Love stories

There are sweet love stories like these and moving tributes by authors like Calvin Trillin.

Then I read something like this, which isn't just about abiding love but also the horror of war on soldiers and their families, and I can't help but feel horrified: first at my reaction to the photographs, and then at the war that begets such awful scars - emotional, physical, psychological.

I crawl back to my copy of About Alice, where Calvin Trillin writes about never ceasing in his attempts to impress Alice.

But I never stopped trying to match that evening - not just trying to entertain her but trying to impress her. Decades later - after we had been married for more than thirty-five years, after our girls were grown - I still wanted to impress her. I still knew that if I ever disappointed her in some fundamental way - if I ever caused her to conclude that, after all was said and done, she should have said no when, at the end of that desperate comedy routine, I asked her if we could have dinner sometime - I would have been devastated.

No wonder someone once wrote, "But will he love me like Calvin loves Alice?"

Trillin's writing is comforting, more than capable of moving my withering soul. But as I read a line Alice quotes - "To live fully is to live with an awareness of the rumble of terror that underlies everything" (Ernest Becker) - I think of the times when terror does more than rumble, and how one struggles to keep living, to say nothing of living fully.

Posted by Monoceros at March 11, 2007 10:51 AM