All romance is unredeemable

Caspar David Friedrich, Wanderer above the Sea of Fog, 1818

One of the cutest and most endearing things happened the other day. Getting into my car to drive back from my parents’ house I noticed this rain-dotted Ziplock bag on my windshield. It held a little folded note, hugging the side of a vessel much too large for it. Something about the anxious unfolding released these feelings of quaintness and maybe nostalgia, even though I don’t even remember the last time I received a handwritten note. The personality of the characters, the imperfect flourishes, the human touch that somehow never quite seems to translate the same through keystrokes. Is it possible to feel nostalgia for something you’ve never experienced?

This is what it said:

I was too tired and food coma-ed from my mom’s homecooked meal to process it at the time. All I remember was feeling overwhelmingly positive and smiling, and I also really wanted to know the author.

Over the course of the next few days, thoughts of the letter would reemerge, not often but with undue force. I thought of all the people who would walk by those mornings when I used to work out in the garage at my parents’ house. The neighbor with that well-behaved wiener dog; the older couple who always seemed to be in good spirits and still so enamored of each other’s company, after all those years; that one girl with the dirty-blonde hair, always on a call: was it with the same person every morning?

I liked to greet them all with a smile. In that state of euphoria I would find myself in amidst strenuous exercise, the faces I saw appeared brighter and more lifelike, and under the gilded glow of the morning sun all the internal luster seemed to shine through. I didn’t know any of them or their names or their stories, but I liked to imagine, to think about the deep interiorities. The things I would never know about people who on the surface really were just strangers walking by, going about their own days.

I liked to imagine then.

And even now, being about the note this time, I still like to imagine, to wonder. Who is this mysterious girl, the one who left the note? And why? What does she want?

It struck me, the distance between what I could imagine myself doing and what she had done. She must’ve noticed, about the same time she no longer saw me working out in the mornings, my car also disappeared from the driveway. And on certain nights — Sundays specifically — I had made a habit of coming back. And she connected my car’s reappearance, assuming it meant my own visitations. And one Sunday, this last rainy Sunday evening, she decided to write a note to me. And on that note she chose not to leave a name or phone number or any means to contact her or even to know her.

This anonymity, it was puzzling to me. I could see a world — many worlds — where I would want to leave a note to a girl. It’s romantic. But surely I would give her some way of knowing it was me who left the note. I would sign my name and leave my number, hoping she would choose responsiveness, to see me, to explore, to find out where a first date could lead. It could and is even likely it wouldn’t go anywhere meaningful. But why not at least see?

As I thought about it more — what I would do — it began to dawn on me. Maybe this was the most romantic gesture. Not leaving me with any recourse. Shielding my imagination from reality. The texts to be sent about dinner to be coordinated, the time and the place, whether she likes sushi as I do or if she prefers steak instead. Waiting for her to do her makeup and get ready even though we are already five minutes late and I don’t like to be late. The little things that come to define the square-peg-in-a-round-hole nature of connecting two lives ever more intimately, more practically.

I’ve always been a romantic, and being a romantic means living in your imagination, because the idealized versions of things only really have a home there. And that’s the beautiful tragedy of it. You want to make these things, these dreams and visions, come true, but any attempt to reconcile the discord inevitably leads to run-ins with reality. To make things real is to sacrifice, the contents of your romantic imagination are the currency you trade. Reality may be a poor imitator of the imagination but it’s all we’ve got as far as experience.

I find myself wondering how to make the best of it. I want to realize the things I dream up. But I also want to keep feeding my imagination, never letting the magic of what could be fully fade, even though to make it fade is to make things real, to experience them as they actually are.

It’s the imagination that makes you want, that makes you desire. And desire, that maddeningly self-contradictory state of being, leaves the moment you get what you previously did not have. I want to realize my desires; I realize I also want to desire. And just the same I want the girl of my dreams; I also want to dream of the girl.

These internal tensions, they point to the complexity of those so essentially human of emotions. The ones that straddle the membrane of internal and external.

I’m coming to believe there’s something there, an answer to my question: is it possible to feel nostalgia for something you’ve never experienced?

It’s nostalgia of the imagination, a longing for something only imagined but never experienced. Unlike longings of the past these longings live in the future. Maybe it’s all the same though, the past, present, and future. They all live in a time eternally present, and unredeemable, T.S. time:

Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable.
What might have been is an abstraction
Remaining a perpetual possibility
Only in a world of speculation.
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.

— T.S. Eliot