idiotropic

“She wanted them to go together to some hopelessly disreputable bar, and to console one another, in the most maudlin fashion, over a lengthy succession of powerful drinks of whiskey; to compare their illnesses, to marry their invalid souls for these few hours of painful communion, and to babble with rapture that they were at last, for a little while, no longer alone. Only thus, as sick people, could they marry. In any other terms, it would be a mésalliance, doomed to divorce from the start, for rubes and intellectuals must stick to their own class.

“If only it could take place — this honeymoon of the cripples, this nuptial consummation of the abandoned — while drinking the delicious amber whiskey in a joint with a jukebox, a stout barkeep, and a handful of tottering derelicts. If it could take place, would it be possible to prevent him from marring it all by talking of secondary matters? That is, of art and neurosis, art and politics, art and science, art and religion? Could he lay off the fashions of the day and leave his learning in his private entrepôt? Could he, that is, see the apple fall and not run madly to break the news to Newton and ask him what on earth it was all about? Could he, for her sake, for the sake of this pathetic rube all but weeping for her own pathos in the Metropolitan Museum, forget the whole dispute and, believing his eyes for a change, admit that the earth was flat?”

– Jean Stafford, Children are Bored on Sunday