add a little fear to your valentine's day

Depending on your feelings towards suicidal romances, you might find this suggestion to be either obvious or entirely off the mark. But I'll risk your mockery and say it: for Valentine's Day, you should take your date to Shakespeare's R & J.

If haven't seen an earlier production of R & J,  let's get this out of the way: the play isn't quite Romeo and Juliet. Joe Calarco, who adapted and directs the play, cuts the cast down to four male characters, each of whom plays an unnamed student at a repressive boarding school. The boys first appear dressed in crisp uniforms, walking in military-like formation and reciting Latin conjugations.

One boy - let's call him R - has hidden away a presumably-forbidden copy of Romeo and Juliet. At night the four friends sneak into an empty room and start a particularly vibrant table-read of the play. They shift between characters, scenes, locations and emotions with barely any tools to assist them: the set is minimalist and the props are almost nonexistent. There's a couple of chairs, a trunk, a piece of red fabric, and that's it. Some inventive lighting and occasionally over-the-top sound design push the play slightly towards the supernatural, but overall, the magic comes in the able acting of the four men onstage, who each play their double roles admirably. As Tybalt, Mercutio and Romeo, they slay each other; as students, they roughhouse. As Veronan friends and enemies, they crudely mock each other; as 20th-century teenage boys, they do the same. As Romeo and Juliet, they fall in love, as schoolboys… well. That's the question.

Romeo and Juliet was always begging for a revamp. She's a thirteen-year-old girl with no sense of perspective and he's got impulse control issues and a habit of obsessing over pretty women. After an implausibly quick wooing they make a series of very bad decisions: let's be honest, these two screw-ups have no business being the English-speaking world's symbol of love.  Fortunately, Calarco's reframing of the text gives it a new, stronger resonance.

Take Romeo and Juliet's first conversation, when they build a sonnet together, suggesting how quickly and effortlessly they became a perfect pair. Calarco uses that famous "palmer's kiss" to reject the idea of easy love and show Romeo and Juliet testing the waters, seeing where their boundaries are.

The men on stage enact this delicate dance as the famed lovers, and simultaneously as the two schoolboys, negotiating just how far they're willing to go. The pretense of the play only barely masks the sexual tension behind the students' acting, and with their performances they ask each other perilous questions: Where are our boundaries? And here's where R & J cuts through the semi-mystic reputation of Shakespeare's classic to expose a deeper truth: love is terrifying.

Rejection. Humiliation. Exploitation. An eruption of physical violence. Revealing desire is risky in any context, but in R & J, set in a world that punishes homosexual desire, the danger is palpable. The boys sit, not looking at each other, on a bench in the middle of a bare stage. They are trying to decide whether to hold hands, and that small choice puts everything at risk. It's a long moment, Shakespeare's famed dialogue slipping out in stutters, the audience's collective breath catching in their throats. Every heartbeat urges do it do it do it -- and then, of course, they do, and it's joyous, it's beautiful. But the risks of loving never fade away.

That frisson of danger -- that's why you should see R & J on Valentine's Day, that godforsaken holiday that reduces our most intense emotions to Hallmark drivel. Fight the defanging of romance. Let Calarco's adaptation remind you that love is all about the terrifying risk of realizing you might not be loved back, and loving anyway.

the books I read this year

Where my mind's been, in 3 words each:

Catch-22: Laugh-out-loud, gasp-out-loud funny.

Cloud Atlas: Mesmerizing and virtuosic.

Death and the Penguin: Bracing post-Soviet humor.

The Fifty Year Sword: Alas, a disappointment.

Silas Marner: Short, moralizing, intelligent.

Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha: A bewildering experience.

Housekeeping vs. the Dirt: Just goddamn delightful.

If on a Winter's Night a Traveler: Successfully, brilliantly obnoxious.

Bring Up the Bodies: A stand-up sequel.

The Night Circus: Lovely love story.

People of the Book: Adequate, not great.

