Rachel Aviv - "Agnes Callard's Marriage of the Minds"

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/03/13/agnes-callard-profile-marriage-philosophy

 

Marriage is “an institution committed to the dulling of the feelings,” Susan Sontag once wrote. “The whole point of marriage is repetition.” Agnes and Arnold felt that they had entered marriage without clearly thinking through what the institution was actually for. For many couples, marriage ends up being about making a family, and, when it fails to meet other needs, the couple lovingly and generously lets it fail. But Agnes was uncomfortable with the prospect of a relationship that had lost its aspirational character

 

 

They were sharing the same space, but Agnes felt as if they were in two separate worlds. She was reminded of a line from the Icelandic novel “Independent People,” by Halldór Laxness, which she had just read: “Two human beings have such difficulty in understanding each other—there is nothing so tragical as two human beings.”

 

 

In “Parallel Lives,” a study of five couples in the Victorian era, the literary critic Phyllis Rose observes that we tend to disparage talk about marriage as gossip. “But gossip may be the beginning of moral inquiry, the low end of the platonic ladder which leads to self-understanding,” she writes. “We are desperate for information about how other people live because we want to know how to live ourselves, yet we are taught to see this desire as an illegitimate form of prying.”  

Anthony Lane - "The Shock and Aftershocks of 'The Waste Land'"

 https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/10/03/the-shock-and-aftershocks-of-the-waste-land

Eliot would lean toward the second. "Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood," he wrote, in an essay on Dante. "It is better to be spurred to acquire scholarship because you enjoy the poetry, than to suppose that you enjoy the poetry because you have acquired the scholarship." What he sought, as both a writer and a reader, was "some direct shock of poetic intensity." True to that quest, "The Waste Land" is a symphony of shocks, and, like other masterworks of early modernism, it refuses to die down. (Go to MOMA and let your gaze move across Picasso's "Demoiselles d'Avignon," from west to east. If you don't flinch when you reach the faces on the right, bladed and scraped like shovels, consult your optician.) The shocks have triggered aftershocks, and readers of Eliot are trapped in the quake. Escape is useless: 

DA

Datta: what have we given?

My friend, blood shaking my heart

The awful daring of a moment's surrender

Which an age of prudence can never retract

By this, and this only, we have existed

Which is not to be found in our obituaries

Or in memories draped by the beneficent spider

Or under seals broken by the lean solicitor 

In our empty rooms

I happen to think, for what it's worth, that these lines, which come toward the end of "The Waste Land," are the greatest that Eliot ever wrote. They cast a shadow of a doubt over everything that we believe about ourselves, at different stages of our lives; over the stories of ourselves that we tell to other people; and over what they tell of us in turn. As always with Eliot, abstraction is offset by the taut particularity of physical things: the spider, the wax seals, and the shuddering blood, concluding in the long and mournful double "o" of "rooms." And the word "surrender" could be applied to so many daring souls: a lover at the instant of ecstasy, a religious devotee, a hounded warrior, a corruptible politician, a wooer who hastens, like Eliot, into a proposal of marriage, or a Dostoyevskian gambler, with the family jewels in his pocket. All of them will face that overwhelming question: "What have we given?" It is something that each of us must ask, on our deathbeds, though nobody wants to die in shame.