I Wrote This Book Because I Love You

by Tim Kreider

  * * *

  People seldom make a conscious decision to change and then actually follow through and do it. I never do, anyway. If it happens at all, it happens without my noticing; I look back at something I did five or ten years ago and am surprised to realize that I simply wouldn’t do it now. That I’m not that guy anymore. Not long ago I was telling a friend about one of my students’ final essays with what must’ve been audible adoration, because she interrupted to ask: “Do you love her?” I was actually scandalized. “You mean am I in love with her?” I asked. “No! Of course not—she’s, like, nineteen! She’s my student.”

  Still, don’t let’s read this as some morality tale of redemption through responsibility—The Temptations of Timothy; or, a Roué Reformed. I don’t know what redemption even means, and still maintain that responsibility is best delegated to those too slow-witted to avoid it. (I’m also hesitant to give myself too much credit, since virtue comes more easily with age and the ebbing of desire. I’ve always admired Montaigne for declining to repent of his vices: “I would be ashamed and jealous if the wretched lot of my decrepitude were to be preferred above the years when I was healthy, aroused and vigorous.”) The last thing I’d want to be accused of is “growing up”; this is how boring conventional people congratulate you when your spirit breaks. My current girlfriend is, by any standard, old enough to make her own questionable decisions, but still young enough that our relationship is respectably scandalous.

  But I am glad to have found, if only for a semester, one human arena in which I could exercise a form of devotion safely firewalled off from desire. A form, really, of love. For what else would you call it, what else could it be that would drive a man to comment in such exhaustive detail on all those essays, to run off all those copies and correct countless apostrophes for what must’ve averaged out to the hourly wage of a Bangladeshi garment worker? They’ll be dispersing into the world soon, my students, to become grad students, librarians, or teachers, some of them maybe even writers, my intellectual and artistic foster daughters. When a student of mine got an essay she’d written in my class published, I was far happier than when I publish anything myself. Late in a life largely given over to hedonism, I had discovered a novel pleasure: being proud of someone. In a sense other than she intended, the answer to my friend’s question—“Do you love her?”—was: of course.

  Teaching was not some sort of karmic atonement or reparation for Rosalind. The two situations are not analogous. But I sometimes think of the two episodes as speaking of two poles of my character. It frankly makes me uncomfortable to write about them both in the same essay: these parts of us are supposed to be kept sequestered in separate worlds that never touch, like your résumé and your porn. I wonder whether talking about these two things together—the kind of love my friend asked about and the kind I actually felt—makes us so squeamish because the latter is a highly refined, almost unrecognizable form of the former. But it’s only politicians, journalists, and other moralists who need to reduce things to Jekyll-and-Hyde terms. Personality isn’t a point but a spectrum. Rosalind wanted me to admit that I was an exploitative creep, while I was trying to convince us both that I was really a decent guy; we were both buying into the fallacy that I must be one or the other. The nice guys and the creepy guys are all the same guys.

  The trick would be to reconcile these estranged selves—the selfish and the generous, the lecherous and the kind. Ideally, in romantic relationships, desiring someone and caring about her are supposed to coincide. I won’t go so far as to say that the two are fundamentally at odds, but they certainly tend to complicate each other. (“Not one couple in a century has that chance,” S. Morgenstern writes of true love, “no matter what the storybooks say . . .”) Long-married friends tell me that the more truly you know someone, the more important they become to you, the more terrifying the prospect of revealing yourself before them becomes. Getting naked with some stranger is easy; but, like Gina said, “baring yourself emotionally—that’s really scary.” How do you balance sanity and happiness? About love and sex I still feel almost as clueless as I did at orientation.

  There was an afternoon, months after I’d broken things off with Rosalind, when I was biking down Fifth Avenue, wearing a helmet and sunglasses, and I was about to slip past a bus that had pulled over, when I saw a girl about to step off the curb to board. She paused and drew back when she saw me approaching but, seeing that I was braking for her, she gave me a tentative thumbs-up to say Thanks or Good bike etiquette, dude. She looked tired, at the end of a long day. It was no big deal—just a fleeting instant of civility between two strangers. It took me a few seconds to recognize her out of context, so it wasn’t until after she’d stepped on board that I realized that the woman in front of me had been Rosalind. Two former lovers, nearly colliding at rush hour in this city of eight millions. I wanted to say something to her, but it was too late, and Rosalind never knew it was me.

  * * *

  I. Groucho, not Karl.

  II. It did occur to me to wonder, too late, why I hadn’t figured this factor into my own college application strategy: Why hadn’t I gone to a 70 percent female college where I could’ve disported myself like a satyr?

  The Uncertainty Principle

  I did not have some naïve idea that Diana could save me, in the religious sense or any other. But I’d lately been doing some reading and thinking about the big insoluble questions, and it’s possible that modulating my twentieth-century hard-line atheism had left me more open to getting involved with someone who believed in God. And Diana did more than just believe in God; she was actually a pastor.