The Lost: Genuinely interesting quest.

The Sound and the Fury: WTF just happened?

Radioactive: Beautiful, evocative, educational.

The Fruit Hunters: Fascinating... who knew?

Cry, the Beloved Country: Over-lyrical but wrenching.

Mrs. Dalloway: Highly concentrated prose.

The Awakening: Inspired fury, empathy.

Possession: English majors, rejoice.

Suddenly, a Knock on the Door: Addictive as crack.

Invisible Cities: Grown-up bedtime stories.

The Possessed: Witty, clever and fun.

Changing My Mind: God, she's smart.

Light Boxes: Experimental, intriguing, wintry.

Olive Kitteridge: Just interesting enough.

I Knew You'd be Lovely: Well-crafted, soft-hearted stories.

What is the What: All-consuming non-fiction novel.

The Hunger Games: It's definitely readable.

Let the Great World Spin: Absolutely entrancing, heart-breaking.

The Dante Game: Not for me.

Saturday: Music! Neuroscience! Philosophy!

Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil: Entertaining novelistic non-fiction.

The Last Werewolf: Intelligent, pulpy bloodbath.

The Sense of an Ending: Not all that.

Snow Flower and the Secret Fan: Just not good.

Waiting for the Barbarians: A captivating parable.

The Crying of Lot 49: Practically perfect Pynchon.

Super Sad True Love Story: Tiresome fantasy fulfillment.

A Visit from the Goon Squad: Great fun, well-done.

Descartes' Bones: Interesting; not profound.

Click: Trippy, weird, excellent.

And 11 recommendations:

Lit-nerd Must-Reads with easily-confused titles: The Possessed, Possession

Everybody Must-Reads with numbers in the title: The Crying of Lot 49, Catch-22

Long, Immersive Reads each featuring tangentially-connected stories: Cloud Atlas, Let the Great World Spin

Short, Smart Reads that take place in a single day: Saturday, Mrs. Dalloway

And in the category of Nick Hornby, Take All My Money Already: Housekeeping vs. the Dirt

Watching the Tiger

Over the weekend, William and I saw Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo, an intense, metaphorically lush and often surprising play about war, the afterlife, and a golden toilet seat. It's a comedy, ostensibly and occasionally, but also a philosophical diatribe, a theological shout of despair, and a psychological exploration of guilt, artistry, and the lingering effects of devastating loss.

The play opens with the tiger caged, center stage, pacing back and forth. One of the two soldiers guarding him is enthralled: "He's hungry," he says, walking around the cage to get a better look. The tiger is neither alive nor caged for much longer, but the image is vivid, and when I left the theater, I was thinking of Kafka: not his Tiger, sleeping in the training cage (there are no trainers in Rajiv Joseph's Baghdad, just as there are no gods or commanding officers) but his panther.

At the end of A Hunger Artist, the Artist dies, the rather unsurprising consequence of fasting for as long as you possibly can. His death isn't very troublesome to him, but he's very disturbed, in his final days, to see that the public has ceased to find him interesting at all: they have no interest in watching him starve, and walk right past his cage towards the animals. Suffering from starvation and artistic frustration, the Artist fades away. The circus supervisor who witnesses his death immediately has him replaced by a far superior act:

“All right, tidy this up now,” said the supervisor. And they buried the hunger artist along with the straw. But in his cage they put a young panther. Even for a person with the dullest mind it was clearly refreshing to see this wild animal prowling around in this cage, which had been dreary for such a long time. It lacked nothing. Without thinking about it for any length of time, the guards brought the animal food whose taste it enjoyed. It never seemed once to miss its freedom. This noble body, equipped with everything necessary, almost to the point of bursting, even appeared to carry freedom around with it. That seem to be located somewhere or other in its teeth, and its joy in living came with such strong passion from its throat that it was not easy for spectators to keep watching. But they controlled themselves, kept pressing around the cage, and had no desire at all to move on.

