Sweet Dreams
And the only explanation I can find
Is the love that I've found, ever since you've been around
Your love's put me at the top of the world
Everything I want the world to be
Is now comin' true especially for me
And the reason is clear, it's because you are here
You're the nearest thing to heaven that I've seen
― Carpenters, "Top of the World"
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Sweet dreams are made of this
Who am I to disagree
I travel the world and the seven seas
Everybody's looking for something
Some of them want to use you
Some of them want to get used by you
Some of them want to abuse you
Some of them want to be abused
―Eurythmics, "Sweet Dreams (Are Made Of This)"
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Dear Kate,
Two visions of "sweet dreams," one about our togetherness, another estrangement, both ring true.
Human relationship is the most fragile thing on earth. (If it is a "thing" at all: we could be sweet-dreaming the whole thing up, that there really is nothing to sing about, as some scientists and philosophers tried to tell us.)
Most fragile because it's also most invincible when we have it good.
"All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way," thus says Leo Tolstoy to begin telling the story of Anna Karenina with one of the most well-known opening lines in literature. I don't pretend to know what Tolstoy exactly means, but I will say probably something about how grace is unnatural and strife is the human norm.
If you are happy, don't break the spell. Don't touch the morning dew, so perfectly shaped, sitting on a new leaf, bouncing merrily half way between heaven and earth. It takes nothing to introduce a more angular perspective to things. Everything.
When you are in love, your world necessarily gets small, to contain and sustain the illusion, your "vision" of human togetherness, like the one in the Carpenter song, at once magnanimous and most stingy, navel-gazing at the cosmos. When love is gone, it's all about control, grasping for what is left of you and with each other, holding up placard of lost ideals to, usually, credit the defeat to the Other.
"So racist, so sexist," our Green Party Leader slams bid to oust her as the party leader. The same ideals that first placed her there are now weaponized for a civil war between lovers. Her former lovers accused her of acting "with an autocratic attitude of hostility, superiority and rejection...has attended few council meetings, and when in attendance, has displayed anger in long, repetitive, aggressive monologues and has failed to recognize the value of any ideas except her own..." I hope that's not how my kids are going to eulogize me. I can explain.
Fairness, equality, freedom, good for one and all?
The Vancouver School Board is scrapping honours math, science programs, so that "all students will have access to an inclusive model of education, and all students will be able to participate in the curriculum fulsomely." Equality and fairness for all, right? Sounded like the truth.
But what if most of us don't really want to learn much? Do we then need to adjust downward expectations we should have about ourselves so to be equally uncurious like everyone else? "Moderna founder says Canada needs to build a biotech hub to avoid 'getting caught with its pants down next time.'" Well, the "masters" of our future are in the shopping mall practicing equality and fairness, promoting them too on their phones, bills paid for, as a matter of equality and fairness also. They are still not happy with stuffs they need to learn to get by in life, even when many parents can't see the last time their kids sat down for homework. Not that we parents are having any deep thoughts of our own.
You were trying to read "The Portrait of a Lady," you told me, and that you liked the opening line already. Let me gently point out to you that it gets...rather difficult after that, because Henry James is not an easy writer. (Why should any be when life is anything but not difficult?) What would Henry James say about adults going around reading Harry Potter?
Why do we think life should be fair and all people equal? What do we mean by them? Based on what? And why do we think such ideals can be achieved as a matter of course? Sweet dreams we have.
Still we keep dreaming.
Yours, Alex
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