Turning from the Mirror (Response to Liking is for Cowards and The Wedding Toast I'll Never Give)

We like the mirror and the mirror likes us. To friend a person is merely to include the person in our private hall of flattering mirrors.

The simple fact of the matter is that trying to be perfectly likable is incompatible with loving relationships. Sooner or later, for example, you’re going to find yourself in a hideous, screaming fight, and you’ll hear coming out of your mouth things that you yourself don’t like at all… Something realer than likability has come out in you, and suddenly you’re having an actual life.

Love is about bottomless empathy, born out of the heart’s revelation that another person is every bit as real as you are.

(Liking is for Cowards)

He summed it up as: “Life is suffering — and yet.”

There is perfection only in death.

But there is so much beauty in the trying, and in the failing, and in the trying again.

(The Wedding Toast I’ll Never Give)

Turning from the Mirror

          It’s underlying. It swims below the surface. There is an obsessive beauty in doing a certain action or method the right way. This could be a set of instructions for building a unit to be used, or an even greater ordeal. There is a primitive want within the individual to do things a specific way because it’s what they’ve been structured to do or what they want to make sure to avoid in the future.

          The text itself comes and sits at a table, facing one another. They exchange thoughts and ideas, coming to the idea of a shared notion between the two; be it known that because “there is perfection in death”, a MOE from Ada Calhoun’s The Wedding Toast I’ll Never Give, it is insane to realize simply how idolized humans have become over the idea of perfection. When there is an inability to do so, be perfect, conflict arises, despite the fact that we as social beings find acceptance through a network between each other, as Jonathon Franzen says in Liking is for Cowards, so that perfection is as unreachable as the level of actual satisfaction that can be received from likes on social media.

          But if we want to find unity together, why is it so easy for us to be strewn apart like forgotten child’s toys in a playroom? Ready to buy a new object to become fixated upon?

          Modern America has the plight of the pursuit of happiness. It has its own misconstrued concepts, but the overall idea provides a gross paradox upon the subject of love: if you aren’t happy with the person you find yourself with, leave them to go try again with another. If that doesn’t work out for you, go and try again. And again. We are sickeningly seeking out to please what we see reflected in the mirror despite realizing that there are beings around us just as deserving, if not more so, of genuine love, empathy, and kindness. If “life is suffering”, then why do we try to isolate our minds into the thought that we must suffer alone? That no one around us could possibly understand what could be going on within our heads. (We aren’t that special.) We must try to preserve the relationships we have for the fear of losing them is an evident possibility; we must always try despite the possibility of utter failure that can actually come about from such an attempt.