Unselfconsciously, vibrantly alive, this panther bears little resemblance to the painfully self-aware, existentially struggling, and very much dead Tiger of Joseph's play. The Tiger misses his freedom, carries only guilt in his teeth, and is generally a ragged, aged, despairing creature.

But while it was the pacing big cat that reminded me of the story, neither the play nor that final Kafka scene are really about the caged creatures. It's all about their admirers: the hapless soldier who can't look away from the Tiger, the audience enchanted by the wholeness of the panther. It's perfectly appropriate that A Hunger Artist ends with a description of the spectators, the real stars of the story all along, whose attention was the "main purpose" of the Artist's life.

Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo, too, is full of restless, pacing performers, always seeking a spectator. The ghosts haunt their friends and murderers not from malice or compulsion, but because no one else can see or hear them: what's the point of being, they suggest, if no one can tell you're there? What's the point of doing, if no one is watching?

So the Tiger lingers in the bedroom so that Kev will watch him; Kev shouts furiously at Tom, wanting him to stay, to listen; Kev lingers in Tom's life just to be heard. Musa brings his sister to his garden so she can see his handiwork, risking everything he cares about for the sake of a single, appropriately-admiring spectator. Uday is downright obsessed with having an audience: "Look at me," he hisses. Watch this. Watch what I'll do next.

Nothing in this play happens behind closed doors: everything, everything, is witnessed. Sex happens in front of a furious audience of one, Kev changes into his gear before Musa's baffled eyes, thefts are always observed and never surreptitious, death is a spectacle. There's always an on-stage audience... except for when the characters are praying. And then they are begging for God to watch and listen, pleading for the ultimate spectator.

It's a perfectly theatrical obsession: audience audience where's the audience are they looking are they watching have we filled all the seats are they leaving are they laughing are they clapping are they watching

And it has an interesting omission, particularly notable if you compare this war play to Black Watch, currently at Shakespeare Theater. Bengal Tiger has no cameras, no screens. There is no suggestion that wars today can have spectators halfway around the world, glued to computers and TVs, rewinding to watch explosions over and over again.

Maybe those spectators aren't good enough. Maybe you need to see your audience, look into their eyes as they watch you: maybe it's one of the many alienations of war that you are disconnected from your audience.

But perhaps Joseph is making a broader point: these soldiers guarding a zoo, this lowly translator, they were never going to get that audience. No one was ever watching along from home. All they had was each other: no other witnesses at all.

Raise a glass for Cardinal Martini, the pope who never was.

On Friday, Cardinal Carlo Maria Martini passed away: millions mourned the passing of the former archbishop of Milan, an unsually prominent Jesuit and a one-time rumored possibility to succeed Pope John Paul II.

How close did he come to the papacy? Well, by the time John Paul died, Cardinal Martini, almost 80, was visibly frail; he suffered from Parkinson's and did not make it far in the voting process. The result of the early ballots are disputed: Martini may have won more than Ratzinger did in the first bout, or close to it, or far behind, depending on who you ask. Regardless of whether he was a serious rival of Ratzinger's at the election, he was certainly considered a possible future pope just a handful of years before.


So consider: had Martini been just a few years younger, or just a little stronger and healthier, there is a very real possibility that the cardinals at the papal conclave would have elected to the head of the church a man who believed:

• That the Church is 200 years behind the times, and in desperate need of transformation;
• That the refusal to fully acknowledge divorce, remarriage or blended families cuts believers off from the church, which ought to be avoided;
• That the revelations of child abuse indict the church at the highest level and demand fundamental change and reorganization, and are not simply an embarrassment to be concealed or covered up;
• That the use of condoms can be a "lesser evil" in some cases and that the Church's position on contraception was poorly expressed;
• That the terminally ill and dying should have a right to refuse treatment; in fact, as he was dying Cardinal Martini himself eventually refused treatment;
• That the church should reconsider the traditional role of women in church hierarchy, and that female deacons should be ordained;
• That state recognition of same-sex unions is not only perfectly fine, but in fact a positive good, promoting stable relationships (even if they are not relationships that the Church will acknowledge);
• That the structure of the Catholic church was overly authoritarian, that the robes were pompous, and that the Church bureaucracy was overgrown;
• That the church, to remain true to its calling and to raise its relevancy in the modern world, should return to a stronger focus on promoting social work and social justice, particularly in helping the poor and oppressed.

