Never will I ever--.

--hate anyone ever again.

It's draining. "Enervating," as they say (a word that doesn't seem to mean itself -- as I was reminded this past weekend). I've done it. I'm over it. The truth I want to believe is: if we could dig ourselves out of moral stupidity and somehow bring ourselves to full empathy, we could never hate. It would be impossible, because we're all too human. (Read: // we're all // too human, not we're //all too // human.) But supposing that isn't actually true, I still think I could do it, as a personal project! (Personal projects = awesome. Obviously.)

Cruelty.

I like the idea of it.
I like the idea of inflicting it before it can be inflicted on me. I think there's something beautiful about revenge, about hatred. Compassion is soft; forgiveness, weak. Part of me understands the necessity of it. Part of me knows it to be merely a tactic.

It will never end, this struggle, and I know I will write about it in different ways for a long time. I just don't know what's natural anymore: the urge to love or the urge to hate. Sometimes I think there is no difference, but then I realize I'm just being contradictory for its own sake.

I feel like Ayn Rand. I want to write characters who are stunning in pure internal strength. To write what I lack, perhaps? I'm not too fond of what I have to do to appear . . . the way I'm expected to appear. I can't separate the tactic from the necessity, don't know if there's a difference.

What happened.

This is something from creative writing, which is to say that I wrote half of it over the summer and half of it about two days ago. It's more autobiographical than I meant it to be. Also I use some of the same imagery. Literary laziness.

She looked up. Craig was now waiting for her response. In the moment that she’d been gone in her own thoughts, the clouds had obstructed the sun and the afternoon had grown gloomy. She could no longer see her own shadow broken by the ripples of the pool water.

She realized that he had perhaps grown anxious. The question was unusual and serious coming from him, and it gave her a moment’s pause. She pulled her legs out of the pool and placed them to drip splotches onto the concrete.

She looked at her feet, noticing the paint chipping on her toenails, before answering.

“I don’t think so,” she began, then hesitated. What did she mean to say? “It would be the end of something—something pretty big. It wouldn’t be so easy, after that.” Another pause. He coughed—a forced burst of air. “What do you think?”

His response came quick and nonchalant, a boy’s reasoning.

“I think it’d be possible,” he said, by which he meant it’d be safe. “We’d still have things to talk about, stuff in common.” He gestured vaguely at the air, an action with which he intended to prove their camaraderie.

In the years that followed, as she grew into a woman wiser than her teenage self, she’d come back to that brief conversation and dissect it into moments. The question. Her silence. Then, her response. His response, so much more and less definitive at once. His friendly eagerness. She grew to resent him.

In the end, it was he who’d been right. But more and more she realized that it was she who’d given the better answer.

My first reaction was: that’s not what happened. I didn’t think it militantly, just: it wasn’t the truth. It wasn’t the truth, and she was beholden to the truth, wasn’t she? Writers are, to intangible concepts like that: truth, beauty, love. And she hadn’t been faithful.

Not to mention the other intangible concepts she hadn’t been faithful to.

Really, it was beyond even the question of leeway. She’d said an infinite number of times on the phone: I twist. It’s what I do. It’s why I write. I’d believed her justifications, her theoretical empathy and sympathy and I-can-do-whatever-the-hell-I-want-pathy, because up until now it hadn’t mattered, because up until now her reasons didn’t seem like blatant rationalizations for exploitation.

But that’s not what happened.

Of course I recognized myself: boyish, affable, maybe simple at times and ridiculous because of it. Maybe she thought I wouldn’t, which is why she sent the manuscript to me, as though it were any random story, any random character.

I recognized myself in the way she wrote about my coughing—she always mocked me for it, the way I got so visibly nervous. Tense, is the word she used. Tense, and then she’d scoff and push me into strained conversation: about mutual respect, about emotional development, about our parents. When I inevitably contrived answers out of a growing sense of panic, she’d call me out, call me naïve.

Here it was, on the page.

But her painted toenails hadn’t been chipped – she would never have let them get like that, back then. And she didn’t hesitate. She never has—she plunges into dialogue and attacks it, slices into it the way she did the pool after she’d answered me:

It would be the end of something. We wouldn’t need each other, after that. We would be separate, independent. It would take so much effort, and there’d be no real reason.

—And then she stood up and dove, one swift and savage motion. She was beside me, and then she was gone. I had been smiling. She must have thought I was a fool.

One more thing: it was a sunny afternoon. There wasn’t a cloud in the sky. I know, because she was squinting as she talked. She wasn’t looking at me, but I could see her eyebrows furrowed, her expression pinched—as she talked and I gestured in vain, and she was looking into the sun, already staring firmly into the distance.

Tess.

Is it true that to love someone means to essentialize them? I’m writing about Tess and Thomas Hardy, and the fact that he was in love with his own character, and it seems to me to be so essentially true, this concept of blind judgment, of studied ignorance.

Thomas Hardy was so infatuated with Tess that it showed through his characterization of her, into the very way his narrator describes her character. It’s almost eerie to see how invasive, how graphic, how focused the narrator’s scrutiny of her is, almost as if he’s standing behind her in the bushes: stalker-writer.

Of course, this sort of controlled captivation is true of any author, any narrator, any story, but with Tess, it leaves a taste of perversion, perhaps because Hardy’s other characters also so easily mistreat her and essentialize her. Angel finds her to be the essence of womanhood, Alec treats her as a sex object. We really want to believe that someone understands her, even if it’s the omniscient narrator—but even he, it seems, suffers from a sort of need to make her what she’s not. I think this is the worst of everything for Tess, even worse than the cruelty of fate and the missteps and mistimed coincidences of her life. The fact that no one will ever understand her (not that even I do, of course . . .)—it leaves me so desperate for someone to rewrite her, to allow her an escape from her horrible destiny.

I do believe that Tess is real, but it’s not because of Hardy’s brilliant portrayal (as some scholars claim), not because she is so complex and brave and vulnerable at the same time. I believe she’s real in spite of the way Hardy treats her on the page. But poor Thomas Hardy, I think. Poor man, so infatuated with the ideal of a simple country girl with rustically good intentions and eternal purity. He couldn’t have her any other way, could he?

This is all predicated on the assumption that we can speak about characters as if they’re real, as if they have a core of identity. It’s still a question whether humans even achieve this: solipsism abounds. We cannot know the full extent of anyone’s existence. (Indeed, I just spent a few days questioning the reality of other people, so.) But if we can really come into a three-dimensional understanding of each other, and if we are allowed to treat the characters in books as flesh and blood, then—then I’m as sad for Tess as I am for her author.