacity to be cultivated. It restores a sense of personal agency to the practice of love - something too often hijacked by the idea of fate.
‘He’s certainly crazy about you,’ I said, trying to make carefully chosen words sound casual.
‘I know,’ she admitted. ‘It’s horrible.’
‘It’s horrible that someone loves you?’
‘Yes,’ she said, looking off somewhere. ‘I want… my own true love.’
Her own true love. The outrageous simplicity, modesty, and arrogance of it took my breath away. It seemed to me, then and now, a wish that everyone had a right to, but that only the very foolish or the terminally naïve trouble themselves over. (313)
See xkcd's latest comic, titled, "Unsatisfied": (click for larger image)
Interpretation #1:
Regret, doubt, "shoulda woulda"... He wishes somehow he was dating the other gal.Interpretation #2:
The text behind the image says, "Forever comparing, never evaluating on any external scale. If you were a search function, you'd break the nlogn barrier." With no objective measure for relationships, we can only compare to what we already know. Imagination aside, he doesn't actually want to be with the other gal. It's just that she somehow became a benchmark.Interpretation #3:
The tragedy is not, despite first appearances, the incorrect choice of partner or the limiting structure of monogamy. It's that we really have no basis for comparison at all. It's just impossible - barring of course, a time-traveling machine allowing us to live out alternate realities. As much as we might dream about it, we simply cannot know what might have been if we had dated someone else, gone to a different school, or pursued a different career.Interpretation #4:
He's just one of those chronically unsatisfied people. In general, I don't think that's such a bad orientation in life... Unsatisfied people, perhaps in yearning for more, tend to be more politically engaged. They "dream things that never were," as Ted Kennedy eulogized RFK, "and say why not." But politics aside, maybe that's not such a great model for romance.Interpretation #5:
Here's the "grass is always greener" interpretation. No matter what, he'd be unsatisfied.
Not much of an "interpretation," but stick-figure sex is actually quite hot.
Warning: Serious spoilers. Ignore this post and first go read the book: The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007), the Pulitzer-Prize-winning novel of Dominican-American author Junot Díaz.
Seriously, if you haven't read the book, put down the blog.
The book centers around a fat Dominican boy named Oscar de Leon growing up in Paterson, New Jersey, and just dying to get laid. Though we don't know it for several hundred pages, the seemingly omniscient narrator is actually Yunior, Oscar's college roommate and the former boyfriend of Lola, Oscar's sister. Yunior narrates several generations of Oscar's family, going back to mid-1900s Dominican Republic under dictator Rafael Trujillo. Trujillo haunts both the book and the family: "He was our Sauron, our Arawn, our Darkseid, our Once and Future Dictator, a personaje so outlandish, so perverse, so dreadful that not even a sci-fi writer could have made his ass up" (2).
Oscar, a prolific lonely writer, seems like his own caricature: He's obsessed with science fiction, fantasy, comic books, and women. Oscar can't escape the "fukú," the curse that's plagued his family and according to a footnote, perhaps all of Latin America since colonization. It's tormented his sister Lola, his mother Beli, and his once-illustrious grandfather Abelard, killed by Trujillo.
Though it went a bit overboard at times, I loved the writing as much as the saga.
As Yunior narrates, Oscar just couldn't find love:
“Dude weighed 307 pounds, for fuck’s sake! Talked like a Star Trek computer! The real irony was that you never met a kid who wanted a girl so fucking bad. I mean, shit, I thought I was into females, but no one, and I mean no one, was into them the way Oscar was. To him they were the beginning and the end, the Alpha and the Omega, the DC and the Marvel.” (173)Oscar, though effectively celibate, did manage to torment himself with close female friends:
“Oh, they got close all right, but did they ever kiss in her car? Did he ever put his hands up her skirt? Did he ever thumb her clit? Did she ever push up against him and say his name in a throaty voice? Did he ever stroke her hair while she sucked him off? Did they ever fuck? Poor Oscar. Without even realizing it he’d fallen into one of the Let’s-Be-Friends Vortexes, the bane of nerdboys everywhere. These relationships were love’s version of a stay in the stocks, in you go, plenty of misery guaranteed and what you got out of it besides bitterness and heartbreak nobody knows. Perhaps some knowledge of self and of women. Perhaps.” (41)After college, he worked as a substitute teacher, naturally identifying with the little guy.