Sound like the Vatican you know?

Martini's death didn't get too much airtime in the States. I first read about it in Spanish, stumbling over ecclesiastical words I didn't know, and then sought out longer profiles and interviews from European publications. American papers gave him only cursory obits. And I think that's part of a larger trend in American reporting on the Church, which is to behave as though the institution is as monolithic as the Holy See likes to claim. (This trend might be changing, as nuns become more popular subjects of profiles, and the split between official Church policy on birth control and actual Catholic practice remains central to issues of public policy). I think we should have talked about him more, as a reminder that the Church is a complex church, full of possibilities for change; sometimes unrealized, but not unimportant.

The death of Martini reminded me of something I learned from an old Jesuit priest in the Philippines: that before the Church authorities declared their official position on new forms of contraception, they convened a group of Catholics - priests and lay believers - to investigate the issue. A married couple interviewed Catholics across the world, asking about their sex lives, their faith, and what contraception would mean for both. The working group recommended that the church allow the use of contraceptives by married couples; famously, the Church rejected this finding, and the rest is history.

History, but not inevitable history. Martini's death as a retired archbishop - and not as pope - was no more inevitable.

An extraordinary number of church leaders believe that their fundamental calling is to help the poor and allieve the pain of the suffering.  The fact that the Church today is most famous as a safe haven for sexual predators, a shadowy organization of unimaginably wealthy men, and an aggressive, political force for social conservativism around the globe - rather than as the world's largest source of food for the hungry, shelter for the homeless, and education for the impoverished - is in many ways an accident of history. Votes that went one way and not another. Illness at the worst possible times, deaths when not expected. Not inevitable, and still not guaranteed.

The Church once gave Mass only in Latin. Things change. They still might.

on Lehrer and Zakaria crashing and burning

In case you haven't been following the stories, in a nutshell:

Wunderkid builds an astonishingly successful career by writing gripping and comprehensible accounts of contemporary neuroscience. In a handful of years, he goes from writing a blog to being hired as a staff writer by the New Yorker. But as his star rises, Jonah Lehrer starts recycling old content of his and repackaging it as new work: then someone looks at his most recent books and realizes he's been making up Bob Dylan quotes. No more New Yorker staff position.

Indian-American editor becomes a widely-respected pundit and opinion writer, shaping the national conversation on foreign affairs through his numerous columns, TV appearances and other media engagements. He was the editor of Newsweek, is currently one of the faces of CNN and Time Magazine, and is regarded as a consistently informed voice of reason. But in Fareed Zakaria's most recent Time column, an entire paragraph was lifted almost word-for-word from a New Yorker piece by Jill Lepore. After a brief hiatus, and other claims of plagiarism that have been debunked, he's been reinstated by Time and CNN.

Now, it's not surprising that people are lazy and unethical. I mean, hello, have you met humanity? It's not surprising that successful and well-respected individuals would make profound moral errors. Or that they would fail on a professional level: after all, this isn't a political scandal, where the moral lapse is often peripheral to the life's work. This is an indictment of both personal ethics and professional ability, and throws a whole body of writing into question.

And unfortunately, it's not surprising to see respected journalists thoroughly discredited: I wish it were, because trustworthiness is about the only capital professional journalists have left, and these high-profile embarrassments are very bad for business. But, alas, it's not surprising at all.

But in two other ways, these cases are downright shocking.

