323. Romantic Joy

The only thing that truly excites her is romance. Most of her life is not romantic. Most of it is like washing dishes. Dirty dishes have to be cleaned, rinsed, and dried. But clean dishes do not stay clean for long. They get used again and the whole process repeats. Ordinary life for her is just this repetition of the same tasks, day in, day out.

But when there is romance everything changes. Romance means tension between two living beings, each pulling the other in its own way, each striving for the life it desperately wants. The intricacy of the tension means that something new and exciting is always happening.

The two living beings that are romantically entwined are not always people. She has had a profound romance with nature since she was a little girl. It exists in the tension between her and the natural world that is not her, and the ways it works with her and against her — the heat of the sun, the brisk north wind, the shrill cries of the seagulls, the rain, falling, falling.

Nature falls on her, but she pushes back. She does so by taking herself where nature cannot reach — by hiding in the warmth of her bed. She withholds her warmth in the same way nature so often withholds its warmth from her. Nature is alive just as she is, and with it she is engaged in a battle of give and take, an endless struggle against an other whose existence is different from her own. Even so, she loves nature and she knows it loves her too. The feeling of love — both the giving and the receiving of it — is her greatest pleasure.

Sometimes she has romances with things that are not strictly alive but that come alive when she is with them. When she breathes life into a book by reading it, she feels she has ignited a romantic struggle with a newly born other. But every struggle is also a joy. To feel the other that emerges from a book is also to work with it, to connect with it, to absorb its life into her own.

Absorbing is part of loving. She cannot be a stone block. She has to shift and change with each of her romantic partners, to become something more together with them. In this way, she knows she changes the other too, even though these changes are not always perceptible. The endless seduction of the other and its seduction of her is the source of everything that gives her life energy, meaning, and joy.