God tur!

This is the book I'm currently reading. Allow me to modify a quote from the author by saying that in order for a love (whether with book or with person) to be unforgettable, fortuities must begin to descend like birds onto St. Francis's shoulders. For me, this novel is incredibly fortuitous, because the characters have each their own definition of love that has been cultivated throughout their lives from a concert of ideas, images, and experiences. Not all of their ideas of love are very pretty, or make much sense, but, nevertheless all of them are true. Therein lies the fortuity for me; I've always felt there was a proper way to love but couldn't conform to it. And I've experienced the sense that, while you may be sitting across from someone and know that they love you and that you love them, nevertheless it seems you are flying your love on a tiny paper airplane across a wide canyon, and it will never reach them. Similarly, the characters in this novel have ideas of love that are doomed never to be compatible with the ideas harbored inside the person who has become their love's object. That said, I think the author would be taken by the inscription I found in my copy:


Here's the scenario my mind has created for Scott and Debbie: Obviously, they were lovers. Probably friends first, perhaps for a long time. Then, through a series of fortuitous events, they were thrown together under sufficient strain of tragedy and excitement to trigger a romantic encounter, maybe even a series of them, including the aforementioned journey west. To Debbie this was a light moment (a moment that occurs only once, never to be repeated again) with sufficient beauty and symbolic power to acquire the weight necessary for it to become unforgettable. Not only does she cherish her memory of this brief love affair but it has become the symbol through which all her subsequent love affairs channel. That is to say, those fortuities she has experienced with any other man after this fellow Scott are fortuitous because they remind her of the beautiful lightness of her past love, echoing that love forward and perpetuating its heavy hand on her heart. And she has fully accepted Kundera's suggestion: That this heavy hand isn't a torturous burden, but is the sense of meaning that ties us firmly to our own lives and, though in some sense limiting our imaginations to the repetition of a few themes, at the same time, keeps all our life experiences from floating away, from becoming utterly transient and worthless.

So. Why did Scott sell the book? I bought this book from a used book store in Wicker Park. He had to have let it go sometime. Whether or not Scott felt what Debbie felt, whether or not their love was unforgettably fortuitous and placed its weight on all his subsequent loves, depends entirely on when and why exactly it was he sold the book. It's a very worn-out book. It even has a few underlined passages in the beginning. Maybe, Scott read only these first few pages and was so moved by the meaningful gesture of Debbie's gift and her obvious belief that their own affair had such random and beautiful qualities, that he immediately stopped reading and either shoved the book to the back of a shelf or immediately sold it, whereupon someone else bought it, discovered its beauty and wore it into the tattered condition I found it in just a few months ago. Or, Scott may have read the book through over and over, regretting whatever circumstances had forced his separation from Debbie (I'm guided, here, by the air of finality in her words) and pining for this lost, weighty love. Until someone else fortuitous came along. And after many years, he felt ridiculous keeping this reminder of something that had so receded into the past. (And probably by then he knew its images and ideas were so ingrained, he could bear to part with their physical representation.)

The only other possibility I can think of is a sad one: Scott simply didn't share Debbie's sentiments. To him, their encounter was light, random -- and inelegant. It was convenient rather than fortuitous that she happened to be there, that they happened to console one another for a time, and that he happened to move quite comfortably on with his life, without ever remembering her, even when traveling down some highway with a different love, and looking over at her, and seeing in her face an expression closely approximating Debbie's. An expression that gave away the process now taking place in her soul, a process by which a random event in her life became for her a symbol of how love ought to feel, of how two people ought to see inside one another and feel that this seeing and being seen was freedom. If this last possibility seems to vilify Scott a little, I don't mean it to. Because I'm sure some other symbol had already planted itself in his heart. I'm sure some other symbol marked the fortuity that made some other love unforgettable. What's sad here is that the two of them missed one another's mark. And that one of them knew it, and the other did not. Or maybe she did know. And maybe the gift of this book was just to say: You mattered, you were everything, I won't forget. And to plead with him a little to honor her devotion, even if he never would return it.