First, both Lehrer and Zakaria failed so dramatically at the kinds of tasks that are normally their biggest strengths. Lehrer's brilliance lay in taking the complicated facts of reality and making them into an approachable narrative. Complex truths were his bread and butter. Why on earth would he ever invent a simple, amateurish lie?

Zakaria had a distinctive voice and was renowned for his breadth of knowledge. He was virtuosic at expressing, in unique words, a well-informed position: yet he stole the words, the knowledge, and the opinion of another thinker.

It would have made more sense the other way around; if Lehrer, who often wrote about other people's research, had swiped some citations, and if Zakaria, fond of a well-placed snappy turn of phrase, had made up a quote when the right one didn't exist. That would be them falling victim to their weaknesses. But instead, their failures map perfectly onto their strengths.

And more fundamentally, I am a little shocked that they were both so phenomenally stupid. I mean, seriously: making up a BOB DYLAN quote? It's lazy, unethical and an absolute journalistic failure to make up a quote from Mildred Brown of Little Pebbletown, Florida. It's firecracker-up-your-butthole stupid to make up a quote from Bob Dylan.  That's like saying, "Oh, I'll make up the title of a Phish song," or "oh, I'll invent some details of this Civil War battle." What kind of idiot fabricates a fact when there's a massive community of people completely obsessed with the thing you're fudging?

(An internationally-famous Rhodes Scholar nonfiction author, that's what kind of idiot).

And Zakaria... really, did you think the readership of Time and the New Yorker contains no overlaps? That people interested in gun control would not read both your column and Lepore's article with close and careful attention? We live in the Google age, my friend. All you have to think is "huh, that sounds a little familiar," and the case is practically closed. There was no universe in which you would not get caught.

These are both men who were supposed to be smart. These are men defined by their intelligence, and rewarded richly for it, with money and prominent bylines and an opportunity to have an enormous impact on a nation's intellectual life. They have been Professionally Intelligent for YEARS.

How on earth could they possibly be so stupid?

the alluring hazards of apartment hunting

Apartment-hunting would be much less dangerous if I could turn my imagination off. But as it is, it’s draining. It’s exhausting. It’s terribly depressing.

With every Craiglist search I die a dozen tiny deaths. With every visit to Padmapper, during every afternoon spent scouring e-replicas of the Washington Post Classifieds, I build up another future life, and then watch as it crashes abruptly down.

Sometimes all it takes is an evocative detail, and I have it, fully formed: an image of a potential future, if only I could land that apartment.  A clawfoot bathtub. Yes, after another long, frustrating day, with another very short paycheck in the mail, I could come home and take a long soak, reading poetry and drinking wine in my clawfoot bathtub, readying myself for another day of crawling up the ladder.

This one’s got cheap rent, shabby carpets, and huge rooms with brightly-painted walls: I can see us passing out boxed wine at the cheerful parties in our orange-and-yellow living room.

And here, a third-story walk-up with a wrought-iron fence outside and a view of picturesque row houses, with skyscrapers on the horizon. From the photos it looks like you can see that window from the kitchen. I’d bake bread, looking out over the city as I kneaded dough, making ambitious weekend plans as the sloppy mess of flour and water coalesced beneath my fingers. I haven’t baked bread in ages, but if that was my kitchen window, things would definitely be different.

Others take longer to grow on me. I see the listing but can’t imagine how I could be happy there: it’s just an ancient, tiny, dimly-lit apartment. I shut the browers and walk away, but twenty minutes later I find myself thinking – it was only one block from an pub. I can see us out late, laughing with friends, rounding the corner from our pub, where the waitresses know our favorite beers. Turning on all the lamps in our humble, creaky apartment, until it is still tiny and creaky, but no longer dark: perfectly appropriate for broke but happy twenty-somethings, which is what we’d be if that was ours.

And then the listing vanishes, and just like that, it’s gone. That will never be my clawfoot tub, my living room wall, my kitchen view, my neighborhood pub. I will never be that ambitious bathtime poetry-reader, that party-throwing peoplepleaser, that bread-baker, that congenial craft beer enthusiast. Not there. Not like that.