“Every day he watched the ‘cool’ kids torture the crap out of the fat, the ugly, the smart, the poor, the dark, the black, the unpopular, the African, the Indian, the Arab, the immigrant, the strange, the feminine, the gay – and in every one of these clashes he saw himself. … Sometimes he tried to reach out to the school’s whipping boys, offer them some words of comfort, You are not alone, you know, in this universe, but the last thing a freak wants is a helping hand from another freak. These boys fled from him in terror.” (264-5)Yunior is the opposite sort of persona. He dates Lola and yet can't seem to help himself. He's the classic anti-feminist villain, and Lola finally bids good riddance. Years later, Yunior reflects:
“Lola’s hair is long now and never straightened; she’s heavier and less guileless, but she’s still the ciguapa of my dreams. Always happy to see me, no bad feelings, entiendes. None at all.Some might criticize this book for Yunior's raunchy narration on sex and female anatomy, but justice, in all its cruelty, reappears at the end: The womanizer can't keep the one he truly loves.
Yunior, how are you?
I’m fine. How are you?
Before all hope died I used to have this stupid dream that shit could be saved, that we would be in bed together like the old times, with the fan on, the smoke from our weed drifting above us, and I’d finally try to say words that could have saved us.
______ ______ ______.” (327)
“They looked at Oscar and he looked at them and then he started to speak. The words coming out like they belonged to someone else, his Spanish good for once. He told them that what they were doing was wrong, that they were going to take a great love out of the world. Love was a rare thing, easily confused with a million other things, and if anybody knew this to be true it was him. He told them about Ybon and the way he loved her and how much they had risked and that they’d started to dream the same dreams and say the same worlds. He told then that it was only because of her love that he’d been able to do the think that he had done, the thing they could no longer stop, them if they killed him they would probably feel nothing and their children would probably feel nothing either, not until they were old and weak or about to be struck by a car and then they would sense him waiting for them on the other side and over there he wouldn’t be no fatboy or dork or kid no girl had ever loved; over there he’d be a hero, an avenger. Because anything you can dream (he put his hand up) you can be.” (321-2)Yes, they killed him, but Oscar, that fat New Jersey geek, somehow emerged the hero. He feared nothing, not even death, for love (nevermind, I guess, that his pursuit also imperiled his lover).
“Turns out that toward the end of those twenty-seven days the palomo did get Ybon away from La Capital. For one whole weekend they hid out on some beach in Barahona while the capitan was away on ‘business,’ and guess what? Ybon actually kissed him. Guess what else? Ybon actually fucked him. Praise be to Jesus! He reported that he’d liked it, and that Ybon’s you-know-what hadn’t tasted the way he had expected. She tastes like Heineken, he observed. ... He wrote that Ybon had little hairs coming up to almost her bellybutton and that she crossed her eyes when he entered her but what really got him was not the bam-bam-bam of sex - it was the little intimacies that he’d never in his whole life anticipated, like combing her hair or getting her underwear off a line or watching her walk naked to the backroom or the way she would suddenly sit on his lap and put her face into his neck. The intimacies like listening to her tell him about being a little girl and him telling her that he’d been a virgin all his life. He wrote that he couldn’t believe he’d had to wait for this so goddamn long. ... He wrote: So this is what everybody’s always talking about! Diablo! If only I’d know. The beauty! The beauty!” (334-5)I am sure I've missed some key themes, discussed in a Slate interview with the author: masculinity, diaspora, family dynamics, the haunting legacy of the Trujillo regime. But more immediately, I walked away with the tragic, almost cosmic, sense that there is such a thing as a better or a worse life. That love is liberation and "fukú" all at once. And that Oscar, in boarding an airplane back to the Dominican Republic in the ultimate act of desperation, determination, and death - indeed, the very epitome of Free Will - seems bound instead by family history and the "laws of nature":
“Yunior?
What?
Are you awake?
If it’s about Star Trek –
It’s not about Star Trek. He coughed. I have heard from a reliable source that no Dominican male had ever died a virgin. You who have experience in these matters – do you think this is true?
I sat up. Dude was peering at me in the dark, dead serious.
O, it’s against the laws of nature for a dominicano to die without fucking at least once.” (174)
Here's something I don't usually write about (with a couple exceptions): my love life. I'm dissatisfied with it, for this reason: It interferes with my friendship life. I moved to Cincinnati this fall, knowing literally one person. I've made a few friends, often in lucky chance encounters. But because I met some of these people randomly and not through a regular circle, arranging a rendez-vous often entails a phone call and lunch (or some other one-on-one outing), in the style of well, a date. So I wonder, how do I show 'friend-interest' without showing romantic interest?
