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I don't know if I ended up siding with the acedemics just because I happened to end up in graduate school, or if I ended up in graduate school because I already secretly sided with the academics. In any case, I stopped believing that "theory" had the power to ruin literature for anyone, or that it was possible to compromise something you loved by studying it. Was love really such a tenuous thing? Wasn't the point of love that it made you want to learn more, to immerse yourself, to become possessed?
On the whole, I thought, I had been right to write to Ivan. Just by typing some words on a computer, I had caused so many things to happen in the world—sleep to be lost, plane tickets to be bought, money to change hands. In a way, it had been a test of what a person could achieve just through writing. But there were also times when I worried that I had acted foolishly and without dignity. I thought of the ball near the beginning of Anna Karenina, when Kitty looked lovingly at Vronsky, who was already really into Anna: "and long afterwards, for several years later, that look, full of love, to which he made no response, cut her to the heart with an angony of shame." Kitty literally almost died of shame, and had to go to a German spa. Then she confided in Varenka, and Varenka said: "Why, what is there shameful? You didn't tell a man, who didn't care for you, that you loved him, did you?" And Kitty said of course not, she never said anything.
To me it proves that life and time are not in sync. It's as if time was all wrong and the wife's life was lived on the wrong bank of the river or, worse yet, on two banks, with neither being the right one. None of us may want to claim to live life in two parallel lanes but all have many lives, one tucked beneath or right alongside the other. Some lives wait their turn because they haven't been lived at all, while others die before they've lived out their time, and some are waiting to be relived because they haven't been lived enough. Basically, we don't know how to think of time, because time doesn't really understand time the way we do, because time couldn't care less what we think of time, because time is just a wobbly, unreliable metaphor for how we think about life. Because ultimately it isn't time that is wrong for us, or we for time. It may be life itself that is wrong.