Most of my dreams die slower deaths, or linger stubbornly on.  I have fantasies of an immediate future where I wake up every morning to go running, write every day, read the books I want to read, don’t waste any hours staring blankly at the wall and wishing I was someone else. Some mornings that future seems eminently achievable: some evenings it seems achieved. When it slips away from me, it never leaves forever.

Other dreams never grow sharp enough to die: they’re set years in the future, comfortably ambiguous, certainly unachievable in the moment. I don’t know how to realize them, so I can’t tell when they’ve passed irrevocably into impossibility.

But life in that apartment – it would be so manageable. I could pay that security deposit. I could sign that lease. If I could only get there in time, find the right one, beat everyone else to it, that could be mine. It’s so vivid, so close, so achievable.

They slip away, one after another. I wish I could leave my imagination out of this, or lock it in a small grey cage of modest expectations: a standard-issue shower, a view of gravel, in the middle of nowhere interesting. 

With no pleasant specifics to cling to, it would be no great loss to miss out on an apartment: I  could let each one pass with a shrug. My search would be disappointment-free.

But I can’t help it. My hopeful visions of the future are irrepressible. A single new listing and i’m off, building a new castle to destroy, exhausting myself in the process.

A 1920s double-oven gas stove. I’d start contributing to my old food blog for sure, just to take pictures with that in the background.

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2 skinny stories tall, hot pink on the outside, near a tattoo parlor. I think I’d make a fantastic hipster.

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Here’s one next to a froyo shop, which would probably become an addiction. I’d joke with all my friends that I kept them in business.  I’d be one of those cool young professonal women with a stylish wardrobe and a froyo habit and I’d take yoga at the

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And this one has a balcony I’d fill with pots of basil and oregano and carefully chosen flowers, and set up a chair so I could read by

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In which pretty blonde women have babies (gasp)

Have you read Kate Chopin's The Awakening? If not, you should.

Seriously. Go do it now.

****

Have you read it? Great. Let's talk about Marissa Mayer.

Actually, let's not talk about Marissa Mayer. She'll be much more interesting to talk about in a year or so, when we can see if she's managed to jolt Yahoo! into the 21st century. Let's talk about the fact that people are talking about Marissa Mayer's fetus as though it's the biggest piece of news related to her hiring.

Marissa Mayer is, by all accounts, an intelligent technologist, an extremely capable executive, and generally a Web 3.0 star. The biggest news here is that she wanted to work for Yahoo!

But no - we have to talk about how she's pregnant, and how she doesn't seem to think that giving birth will totally destroy her ability to lead an enormous (and enormously struggling) company. What madness!

****

Edna Pontellier, the woman who awakens in The Awakening, is a decade younger than Marissa Mayer, and much less intelligent. Oh, come on - you've read the book by now, and you know it's true. She's good at betting on horses, but she's no towering intellect.

In fact, Edna Pontellier doesn't have much in common with Marissa at all. She's got absolutely no experience with the internet, most of her money comes from her husband, she's not very self-possessed or self-confident, and she's terrible at remembering to wear sunscreen. But she resembles Marissa in a few ways, some of them important: she's blonde(ish) and attractive, she is wealthy, and she would like to do more in life than be a beloved and loving mother.

Edna puts it like this:

"I would give up my life for my children, but I wouldn't give myself."

Her friend Adele, a splendid wife and mother, a beauty bent over the sewing of tiny bibs, doesn't understand this in the slightest; but of course, we can hardly blame Adele, since Edna doesn't quite get understand herself either. But we might observe, from a comfortable readerly distance, that Edna would really like to be the kind of parent that her husband is: unquestionably loving towards their children, very considerate of their material welfare, often absent, and beloved in absence as in presence.

