“Comes again the longing, the desire that has no name…for a party, for youth, for the good times, for dear good drinking and fighting comrades, for football-game girls in the fall with faces like flowers? Comes the longing and it has to do with being fifteen and fifty and with the winter sun striking down…”—Walker Percy, Love in the Ruins
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From room’s vantage, they gazed from window onto sodden world beyond under front that alternated from falling rain to held suspension of sky-filling and clouding blanket-gray. Together, they spoke of books to forget and feel alive.
He read to her passage and they mused on the thought, her body long and loose and free like the movings of her mind. She considered, contemplated, and decided, why should she care?
“So what if it never leaves?” Annie spoke. “Is it not simply sign and proof we are and feel alive, inclined to dream and romance, even should love and life appear decided and determined?
The feeling stirs us from a living death that is blindness and inaffection to encountered beauty. In return, we are woken into awareness again: resurrected from the neither dead nor living that is corporeal existing…That is a wonder of beauty and romance. Like Sleeping Beauty, it wakes us from life-sleep into awareness once again.
To feel and sense is neither sin nor ground for shame. It is not action of a wrong,” Annie told further. “It is a gift of life’s experience: to be aware, to feel, to be touched and affected by another. What we do with gift determines whether it shall, for us, become blessing or burden.”
“And what should we do when it arises and restores?” James asked.
Annie smiled, undoubting and untroubled from conflict or inner-contradictions.
“Exactly what you’re doing,” Annie answered. “Focus on the beauty. Bring to life the romance in innocence of a story.
The world needs romance. We all need romance: hope in possibility, in ideals and dreams; to will and manifest lived expression of our souls. Is not the greatest part of romance the belief that we are seen, and known, in the truth of us. Is this not what elevates and overcomes despair that is our denial and hiding of these truths?
Defy despair. Embrace that which has no name. Believe in the romance. Don’t let it die and end in you. To spread and further stir: that is why it’s there.”
Annie looked beyond the window, gray still descendant, obscuring world and view.
She spoke, “It is still a dreary day, and I wish it wasn’t so. Won’t you share with me the longing so I may feel it too?”
Unnaming, they moved in wake from their malaise.
