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Lampedusa.
On page 360 out of 656, and I am falling in love with a fictional character.
This has not happened before in a novel. Occasionally (well more than occasionally, really) I've been afflicted with an infatuation for a fictional character on the big screen, or more often on the small. Both of these were different, though, because dramatic characters are necessarily infused with the reality of their portrayors. Buffy the Vampire Slayer may be an amazing character, but adoration for Buffy is siphoned off to Sarah Michelle Gellar, who embodies her, whose life and intelligence create Buffy week after week after week.
Mere minutes after I write "The way to this man's heart is through his vocabulary," I stumble upon a girl who dreams fantastic words. Further, she is entirely made of words; there is no corpuscular reality to distract from my feelings toward Rosa Luxemburg Saks, who lives solely in the pages of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay. Of course she is beautiful, but that is an afterthought, and redundant. Anyone who is so intelligent, who possesses a Promethean power of thought, cannot be anything other than beautiful.
I've talked before about my endeavors with the personals. Today I received, as I receive every day, a list of "Potential matches from Venus@match.com." Among them today was a profile that has been rewritten. I've read this profile before, looked at the picture, and decided that this girl wasn't really my type. The profile has been rewritten and is now much more interesting. Hence I am interested. The same picture that before looked blurred and unattractive now looks oddly endearing. My word.
I wonder sometimes what other people mean by "chemistry." Many people, apparently, think this has something to do with scented emanations from the body picked up subconsciously. For me, it's brain chemistry, the popping and fizzing of a Frankenstein's laboratory that I can see hiding behind the eyes of a person. I'm completely unable to describe eyes; I'm never looking at them. I'm always looking behind them, or else I don't care enough to look at all. When I talk about it, I use the term brilliance because it is a quality that is literally enlightening. And with so much light, how can a person not be beautiful.
And in words, often, it's simpler for me to see brilliance like a spotlight shining at me from the page or computer screen. I wonder if this is why I have such an instinctive bias toward long-distance romances, if the its epistolary nature makes it easier for me to see and feel attraction. When I was preparing my first (and only) date with J., veek teased my apparent giddiness (apparent even when I was trying to be nonchalant). "She has smoten you!" she said, and she was right. I doubt that after our correspondence it would have been possible for J. to have looked anything other than beautiful.
And so when Rosa Luxemburg Saks steps from the margins to center page, timid and brave and affectionate and mysterious, how can I not fall in love. And when her fictional beau immortalizes her as the unassuming librarian, Judy Dark, who is transformed into a Super Heroine, Luna Moth, armed with the mystical power of her own Imagination, I am lost in the fall. Here, fictionalized, is the distilled archetype of my "type," not blond, brunette, tall, short, zaftig, svelte, but transfigured.
The love of a novel character may be more penetrating than that of other characters, but it's time is limited. Soon the pages will peter out, and Rosa Luxemburg Saks will fade from my immediate presence. And the plot may yet hold some more reversals that will wrench my heart before that end comes. But right now, I want nothing more than to spellunk in the dark corners of Central Library, looking for the inevitable actual counter part to Rosa Luxemburg Saks, and Luna Moth.
Poor Judy Dark! Poor little librarians of the world, those girls, secretly lovely, their looks marred forever by the cruelty of a pair of big black eyeglasses!--Michael Chabon, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
This has not happened before in a novel. Occasionally (well more than occasionally, really) I've been afflicted with an infatuation for a fictional character on the big screen, or more often on the small. Both of these were different, though, because dramatic characters are necessarily infused with the reality of their portrayors. Buffy the Vampire Slayer may be an amazing character, but adoration for Buffy is siphoned off to Sarah Michelle Gellar, who embodies her, whose life and intelligence create Buffy week after week after week.
Mere minutes after I write "The way to this man's heart is through his vocabulary," I stumble upon a girl who dreams fantastic words. Further, she is entirely made of words; there is no corpuscular reality to distract from my feelings toward Rosa Luxemburg Saks, who lives solely in the pages of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay. Of course she is beautiful, but that is an afterthought, and redundant. Anyone who is so intelligent, who possesses a Promethean power of thought, cannot be anything other than beautiful.
I've talked before about my endeavors with the personals. Today I received, as I receive every day, a list of "Potential matches from Venus@match.com." Among them today was a profile that has been rewritten. I've read this profile before, looked at the picture, and decided that this girl wasn't really my type. The profile has been rewritten and is now much more interesting. Hence I am interested. The same picture that before looked blurred and unattractive now looks oddly endearing. My word.
I wonder sometimes what other people mean by "chemistry." Many people, apparently, think this has something to do with scented emanations from the body picked up subconsciously. For me, it's brain chemistry, the popping and fizzing of a Frankenstein's laboratory that I can see hiding behind the eyes of a person. I'm completely unable to describe eyes; I'm never looking at them. I'm always looking behind them, or else I don't care enough to look at all. When I talk about it, I use the term brilliance because it is a quality that is literally enlightening. And with so much light, how can a person not be beautiful.
And in words, often, it's simpler for me to see brilliance like a spotlight shining at me from the page or computer screen. I wonder if this is why I have such an instinctive bias toward long-distance romances, if the its epistolary nature makes it easier for me to see and feel attraction. When I was preparing my first (and only) date with J., veek teased my apparent giddiness (apparent even when I was trying to be nonchalant). "She has smoten you!" she said, and she was right. I doubt that after our correspondence it would have been possible for J. to have looked anything other than beautiful.
And so when Rosa Luxemburg Saks steps from the margins to center page, timid and brave and affectionate and mysterious, how can I not fall in love. And when her fictional beau immortalizes her as the unassuming librarian, Judy Dark, who is transformed into a Super Heroine, Luna Moth, armed with the mystical power of her own Imagination, I am lost in the fall. Here, fictionalized, is the distilled archetype of my "type," not blond, brunette, tall, short, zaftig, svelte, but transfigured.
The love of a novel character may be more penetrating than that of other characters, but it's time is limited. Soon the pages will peter out, and Rosa Luxemburg Saks will fade from my immediate presence. And the plot may yet hold some more reversals that will wrench my heart before that end comes. But right now, I want nothing more than to spellunk in the dark corners of Central Library, looking for the inevitable actual counter part to Rosa Luxemburg Saks, and Luna Moth.
Poor Judy Dark! Poor little librarians of the world, those girls, secretly lovely, their looks marred forever by the cruelty of a pair of big black eyeglasses!--Michael Chabon, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay