Saturday, January 26, 2013

Reveries

Yesterday I read reveries of a bachelor, it was very interesting, a man sitting in front of his fire contemplating marriage pros and cons. I think it was very interesting the way the man divided the three sections, smoke, fire and ash. I kind of saw the three parts as very separate, but linked all together in how someone might describe the different feelings, or stages of love.

Smoke was first, and it was the man talking about all the horrors of marriage, the annoying kids, the nagging, the fact that his wife probably doesn't even like him and does not want him to come home. He describes her, "Peggy is rich enough, well enough, mild enough, only she doesn't care a fig for you." He also talks of how terrible the food is, "No matter for cold coffee; you should have been none before. What sad, think poorly cooked chops!" it almost seems comical the way he must act that everything is fine but he hates every minute of it. I would call this stage of love, doubt or fear. Fear of rejection, fear that thing won't work out the way you want them too, and doubt that anything could really be as good as people really say it can. Almost denial in a way, the refusal to look at it from a different perspective.

Next came fire, and this is right in the heat of love. There is a honeymoon phase, desire and only good things related to the significant other. He talks of her, "Her face would make a halo. . .Her smile would illumine the blackest of crowding cares." He loves her so much and she him, that he loves the kids. "Those children, rosy, fair-haired; no, they do not disturb you with their prattle now; they are yours!" He loves her cooking, she helps him with work and waits for him to be home and they couldn't be happier. It shows all the good things about love, they way ones heart can leap and hope and see only good in the world because of how they feel about someone else.

Ash is the pain one feels once one has loved and lost. To love someone is great, the relationship is magical but once you have something like that it also means you can lose it. In this section the man loses his daughter and his son and finally his sweet wife that he loves so much. He talks to his daughter, Bessy, "'Dear Bessy' - and your tones tremble. . .can you pluck her back? Can endearments stay her?" At this point he is desperate to do anything to get her back and that feeling of love. With them he even states that he had the whole world, "Keep your money, old misers, and your palaces, old prices,- the world is mine!" Once he loses all of them however he is so sad and living in so much pain and there seems to be nothing left. The fear or loving, the fact that one can lose it. 

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