Warm Recollections #44

More from the Bitz Files

Dec 18, 2024

As introduced here, these Warm Recollections are random cullings from thirty years of notes files…

The way, after one of their drinking buddies leaves, a person will unconsciously turn to check who’s still here in a bar. You’ve gone; who’s left? I’m staying… With who?

Perhaps a way of looking at what happens when someone dies. Of course you’d prefer them to still be there to have another pint with, you may hugely miss them, and not have anywhere as nice an evening ever again as you would have done if they’d stayed. But ultimately… you’re still there, in the bar.

So what are you going to do? You’re going to buy another round and make the best of the evening with the people who’re left. Of course. That’s what staying alive means. That’s how you deal with death. That’s how you put it in its place.

Marriage is like a language — but an oral one, without a tradition of writing. Once you start to write it down and codify it, it starts to die. Studying grammar is not how you learn a language: it’s merely a way for outsiders to inspect it. Fixing a relationship in this way is like trying to learn a language in middle age.

Also: there’s a lot of sleight-of-hand in marriage. It’s a kind of magic. The danger of therapy is that it excavates all the tricks, shows how you’re doing them. It’s a risk, assuming you’ll still want to believe this marriage has magic once you know how all the tricks are done.

The deepest eyes reflect back the person you should be, not the one you are.

If “soul” is more about the persistent Aristotelian “form” of a person, and thus “character” — then “soul mates” are more properly “character mates”. Which makes more sense, and is less easily dismissible as an idea. If re-cast in this way then you’re not saying something limp and metaphysical, more that the fundamental structures of two humans (on mental, emotional and physical levels) match up well.

You don’t have to be alive to still be someone’s mother.

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