My one existing picture of Lindsay, my partner for eight months but many dozens of adventures, and many dangers, July 1985, and my mother.
A preface to my meeting and falling in love with Lindsey.
I wonder why I never met and fell in love with a highly intellectual woman, (living in Berkeley so long) and what that would have been like. But that might have been equally disastrous as those I did find.
If you consider the lives of Thomas Carlyle and his wife, Jane Welsh Carlyle, two of the brightest minds of their Victorian time span, after the first few happy years of marriage, they argued incessantly before all their many visitors. Their brilliant wits only sharpened the insults they threw at each other like daggers, for hours on end, right in front of their shocked company. Their wide reading only fed and fuelled such mental batteries (in the second sense, “a fortified emplacement of heavy guns”) and protracted their heated arguments from dinner to the midnight hours.
Samuel Butler as a young man had a chance to witness one of these marathon disputes and wrote: “It was very good of God to let Carlyle and Mrs. Carlyle marry one another and so make two people completely miserable and not four”.
So maybe an intellectual girlfriend would not have been a happy match. Besides, just as men and women are so different, there’s a magnetic force in that difference, and the greater it is, the more powerful the attraction. Then again there was Dale. She wasn’t what you’d call an intellectual, but she had by far the most refined, cultured, elegant mind of any I dated. I could read her an essay by Addison or quote any good author of any age and she’d relish it. If only I’d been born ten years sooner and we’d met.
There is one great love that does last a lifetime and I’m lucky to have it, my never-ending infatuation with great literature and my insatiable pleasure in reading it, and the troves on my shelves I still have left to enjoy, enough to last three lifetimes.
In a way it’s like having a thousand lovers, my love of books. They all have their unique beauties and personalities, widely different in their charms. When I finish admiring one, satiate my intellectual appetite for it, whether finished or half-finished, I put it down and pick up another, on and on, or return to an old favorite with double fondness. Some I just taste, read a few pages and sample their flavor, knowing what to expect if fancy brings me back to them, my late night, mute mistresses. They never complain. They demand nothing. They sit on the shelf and wait my beck and call. That’s why this love lasts a lifetime, its variety is endless. It only runs out if your desire to enjoy and learn fades away, which is synonymous with death.
But back to the strange twists of fate which cause two people of two different characters to bond.
When I muse upon the purely fortuitous chances that guide our lives and determine our careers and when I examine the chain of events minutely, I’m struck with wonder by how slight the circumstances and how faint the ephemera that guide our steps to some fateful meeting, changing our lives forever.
The fragility of our futures astounds me. We are feathers in the wind. And any pretense that we determine our own course is laughable.
An even more profound and complicated and darker musing lies in the contemplation on the encounters that we just missed, perhaps by a few seconds, by a glance the other way or someone stepping in front of us in a line, missing the eye contact that would have led to a smile and conversation, or a dance that would turn into a romance and redirect our lives completely, ‘serendipity manqué’. In male friendships I feel I was so rich and lucky I don’t think of this. But in female missed encounters I sometimes wonder, most of my love affairs proving disastrous.
In my last university year at Berkeley I went one night to a rock concert in San Francisco with Richard and Doug, standing in a long line on the street waiting to buy a ticket. I forget the band but I’ll always remember this: while we were slowly moving forward I got into a discussion with them on some topic and waxed eloquent for minutes. I can’t even remember the subject. I was wearing my nice, gray, suede jacket and once inside, taking our seats, I chanced to put my hand in one pocket and discovered a note. It said: ‘I’m standing right behind you and really admire your conversation and would like to meet you’. It was a woman’s handwriting, didn’t include a phone number and by now the girl was lost in the seated crowd. But I did faintly remember a pretty girl in line behind me. Serendipity manqué.
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