The Story of a Lover

by Hutchins Hapgood

We left the sensuous charm of Italy and went back to nervous New York and its detailed and relatively meaningless activities, and I again attempted, as I have attempted periodically all through my life, to become a part of the machinery of practical existence. But the big deceptive generalizations of philosophy, which I needed in my youth, as I have explained, to attain equilibrium, and my subsequent absorption in the deep pathos of love, stood always in my way when I honestly tried to be interested in what the world calls practical and necessary. But to all things I invariably tended to apply the measure of eternity, and eternity spoke to me through the impulses of philosophy and of love. So that the spur of practical need, which was keen and constant enough to have chained most men to the wheel of necessary routine, acted on me mainly as an irritant, leading me into situations, positions, jobs as they are lugubriously called, but never strong enough to hold me there. I was continually thrown off onto the bosom of the Eternal, where only I found significant excitement and troubled peace.

When our second boy was born I was exceedingly active in journalism and in other futilities, called important by the best people, and a great deal was happening to me, in the ordinary way. But these important events have left no strong impression on my memory. They are vague and shadowy and have not the quality of value. I know they happened mainly because from time to time I come across some record of them. Otherwise they would have been entirely forgotten; have taken their proper place in general oblivion.

But what I do remember as intensely as though it were happening to me at this moment is the look of the second child as he came with a flash of noise into the world. As the doctor waved him in the air to help him take his first breath in this amazing place, he seemed to me older than anything I had ever seen or imagined. When I first met Her she had seemed older and more beautiful and more terrible than the Sphinx, but he seemed to go back beyond all human expression and to go forward beyond it all, too, and to represent the suffering essence of Life itself! He was neither animal nor human, but the something from which they both come and to which they both go!

What a contrast he was then and has always been to his brother! When the first child came, he was a baby, a human baby, and at each stage, up to his early teens, where he now is, he has been the child, the boy, perfectly and typically the happy, playful child, the romantic active boy—so much the boy that as yet there has been little else—he has the boy quality taken to the nth degree!—a beautiful thing, a ridiculous thing, a baffling, incomprehensible thing, a delightful, innocent thing, with open joyful eyes, keen to the color of events, unseeing the unseen harmonies and discords.

To his brother, however, are the unseen harmonies and discords; the child of the sensuous Italian hills, the child who formed its unborn life about the spiritual woe of the mother, the child of sensuousness, the child of disturbance! I have sometimes felt that the blow that struck her in the midst of rich peace and joy must have come from some cold, inhuman artist who saw the tragic form—some smiling sculptor who brutally modeled without regard to human good and evil, thinking only of the line, of the possibilities inherent in the clay of life.

Whatever the cause—and our causes are all of the fancy; we know no other—this second child has been strangely sensitive to all things outside of him. They have filled him with disease and pain, but he has seen their form—their discord and their harmony. He does not live in the romantic world of the pure child. He does not become a Sir Lancelot or a cowboy. He lives in his perceptions of reality, and his instincts to construct. He is always building, building, indefatigably, even in the moment of physical pain and weakness. His mood is changed by the sunlight, by the dampness, and he sensitively understands the emotional situation of those near him; and it is on the basis of the way this wonderful, tragic world affects him that he builds, builds.

I am aware that most people love the joyous and the happy; the robust, the cheerful and the pleasant, the adequate and efficient ones, and these are indeed a part of the strange rhythm of life that holds us all, but to me there has always been a peculiar beauty in those who suffer—not those who merely bear, but those on whom all of life impinges, on whom rush the quality of all things, rendering them painfully conscious and sensitive of the beauty and the horror; those who are affected by the hidden meaning of every event and every form and whose structure, whose being, is therefore always in imminent danger, the meaning forced upon them being so constantly great and unrelenting.

So a part of my love for her—my ever deepening and increasing love for her—were these successive pregnancies, these material signs of sensibility to the spirit of life itself; this, her capacity to receive and to be affected by the germinating seeds of existence, to have her being threatened and developed at the same time, to be struck and to expand, and to give birth to little children, through whom existence passes and who respond constructively to it.

Why do we all struggle for that impossible ideal we call consistency? I do not know unless it is because we are unable to attain it, and our strenuous souls desire the unattainable. I loved in her this insistent sensitiveness, loved to see her receive and use whatever came to her, and I feverishly brought all I could to her. I passionately sought for her the widest experience, used my restlessness and my sociability to bring to her all I knew and loved and enjoyed. I wanted for her the fullest life, and yet when she responded to the charm and power of other men, my emotions were not those of unalloyed joy and satisfaction! I wanted that set of impulses, those spurs to life, to come through me alone!