Edna wants many things, of course. She wants to be in love, and to be loved, and to remain married to her husband while having sex with rather more exciting men, and to make art - make good art, even - and to run her own household, and to learn how to swim, and to hear great music, and to walk unencumbered down the streets of New Orleans, and to have happy children, and to eat crackers and Gruyere at midnight if she feels like it.

Edna might be greedy and selfish; that's a pretty fair response to her characterization. She makes sometimes astonishing demands on her husband, who is conveniently absent for much of  the story. But it's very important to note that she does not want everything. There are many apparently desirable things that Edna simply does not want.

She doesn't want to be a powerful society woman (although she probably could be). She doesn't want to summer in Paris (although she certainly could). She doesn't want a big, beautiful house (she has one, and leaves it quite willingly behind). She doesn't want a career in banking (which is fortunate, because she certainly couldn't have one) or a massive amount of wealth (which she has no interest in helping her husband acquire). She wants a certain unexpected combination of things, but she's willing to sacrifice a great deal of advantages; she wants a lot, but she doesn't want it all.

She wants, in many ways, less than her husband wants; but it seems she wants too much.



*********

This is, to my mind, one of the most absurd elements of this whole cultural argument over how women spend their time and when they have their children - from that Atlantic cover story to the reports on Marissa Mayer back all the way through these so-called "Mommy Wars." The desire of certain middle-class or wealthy women to have both children and a successful career has somehow been successfully branded Wanting To Have It All.

Madness! As though a career and children were all the world had to offer. Listen, I have neither a career nor children, and I can promise there are many other things in the world; there are mountains to climb, craft beers to drink, great works of fiction to read; there's art to be made, and chores to be done, and bills to be paid, and I just learned how to make sopes the other day (they were delicious); there are parties to go to and cocktails to learn how to make and crossword puzzles to solve and I am BUSY, okay? I don't know how anybody has time for a career OR a family when there's like five whole seasons of Star Trek to watch.

There are so many different things you can ask from the world: you could want to see every Phish concert live and intoxicated, you could want to get your picture on the cover of Forbes Magazine, you could want to get the most epic neck tattoo of anybody you know, or you could want a quiet, peaceful life on a mountaintop in Nepal. Probably there's nobody on earth who wants all of those things simultaneously; if there is, I kind of admire that person's inner life, even as I regret their constant disappointment with the limitations of the space-time continuum.

But mysterious Nepal-dwelling, neck-tattooed, Phish-loving young executive aside, most of us are really quite okay with the idea that our lives cannot contain all possibilities. Saying that women "want to have it all" suggests a childish inability to comprehend that every decision demands the sacrifice of alternate possibilities. And here's the thing: we all get it.

Yes, of course no one can have it all. But who wants to have it all?

I submit that full-time Phish enthusiasts understand that, in order to smoke as much pot and hear as much Phish as they intend to, they will not be placing themselves on track to be VP at a multinational by the age of 30. And most ambitious young executives appreciate the tragic number of Phish concerts they will have to miss in the pursuit of a higher profit margin,.

We don't want it all. We understand you give up one thing to have another; you do it every minute of your life. But we all fully expect to have more than one thing at a time. This is hardly a revolutionary idea. Both a job as a CEO and an frequently-exercised golf habit; both the responsibilities of president and a loving family; both a rewarding job at a nonprofit and a modest boat, both an income and a career as a poet. To have more things, you simply give up more things; you don't buy a new car, or keep up with five TV shows, or sleep eight hours a night, or eat organic, or take weekends off. You sacrifice the excitement of a city for the cheap price of land in the country, or you live in a 300 square foot apartment for the job opportunities in a city, and either way you can still give up your sushi habit in exchange for a more detailed hobby railroad. There are lots of ways to arrange a life.

The questions are: What do you want? How do you plan to get it? What are you willing to give up in exchange?