  That’s how she answered when people in New York City, capital of Godless East Coast liberal-elite America, asked her what she did: “I’m a pastor, actually.” She had started her own church in the heart of hipster Brooklyn, with an unconventional worship service she’d designed herself. But it wasn’t some New Agey church where they kept the God talk to a minimum; it was part of a stodgy, respectable, five-hundred-year-old denomination, and although some of her congregants were young people who worked in the arts or for nonprofits, there were also single parents and retirees, the unemployed and the homeless. She was something of a rising star in the clerical world—a charismatic woman who’d created a new church that was attracting young people and growing at a time when the denomination’s membership was aging and churches were closing down.

  It did not, however, make her a hot commodity on OkCupid. A lot of guys either assumed she must be priggish and virginal, or else fetishized her profession. It must have been a little like being East Asian—having to gauge whether men actually like you or just want to act out some Madame Butterfly/hentai fantasy. I suspected the sorts of guys who got off on cassocks and wimples had probably grown up in guilt-inflicting religions that veil sex in secrecy and shame. (These religions never seem to realize that secrecy and shame are the psychological equivalents of thongs and garters.) I told Diana that I associated church with doughy women in print dresses and hairnets, and did not ever need to see her in her clerical collar if we could help it.

  For years I’d told people the worst thing about my own religious upbringing was that it was boring. This was meant as a backhanded compliment; it hadn’t warped my sexuality, given me nightmares, or left my personality twisted with resentment or shame (let alone withheld medical treatment, subjected me to regular rape, or any other more overt crimes). The values it taught—simple living, service, pacifism—still seemed to me like sane and decent ones. Church was boring, make no mistake—the drawings I did in bulletins could fill a multivolume set of notebooks—but at least it wasted fewer hours of my life than school.

  The thing I really couldn’t forgive it for was not being true. As a child I’d read picture books about the Good Samaritan, mounted puppet shows about Lot’s wife, and listened to children’s rock operas about Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego (Abednego? Yes, Abednego! Oh, no!). I’d grown up drawing crayon pictures of Captain Americ
a, Prune Face, Jesus, and Frankenstein, all of them more or less equally real to me. In early adolescence, I remembered how the grown-ups had gradually let me in on the secret of Santa Claus, and I kept waiting, increasingly uneasily, for them to do the same thing with God. I can still remember how it felt to lose the easy belief of childhood, and trying to cling to it; the closest thing I can compare it to in adulthood is trying to recapture the feeling you once had for a favorite song, or for someone you’re no longer in love with.

  What really did God in for me was the reading: Carl Sagan was the kindly uncle who drew me in with a sense of wonder and then gently broke it to me that there was no reason to posit God as first cause; Freud the strict, no-nonsense grandpapa who scoffed that it was all a lot of infantile projection, a big bearded father figure in the clouds; and Nietzsche the disreputable friend of the family who slyly pointed out how religion (and its rebranding, idealism) exalted the purely imaginary over life, the world, or anything real. The Church was probably smart, from a self-serving point of view, to oppose translating the Bible into the vernacular for so long.

  Ceasing to believe what your parents and all the other nicest grown-ups you know have always taught you, and still believe themselves, is initially liberating, but it’s also alienating. It makes you feel secretly snobby, and sorry, and alone.

  Like a lot of unhappy people, I’d formed a half-conscious assumption that depression was a function of intelligence, that happy people just hadn’t Realized yet. But after thirty years of smug unhappiness, it was starting to lose some of its adolescent cool. I was drawn to Diana partly because she seemed so effortlessly happy. She showed up last-minute to an animated Batman film, threw herself into the seat next to me all flushed and out of breath, and said, “This is going to be awesome.” It was this—her certainty that this was going to be awesome—that appealed to me. She would wake up in the morning and say, “Today’s going to be great.” Most mornings I woke up and thought: Fuck—this again. Of course her happiness wasn’t effortless; I knew so little about the condition that I assumed, like all ignorant amateurs watching a disciplined artist or athlete, that it must come easily to her. My agent, attempting to foist off on me some piece of book-party swag, a little journal bound in orange faux leather imprinted with the gilt slogan LIFE IS BEAUTIFUL, suggested that maybe Diana would like it. “Lea,” I said, “she’s religious, not retarded.”

  On one of our first dates, when Diana was feeling out whether “the whole pastor thing” was going to be an issue for me, I ventured a potentially impolitic analogy: I told her that I had a friend who was a prostitute, and that her being a pastor signified about as much to me as Zoey’s being a whore; it was an unusual occupation that suggested she must be an interesting, unconventional person, but in general I didn’t take all that much interest in people’s jobs. To my relief, Diana liked this analogy a lot.

  In an unfallen world, I suppose, there’d be no need for either prostitution or religion, but both institutions apparently answer basic, insatiable human needs, and I expect they’ll both endure for as long as this unfinished, half-crippled species exists. A cynic might say that, of the two rackets, prostitution at least delivers on what it promises. But both Zoey and Diana are exceptions among their respective professions: Zoey sees prostitution as intimate, even loving; Diana once said, “I believe sex is sacred, even if it’s with someone you’ve never met before.” They both use the word vocation to describe what they do. Zoey says her work fulfills deep needs that aren’t being met in any other way; Diana describes her job as creating a space in which people can “become who God meant them to be.” Let’s not overstrain this analogy—Diana counsels the homeless and lonely and Zoey fucks people with strap-ons—but they’re both trying, in very different ways, to help people become themselves.

