Notes from the Editor's Desk -- 9/7/22

Part of the novelist’s work is to make life’s inaccessible romanticism accessible. Our encounters with life’s scenes that invite the imagination, but preclude our direct participation, cannot be reconciled entirely by literary access, nor is such a capacity superior to direct participation, but these scenes that beguile and refuse us become another matter altogether when our sensibility becomes invested in them. We are incredibly constrained by our social stations, no less so by our very persons. Consciousness remains unconstrained. The congress of our limitations and the absolute freedom of consciousness constitutes the grist of this beautiful condition called life. Beauty, at times reprieve, and at times a heavy load, is no easy matter to contend with gracefully, although it is simple. Not only is there another matter in whose study one’s attention could be trained, but this matter may also possess the virtue of being no less worthy of attention than the matter at hand. Overwhelmed by this reality, we often favor wastes of time, as this relieves us, or, to speak properly, only seems to relieve us, of the burden of decision. That is why I was stuck one night when, on a walk far from home, and late into the evening, I saw an estate on a wooded plot of land whose points of light through the foliage caused me to stop. I was presented with a totem that jarred me from my solipsism. A world existed there, not mine directly; but indirectly, sure. My material condition receded from me as does a curl of foam upon the waves. Jane Austen came to mind, as she was adept at discovering what was immaculate around her and specifying the condition that existed therein. She possessed glimpses of her society, may have had a Mr. Darcy in actual fact, on which to model her Mr. Darcy, the surviving twin, but she lacked entree to its every fact. In her marriages, which may be seen as absurd, or overly repetitive, she produced a truth more essential, and it was appropriate therefore to produce variations on that theme. A writer should be judged, in part, on the propensity of their work to inspire romances in its readers, judged on the propensity of their words to inspire love and feeling that manifests not merely in the abstract. To be able to access romanticism is a gift, and gifts are not to be taken for granted. In the absence of knowing of the kind that literature offers its devotees, the life that we gleam, but that is inaccessible to us, becomes a cause for grievances of distinctly foul character. Whereas we are presented with beauty, we see malfeasance; when presented gifts, we repay generosity with tabulation. Theatrical acts of violence are therefore interpreted by our nation’s grimmest characters with sincerity because the culture cannot produce and sustain sincere expression. Wonder and sadness are not distant relations — they have entree to the same ballrooms and salons, they walk the same streets, and their introduction is as inevitable and charged as it would be in a novel — and the remainder of my walk went not without a measure of mourning.