In that context, I saw this xkcd comic (click for larger version):
Clearly my situation is different. The bozo above actually likes the girl. Me, I'm playing the part without actually liking her. So, xkcd, here's a more subversive plot: Gal mistakenly suspects Guy is "interested." Guy, nervous about perpetuating that myth, torments himself through every encounter by attempting to be attentive without appearing too interested - which unfortunately, resembles the classic middle-school tactic of ignoring the girl you actually like - which, cruelly, might give her the very wrong idea that not only do you like her, you're stuck in middle school.
Or something less heteronormative.
Fantastic video on marriage equality - also a bit wrenching.
In other news, I met with reps of three community organizations today, all based in Over-the-Rhine, an economically depressed and historically important Cincinnati neighborhood. As part of a friend's 'social injustice tour,' we met the medical director of a health clinic, the 'team coordinator' of a homeless shelter, and a social worker at the community housing non-profit. These great organizations rely heavily on grants and donors, distressingly so. But all insist they're here to stay - with several decades each of longevity. All our speakers seemed motivated by a sense of holy mission, a determination conveyed in simple descriptions of buying shoes for indigent patients or providing free laundry for shelter residents without a dollar to spare. The social worker at the community housing org absconded the companies that purchase area apartments, evict long-time residents, and build up-scale condos in their stead. But what came across besides their motivation, was the tediousness of their work: the Medicaid forms, the shelter rules, the housing taxes.
There's no such thing as the perfect job.
Alright, I admit it: I read Post Secret. I find most of the postcards boring, weirdly confessional, or uncreative repeats, but every once in a while there's a real gem, like the postcard below.
Sad thing is: He's not alone. A 2008 poll by the Kaiser Family Foundation found that: "Among all adults, 7 percent say that, in the past year, they or someone in their household decided to get married in order to have access to their spouse’s health care benefits" (background pdf). That's another reason, certainly an odd one, to support single-payer Medicare-for-All...
On the flip-side, back when I was staffing a suicide prevention hotline, I spoke with a caller who decided (I think) not to kill himself because then his family would lose their health insurance.
The GED prison class I tutor on Thursdays now begins with a short reading and discussion about the goals of education and/or the barriers prisoners face. I choose weekly readings and facilitate the discussion. Last night we read Edna St. Vincent's Millay's classic sonnet, "Love Is Not All."
LOVE IS NOT ALL (1931)All seven men present (we had low attendance) participated. In fact, they loved it, reading the poem aloud four (yes, four!) times, each person with a different cadence (and with this crowd, different respect for punctuation). The discussion ran a half-hour. Questions: If it came down to it, would you choose love or trade it for the more concrete staples of life? Is love portrayed in the poem as a non-physical force, as "the memory of this night," or more as a physical substitute for meat, drink, and a roof? If you trade love for peace, does that imply that love isn't peaceful? Is "making friends with death" an allusion to Romeo-style suicide or Helen-of-Troy homicide? They kept returning to that cryptic line, "nagged by want past resolution's power." What did that mean?
Edna St. Vincent Millay
Love is not all: it is not meat nor drink
Nor slumber nor a roof against the rain;
Nor yet a floating spar to men that sink
And rise and sink and rise and sink again;
Love can not fill the thickened lung with breath,
Nor clean the blood, nor set the fractured bone;
Yet many a man is making friends with death
Even as I speak, for lack of love alone.
It well may be that in a difficult hour,
Pinned down by pain and moaning for release,
Or nagged by want past resolution's power,
I might be driven to sell your love for peace,
Or trade the memory of this night for food.
It well may be. I do not think I would.
I think love is form of spirituality - an ineffable gut-feeling that I don't quite get. But before I expose myself as a cold heartless person, let me say that it's not for lack of trying.
Some people seem to fall in love left and right, forever compiling lists of crushes and gushing about sweaty palms and dry mouths and clumsy hands. Other people are much more steady; they hold out for that legendary soulmate and rarely fall in love. Forrest Gump is that sort of lover, longing for Jenny through the decades. Soulmate-lovers, like spiritual people, don't seem to understand that not everyone experiences their euphoria. I have no euphoria, but I think I'm more of the soulmate variety - not because I think there's one person in the world absolutely destined for me, but because I can't imagine that there'd be two. Maybe there's not even one. In my more cynical moments, I imagine love as a hyped-up version of compatibility. But even compatibility is a stretch. That any two people, complicated as they are, can think of themselves as compatible is nothing short of insane, though I suppose, no less of an ideal.
