This is a sad story. One detail reminds me of Chekhov's' The Lady with the Lapdog. Small details are sometimes remembered forever because they carry a big psychological impact. In your story, it's a sliced fish; in Chekov's, it's sliced watermelon. In yours, the diminishing of love; in Chekov's, the beginning of a real feeling of love.
It's not exactly parallel; it's the psychological importance of the small detail in the story. You can't imagine how many Russian literary critics wrote about the slice of watermelon in Chekhov's.To show Gurov's vulgarity at the beginning of the story, Chekhov made him eat a slice of watermelon. You use the same small detail to show your relationship to your love in your story. It's how I, a reader, understand the story.
Rereading this again (the benefits of insomnia), what moved me most is the heartbreaking line about following the thread of “young love as far as it went,” which subtly suggests the stars you repeatedly invoke prior to that penultimate point and then again in your last, devastating, sentence. The thread should lead us to those stars, the origin of light and life as opposed to “clumps of rock.” The thread should lead us to love at its highest.
But you couldn’t reach those celestial wonders in this case due to circumstance and tragedy: your stars were instead crossed because of youth, and the too soon specter of your first love’s early passing that haunts the essay. (Which also makes the final lines about Kant and Freud so powerfully intelligent.)
Sorry for my half-assed old academic’s rambling btw, but I too suffered a loss early in life and your essay spoke to me: such a beautiful tribute and elegy, Ella.
It echoes, for me, Gilbert’s “Flying And Failure” about a love that has run its course and yet... Yours is like the too early elegiac counterpart to his elegiac, yet ecstatic, meditation on the too late…and yet!:
Everyone forgets that Icarus also flew.
It’s the same when love comes to an end,
or the marriage fails and people say
they knew it was a mistake, that everybody
said it would never work. That she was
old enough to know better. But anything
worth doing is worth doing badly.
Like being there by that summer ocean
on the other side of the island while
love was fading out of her, the stars
burning so extravagantly those nights that
anyone could tell you they would never last.
Every morning she was asleep in my bed
like a visitation…
Gonna post on this and post the poem. Your work always both moves me and makes me think. Thank you, Ella, and keep going!
This is a sad story. One detail reminds me of Chekhov's' The Lady with the Lapdog. Small details are sometimes remembered forever because they carry a big psychological impact. In your story, it's a sliced fish; in Chekov's, it's sliced watermelon. In yours, the diminishing of love; in Chekov's, the beginning of a real feeling of love.
Thank you, Larisa! I love that Chekhov story. The parallel never occurred to me.
It's not exactly parallel; it's the psychological importance of the small detail in the story. You can't imagine how many Russian literary critics wrote about the slice of watermelon in Chekhov's.To show Gurov's vulgarity at the beginning of the story, Chekhov made him eat a slice of watermelon. You use the same small detail to show your relationship to your love in your story. It's how I, a reader, understand the story.
Wow. This was beautiful.
wonderful work. very tender
Beautiful, lyrical, but also you are making serious analytical points showing us how lyricism and intellectualism can be synthesized.
Rereading this again (the benefits of insomnia), what moved me most is the heartbreaking line about following the thread of “young love as far as it went,” which subtly suggests the stars you repeatedly invoke prior to that penultimate point and then again in your last, devastating, sentence. The thread should lead us to those stars, the origin of light and life as opposed to “clumps of rock.” The thread should lead us to love at its highest.
But you couldn’t reach those celestial wonders in this case due to circumstance and tragedy: your stars were instead crossed because of youth, and the too soon specter of your first love’s early passing that haunts the essay. (Which also makes the final lines about Kant and Freud so powerfully intelligent.)
Sorry for my half-assed old academic’s rambling btw, but I too suffered a loss early in life and your essay spoke to me: such a beautiful tribute and elegy, Ella.
It echoes, for me, Gilbert’s “Flying And Failure” about a love that has run its course and yet... Yours is like the too early elegiac counterpart to his elegiac, yet ecstatic, meditation on the too late…and yet!:
Everyone forgets that Icarus also flew.
It’s the same when love comes to an end,
or the marriage fails and people say
they knew it was a mistake, that everybody
said it would never work. That she was
old enough to know better. But anything
worth doing is worth doing badly.
Like being there by that summer ocean
on the other side of the island while
love was fading out of her, the stars
burning so extravagantly those nights that
anyone could tell you they would never last.
Every morning she was asleep in my bed
like a visitation…
Gonna post on this and post the poem. Your work always both moves me and makes me think. Thank you, Ella, and keep going!