What happens in those short years between pressing one’s nose against a cold window, heart sprouting wings at the sight of snow, and now, heart unsteadily flapping against the iron bars of a 38th January? I’d walk around collecting answers but a flapping heart needs nice stories, happy endings, and by default my questions would only rust the iron further. Still, I plan my questionnaire: where do you get your tetanus shots? I’m out here living the uninoculated life. It’s an option. What are the other options? Proust says “The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new lands but seeing with new eyes.” And then, when answering his own famous questionnaire and asked to name his “main fault,” he chose: Not knowing, not being able to “want”.
This is hard, right, since a want can only truly be defined as a lack of something, anything. It’s space waiting to be filled, desire with no end. When left on its own, want is eternal: Sir Want, in his perpetually forthright way, travels from one unoccupied expanse to another; and when eventually kicked out, he simply slides around until he finds another cavity, small or large; it’s no matter, if it’s small he will make it large. He will make it open and gaping and thirsty. Want is beautifully limitless, a forever game of whack-a-mole.
It’s almost charming, the consideration of denying want. You can skirt it, tame it, dig a grave for it. Watch it from afar and appreciate how it’s grown. In the end though, you still want the thing you want. I can try to make it as elevated and pure as words allow, but getting what you truly desire is one of the great pleasures of this life. And yet—this all started with me wanting summer. And not wanting winter. Which, at their core, might be two disparate longings. Sir Want can roam however he likes, but once I have summer, I am sure (and I have never been more sure) that I will stop wanting summer. So there is also that to consider.
Yet now, instead of buckling under its weight, I’m staggered by how gracefully want can age when it’s permitted: from nebulous and dark to ruthlessly clear. A marble statue emerging from under a decade’s shavings*. Or the other way around. Really, the only thing to do is rig the game: go in with a trowel and bucket of cement, hard-won slurry made of your drudgery, your tears, your work, your love, your life and seal those fucking holes, bury the moles.
According to recorded history, Proust answered his questionnaire twice: once in 1890 and again in 1896. I can’t find the 1896 answer for his main fault, but in 1890 his favorite color and flower were “The beauty is not in the colours, but in their harmony.” And in 1896, “I like them all and, for the flowers, I do not know.”
It kind of seems like he knows, though. I mean, look at that pic.
*My original analogy was more along the lines of “a perfect gyro emerging from the ashes of a rotating slab of meat” but it lacked something…it wanted…poesy, or lunch, maybe
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