As for less than perfect relationships, Feministing's Ann created this spoof below, inspired by the classic anti-feminist poster that adjures independent women "to take back the date."
If you’re looking to re-experience the enchantment of One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez (GGM), then read that book again. You won’t find it in Love in the Time of Cholera, a novel about two lovers in a love triangle in an unnamed Columbian port city. In brief soap opera form, Florentino Ariza falls for Fermina Daza, who marries another man.
Warning: Spoilers follow.
Still, the book has other redeeming qualities, including GGM’s ability to relate wrenching tragedy and cruelty with dispassionate steadiness (79):
“He [Florentino Ariza] had awakened at dawn that morning, as a condemned man awakens at dawn on the day of execution, and that entire day he had done nothing but imagine, minute by minute, each of the events at Fermina Daza’s wedding. Later when he returned home he realized that he had made a mistake in the time and that everything had been different than from what he had imagined, and he even had the good sense to laugh at his fantasy” (146).Tragedy and cruelty aside, this book is an extended meditation on love. Actually, don’t put tragedy and cruelty aside; in this book they might as well be synonymous with love. The highlights:
“She turned her head and saw, a hand’s breadth from her eyes, those other glacial eyes, that livid face, those lips petrified with fear, just as she had seen them in the crowd at Midnight Mass the first time he was so close to her, but now, instead of the commotion of love, she felt the abyss of disenchantment. In an instant the magnitude of her mistake was revealed to her, and she asked herself, appalled, how she could have nurtured such a chimera in her heart for so long and with so much ferocity. … ‘No please,’ she said to him. ‘Forget it’” (102).4. Casual sex between passing “lovers” isn’t love, but it’s not insignificant either. In fact, it might be better than love. Florentino Ariza’s many affairs were “always without pretensions of loving or being loved, although always in the hope of finding something that resembled love, but without the problems of love” (151). Best of all, GGM suggests that it's supposed to be fun:
“He persuaded her to let themselves be observed while they made love, to replace the conventional missionary position with the bicycle on the sea, or the chicken on the grill, or the drawn-and-quartered angel, and they almost broke their necks when the cords snapped as they were trying to devise something new in a hammock. … He had taught her that nothing one does in bed is immoral if it helps to perpetuate love” (151).5. The pain of being denied. Even the smooth debauchee Florentino Ariza would court women “with caution, for he felt that nothing was more embarrassing or more demeaning than a refusal” (152). Why do I feel similarly? Is it a scar of having been rejected oneself? Is it really an embarrassment to admit liking someone who doesn’t reciprocate? In another episode on a similar theme, Florentino Ariza seems to feel as I do: “Ever since his rejection by Fermina Daza, Florentino Ariza had learned always to keep the final decision for himself” (201).
Richard Russo's The Risk Pool follows Ned Hall, the only child of two estranged parents, from childhood to early adulthood. The book is a fictional first-person memoir that recounts Ned's years growing up in Mohawk, a blue-collar town in upstate NY. It's a marvelous story - engrossing and irresistible and all of the other descriptors you'll see on the back cover. Time and again, I would read another 20 pages after deciding I was done for the night - not because I needed to wrap up a cliff-hanger or an action scene, but because every place to stop was no better than any other. Russo tells the story of everyday life fluidly. The book's sole fault, in my view, is in devoting two hundred pages to Ned's first decade of life - a time devoid of love, lust, independence, and for Ned, ambition.
Growing up isn't easy for Ned, considering his mother's a lunatic and his father's a drunk. In their shadow, Ned becomes a quiet reflective introvert - a grad school drop-out-turned writer - who finds little companionship among his peers. Still, Ned's coming of age is not so unique as to defy analogy. His observations resonated with me. In his youth, Ned found few things “so curious as the mystery of how anybody could be Jack Ward and not live happily ever after." But an older Ned acknowledges that "despite living through the war, marrying a rich woman, fathering a beautiful daughter, living in the while jewel house, driving the big Lincoln, and dying in the saddle, Jack Ward had not been happy” (248).
