Brackets

Originally Posted Saturday, July 20, 2013

In 1847, shortly before 23-year-old Marie Duplessis, one of 19th-century Paris’s most celebrated courtesans, died of consumption, she told her maid, “I’ve always felt that I’ll come back to life.”

Still, her coachman reported, “at the end she drank nothing but Champagne."

 Those are the opening and closing sentences in a review of "The Girl Who Loved Camellias" (link).  Good writing, I think.  If life, however, could only be contained so easily.  But we have to live through the middle parts, and it can be painful.  When we are mean, we try everything we can to deny people their "brackets."  We counter "moment" with the flow of time.  I like writing.  I like photography.  If they are done right, they are difficult to refute.  When things get rough, it is important to remember the brackets, to emphasize them, to cut them in stone.  Imagine what the real life of Don Juan or Casanova was like, especially in the end.  All the miseries, horrors, and diseases, the pain of living.  Debtors and trips to the doctor.  That is what the iconoclasts would have you do.  That is the way of criticism. 

And so we try to staunch the flow of time, the dribble, dribble, dribble of life.  That is why we invented grammar, punctuation, capital letters.  It is why we break those rules.  Stanzas, enjambments, modernism.  It is why we play a song over and over again.  It is why we fall in love. 

Old Q eludes to an epiphany today.  Epiphanies are painful.  It means we see our relationship with the cosmos in a new and shocking way.  The sudden inrushing of insight is both liberating and devastating.  It means you must relinquish who you were and say goodbye to what you thought you knew.  But it is O.K.  They do staunch the flow of time.  They are punctuation marks.  Memories. 

On the other hand, I'm sure Ward Cleaver had a very comfortable life.