*****

What exactly is so excessive about Edna Pontellier's demands on life, anyway? Her artistic ambitions are limited to improvement; she doesn't plan on being the next Rembrandt. Her means match her expenses. She has time enough for all the walks she wants to take and all the men she wants to love, and doesn't ask for any great measure of respect from society. So why is it too much to demand?

It's not that she couldn't possibly demand to the point of excess. To cry out for respect as well as sexual freedom would be to expect too much from her society. To want great artistic success as well as great wealth would be a pretty high bar. Some kinds of lives are harder than others, some are luckier, some demand more fortitude (only a strong-winged bird can fly against the wind, to borrow Mademoiselle Reitz's ominous metaphor). Some simply cost more than they are worth.

But other ways of living might seem workable, yet be unacceptable to the world. And this is the point that drives Edna wild. It seems to her perfectly reasonable that she might have a modest income from her art and her inheritance, a small house, a constrained social life, an appreciation for art and music, and healthy, happy children; how she will manage the lover and the husband never quite coalesces in her mind, but she suspects it can be done.

She's right about almost all of this - except the children. At the end, while it might seem like the note from Robert is the final straw, read closer. It's no accident that a birth scene immediately precedes the romantic disappointment. In the final scene, just like Adele demanded, Edna is thinking of the children.

What she thinks is that she cannot possibly be their mother and be also herself. Mothers can have affairs or hobbies or interests or appreciations, but they cannot be individuals; they cannot be let alone.

She cannot live her longed-for life because her children possess her too completely.

And yet her children are living with their grandmother; she has visited them once, brought bon-bons, kissed them and loved them exorbitantly, and left. They seem to be perfectly happy with this situation. She has nannies and maids to care for their needs and keep them safe, relatives to help shower them with love, she has an abundance of affection for them; there is no practical reason why she should feel that her children are preventing her from living the life she wants. And still she is wholly convinced that they are, devastatingly certain that they have destroyed her independence through their very existence.

*****

There is something patently absurd about suggesting it is unworkable for a woman to both raise a child and do difficult, time-consuming work. That "something" is the entirety of human history - including the present - in which the vast majority of women struggled and labored just to keep their children alive.

It is as absurd as Edna's internal claim that her children, who love her fondly and miss her hardly at all, are a concrete obstacle to her attaining an independent life of happiness.

And both these absurdities are, of course, not the real argument at all.  Rather, the critics of the new Yahoo CEO and Chopin's dour heroine have reached the same underlying conclusion: that a woman cannot properly love her children while acting on any unmaternal desires - any longing for fame, respect, sex, or power. Regardless of how the mother and child in question feel about the situation, regardless of the family finances, regardless of how controlled or confident or strong the woman in question is, regardless of the father's aid or absence, regardless...


What do you want? How do you plan to get it? What are you willing to give up in exchange?

Pontellier and Mayer can make any answer they want to the second and third question. It doesn't matter. The problem is with their answer to the first.

It would be fine for their critics - though perhaps not for them - if they were, in some way, fighting fundamentally for the needs of their family. "I want to feed my children, so I need to work" is never part of the "Women Can't Have It All" discussion.

It would be acceptable if they wanted no children at all; if Edna, like the prickly pianist Mlle. Reitz, were willing to forgo the rewards of a family, she too could be unliked and independent. Mayer's uterus would never have made the news at all.

But they want a family and. And and and. A family and an art career, a family and professional success, a family and love, a family and freedom, a family and some revolutions in the way the internet is used on a daily basis.

While they might see a thousand ways to build a life of "ands," the world cries out that the very idea is unacceptable. Chase both money and religious satisfaction, pursue moral certainty and gustatory excess and artistic excellence, seek both quiet contentment and constant excitement from the world - you can ask for anything else, but add "and family" and suddenly you Want It All.

Don't bother explaining all the things you're willing to sacrifice for the sake of your "and" - didn't anyone ever tell you you Can't Have Everything?

***

It is a strange world that views children as cages. It was strange to Chopin, a mother and an author, 115 years ago. It ought to be deeply strange to us now.