Russo is entertaining and sharp, but especially clever. In describing Ned's mother, an obsessive woman who managed her money meticulously, Russo writes: “She always congratulated herself on the fact that she had absolutely nothing to worry about, and wouldn’t have, so long as she continued to worry all the time” (214). Sometimes, amid the cleverness, shines a simple peril of wisdom, distinguished strangely by its mundane nature. As Ned says, “there are few things better than riding a bike after a long winter. A bicycle promises spring as surely as the hollowing out of melting snowbanks, the return of songbirds, the first bright tulip bud” (233).
Ned's relationship with his father Sam Hall matures over the decades. For much of his life, there was no telling when Ned would see his father, who swooped in-and-out of town. After one good-bye, Ned relates in a steady tone, “I didn’t see him again for ten years, nor did I ever hear a word concerning his whereabouts. Not a letter, not a Christmas card” (268). As a kid, Ned is scared to approach his dad. "As usual," Ned says, "everybody seemed to know my father better than I did, and I always ended up feeling like an outsider" (101). As he spend more time with Sam Hall later in life, Ned begins to worry he shares too many of his father's poor habits (458). Not wanting his girlfriend to see any resemblance between Ned and his father, Ned keeps the two apart. Russo crafts a character who loves and reveres his father and visits him regularly, yet in his heart of hearts, knows he's terribly “afraid he [his father] would live to be a hundred” (458).
Perhaps I've quoted enough, but I want to conclude with one more quotation - my favorite in the book - where Ned reflects on his budding relationship with Jack Ward's beautiful daughter, Tria.
“Paradoxically, even though I doubted that Tria Ward felt much attraction, I began to be uncharacteristically certain that before long she would extend me the invitation. Such arrogance, I hasten to add, was far from customary. In my relations with other young women to this point in my life, I had always been rather pessimistic about my prospects, a circumstance born of experience. I’d been told that I struck most girls as gloomy, and at the university one honest sorority girl I had badgered about going out said that she had nothing against me personally, except that when she went out with a guy, like, she preferred to have a good time, you know? I knew. Perhaps I was confident about Tria because I was beginning to suspect that she was not the sort of girl who preferred to have a good time” (354).
I’ve been reading Vladimir Nabokov’s famous novel Lolita, a book so erotic that four American publishers once declined to publish it. Enchanting as it is, I put it down and removed it from my book list because the 1972 binding was breaking. And I have no acid-free tape to fix it. Of course, I’m in no hurry to get acid-free tape. That book was making me so love-sick that I was quite happy to find an excuse to bury it – at least, hopefully, just temporarily.
It begins: "Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta" (11).
It continues: "All at once we were madly, clumsily, shamelessly, agonizingly in love with each other; hopelessly, I should add, because that frenzy of mutual possession might have been assuaged only by our actually imbibing and assimilating every particle of each other's soul and flesh..." (14).
If my life were a movie, a future girlfriend would read this post and buy me a roll of acid-free tape. Alas, “bioethicist by day, blogger by night” doesn't generate enough drama to merit Hollywood.
When I need a break from my reading, I peruse the library bookshelves, leaving my fortune to the book binding that catches the eye. Today, it was The Autobiography of Bertrand Russell. This excerpt comes from the prologue, titled, “What I have lived for.”
"Three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong, have governed my life: the longing for love, the search for knowledge, and unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind. These passions, like great winds, have blown me hither and thither, in a wayward course, over a great ocean of anguish, reaching to the very verge of despair.
I have sought love, first, because it brings ecstasy - ecstasy so great that I would often have sacrificed all the rest of life for a few hours of this joy. I have sought it, next, because it relieves loneliness--that terrible loneliness in which one shivering consciousness looks over the rim of the world into the cold unfathomable lifeless abyss. I have sought it finally, because in the union of love I have seen, in a mystic miniature, the prefiguring vision of the heaven that saints and poets have imagined. This is what I sought, and though it might seem too good for human life, this is what--at last--I have found.
With equal passion I have sought knowledge. I have wished to understand the hearts of men. I have wished to know why the stars shine. And I have tried to apprehend the Pythagorean power by which number holds sway above the flux. A little of this, but not much, I have achieved.
Love and knowledge, so far as they were possible, led upward toward the heavens. But always pity brought me back to earth. Echoes of cries of pain reverberate in my heart. Children in famine, victims tortured by oppressors, helpless old people a burden to their sons, and the whole world of loneliness, poverty, and pain make a mockery of what human life should be. I long to alleviate this evil, but I cannot, and I too suffer.
This has been my life. I have found it worth living, and would gladly live it again if the chance were offered me."
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