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Dear Jackie (Gemstone_10021),

 

I sensed in your last email to me that you were getting "cold feet" about meeting me. I felt your questions were pretty much lined up to "crash the deal" but did my best to answer them.

 

They were, for instance, a far cry from your writing, as you had, "In terms of what I am passionate about.. first and foremost, it's my children. Then it would be intelligent men! You do sound brilliant!:)" Here, you sound both hopeful and full of play. And while, sure, it's fairly plain that I'm brilliant, this is not, I think, the best aspect to "fall" for me or not; rather, it would be my own life-playfulness (even though that hardly sounds so), and my willingness and ability to listen to another (which you could also call attentiveness), and my willingness & ability to feel the world around me (which you could also call sensitivity). "Brilliance" or "intelligence" is at the service or the behest of these, allowing me to articulate, to some degree, some of my so-called constituent parts, as David Hume might have it.

 

I really can't help playing, don't want to, and never will; this does not make me frivolous, insincere, or silly; rather, I think, quite the opposite. It means I am active and aware and full of the very breath of life itself. I am these; ample, fair, and strong (as Whitman put it about his grand matriarch America).

 

Honestly, Jackie, you asked me about what is "reasonable" (my mind flashed to a brilliant & playful section of Stephen Pinker's book How the Mind Works in the index under "Romantic Love"--which I'm doing everything here I can besides pasting it for you, which I could, too, but think if it's really worth your time and curiosity you'll go to B & N and look it up yourself one day), and I can tell you upfront that there is nothing "reasonable" about it. Couched in terms of "dating" there is no point. With an eye turned toward, against, or around "marriage" (and her sometime sister "divorce"), may God be with us all.

 

But toward meeting someone you might fall for? or whom I might fall for? These uncertainties, these blessings, I will never shirk from. It is, I suppose, a certain worldview, a definite Weltenschauung I have held and maintained at my very best--and, for that matter, forfeit at my worst; and then, to borrow a phrase from one of Joseph Conrad's doomed ship-captains, I am like a man whose "head is wrapped in a wool blanket." However, I am much more the Lord Jim type: troublesome, rebellious, obstinate, passionate, and principled to the point of feeling, at least, but never performing, some murder in my bones (though not quite as tall as that eponymous hero.)

 

Know, though, for certain, I am not a murderer at all; it's only a convenient and immediate trope, which I don't feel like amending to play it safe. I don't play safe. Safe is unappealing to me, boring. Yes, I once knew a fine enough lady from the Upper West Side; it was so safe I thought my life was turning into being one of those mindless ant-bodies living inside a nibbled-away tunnel inside the plastic see-through case of one of Uncle Milton's Ant Farms for children. No, I like adventure: I drove down, just as I say in my profile essentially, at the drop of the hat, to buy a woman the finest bar of chocolate at Whole Foods recently. We had little in common; she never unbuttoned even her coat; I am happy I did so, and will be happy for it all my life. Reasonable? Absolutely not. Crazy? Absolutely not. Passionate, yes. Adventuresome, yes. Romantic, yes. Poetic? Absolutely.

yrs.,

Egbert

# 128

 

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