“… he had yet to acknowledge the romantic fever it was his gift to inspire, and the inflammatory dreams and misunderstandings he could ignite with his silences.” – Laura Argiri, ‘The God in Flight’
Old books are like old friends – when they’ve played a pivotal part in your formative years, it feels like they know you in a way that only an old friend could. Currently I’m re-reading one of my favorites, ‘The God in Flight’ by Laura Argiri, an indulgence I partake of every few years, the same way I return to the more mainstream ‘Great Gatsby‘ just for the cadence of words, the depictions of longing, and the sense of romantic abandon that has always privately called to me (and that I always had the reckless determination to foolishly act upon).
Born with a viciously romantic nature, I had it beat out of me – as much by my own hands as the metaphorical hands of wicked men whose only wickedness was in not being interested. Anything but apathy seemed bearable; how unfortunate that disinterest was what I most inspired due to my own petrified countenance among those men who captured my attention. Eventually I embraced apathy as well, as much for emotional survival as from the wear and tear of having gone through it so many times; an unhappy collision of forced and natural modification to a romantic soul not quite designed to navigate the fickleness of human beings.
“Even if he had not been beautiful, he would have been the first person in any crowded room whom the others looked at first, the one whose motions they tracked with fascinated eyes… My God, he smells wonderful.” – Laura Argiri, ‘The God in Flight’
When I think back to the first time I read these words, and the young man whose romantic yearnings were just being kindled, I feel a tenderness and ache for what he was about to put himself through. If I could speak to my younger self I’d say something like, “Relax, enjoy, stop overthinking everything and simply inhabit the moments and days of youth. If it’s meant to be, it will be. If it’s not, it won’t. The rest will fall into place.”
The only thing I wouldn’t change would be his willingness and overzealous desire to fall in love. To that I would only say, “Do it. Whenever in doubt, choose to love. Even if they don’t love you back – keep on loving them. Even if they don’t deserve it, love. There is a nobility in that no matter whether the sentiment is returned. And don’t ever apologize for loving.”
Granted, the actions and craziness that often accompanied such emotions are a different thing entirely – those should definitely have been modified, but the folly of youth was strong and, for me, insurmountable.
“He was a dandy, a beauty, an actor, a fabulist – your canting puritan might say a liar – and he loved to make trouble for deserving parties, including himself. He did all this in a spirit of cheerful despair, being one who experienced sadness in the guise of intolerable restlessness rather than in its raw form.” – Laura Argiri, ‘The God in Flight’
No matter how inconvenient or disruptive, no matter how much it hurt, I never gave up loving. Whenever I felt it, I proclaimed it, unabashedly revealing feelings I hadn’t even fully processed. It’s an essential component of what made me into the person I am – perhaps one of my only saving graces – and I would most certainly need grace, and perhaps a bit of saving in all the years that followed.
Now when I read this book it resonates differently, the way the past no longer hurts quite as keenly, the way infatuations no longer sting, the way I’ve moved beyond losing myself to such wild abandon.
“Growing up is the slow process of learning to tell oneself the truth.” – Laura Argiri, ‘The God in Flight’