  What I relate is the history of the next two centuries. I describe what is coming, what can no longer come differently: the advent of nihilism. . . . For some time now our whole European culture has been moving as toward a catastrophe, with a tortured tension that is growing from decade to decade: restlessly, violently, headlong, like a river that wants to reach the end . . .

  . . . [W]hen truth enters into a fight with the lies of millennia, we shall have upheavals, a convulsion of earthquakes, a moving of mountains and valleys, the like of which has never been dreamed of. . . . [T]here will be wars the like of which have never yet been seen on earth.

  These passages by badly lapsed Lutheran Friedrich Nietzsche have been spooking readers for a century now, and will likely spook them for a century more. (The first is from his notes, posthumously scavenged and published as The Will to Power; the second from Ecce Homo.) Whence he pulled that “two centuries” figure is anyone’s guess, but so far, halfway through his predicted interregnum, it’s hard to argue he was wrong: the wars of the twentieth century have made all the previous wars in history look like provincial skirmishes. The greatest of these slaughters were perpetrated in the name of atheistic ideologies (although some of this unprecedented violence can be credited to exciting new breakthroughs in person-killing technology; it’s not pleasant to picture what would’ve happened if the Crusaders had had nerve gas, or the Hittites had Gatling guns). Some people think we’re now in the midst of a global religious war between Fundamentalist Islam, still dangerously fervid in its belief, and the dissolute secular West. (Or maybe it’s really between Fundamentalist Islam and Fundamentalist Christianity—what the media calls “sectarian violence” when it doesn’t involve our sect.) Pluralist societies are recoiling from an influx of Muslim refugees now that Allahu Akbar is translated, throughout much of the West, as Fire in the hole! Democracies are electing racist reactionaries, longing for another Charles “the Hammer” Martel to drive back the Mohammedan horde. But fundamentalism isn’t a sign of a faith’s health and strength; it arises in reaction to a faith being fragile, endangered.

  I recently attended the deconsecration of a church with my mother. It was a lovely little picture-book country church with a view of rolling northern Maryland pastures where horses grazed. Although I’d never attended this church myself, my mother had been an elder there, my father was buried in its cemetery, and I’d walked my sister down its aisle. After my mother spoke, I snuck out to go sit and read As I Lay Dying on a bench beside my father’s grave, which was still less depressing than a deconsecration. Mom herself was stoic about the end of the congregation; it was a decade overdue, she said. There were fewer than twenty people still regularly attending, and no one was under eighty-five.

  There’ll be more and more of these ceremonies in the years to come. A lot of churches are now demographically divided over issues like homosexual clergy and marriage, splitting into younger, urban, progressive churches and older, rural, conservative ones, the former unrecognizable to older church members as the same religion they grew up in, the latter gradually dying off. My mother, in her late seventies, tells me her friends are puzzled and saddened that their children have rejected the faith they were raised in. Mom, who has a master’s in theology, is more philosophical, saying that I seem to have internalized the values of the church, if not the metaphysics. Apparently Mom got a lot of shit from her fellow churchgoers over a letter I’d written to our denomination’s national magazine in which I outed myself as an atheist but also piously reminded them all of Jesus’ line about camels and the eye of a needle.I

  On our second date, Diana and I had a tentative talk to determine whether either of us was adamant enough about either Christianity or atheism for this to be what they call, in dating, a deal breaker. I asked Diana what about religion was so important to her. She said it had to do with fostering a sense of community, with the holiness of human connection. She’d deliberately designed her church’s service to feel homey, familial. “There are many moments when I wonder if believing in God is silly or foolish or self-serving,” she wrote me later, “and then I go to church and eat some bread with some people I’ve never met and talk about parasites and there is
nothing holier.” I thought of the semiweekly hootenannies my friends in South Baltimore had had for years, where we’d all gather in the back room of Cox’s Pub and play “Roller Derby Queen” and “Bad, Bad Leroy Brown” and talk seriously about women and politics and whether Lando Calrissian could ever truly be trusted again, all while drinking pitchers of beer and the occasional round of shots, toasting: “Gentlemen, our lives are unbelievably great.” I said to Diana: “Those things are really important to me, too.”

  I grew up during a bizarre discontinuity in human history, the second half of the twentieth century, not only post-Nietzsche/Darwin/Freud but also postwar/Holocaust/Bomb. The intellectual and artistic zeitgeist was characterized by what you might call an exalted bleakness: Camus, Beckett, Bacon, Bergman. It was intoxicating stuff for an adolescent to ingest after the stuffy atmosphere of church—intoxicating in the sense of being liberating and stimulating but also, in the long term, poisonous. (I started drinking around the same time.) And yet it wasn’t entirely discontinuous with the aesthetics and sensibilities of the iconoclastic northern European sect I grew up in. The art I loved in adolescence, from Edward Albee to Stanley Kubrick, had a certain hardassed austerity to it, a beauty that wasn’t pretty, one that consisted in rigor and renunciation—the renunciation of comforting delusions, the worship of unlovely truth.