The Big Picture and the Closeup

Rupert Holmes and Susannah McCorkle understood the sadness in the limits life places on our love lives. We can try, for a little while – I did – to break the short tether of human finitude that so restricts our access to romance, but we can never pull hard enough to snap it. We can, at best, meet an infinitesimal fraction of the people with whom we could have mated. Good things may come from crying uncle in this struggle, but let us not disguise the defeat as a victory.

The vines and the telephone wires and the guitar strings are all one in a dazzling poetic metaphor, all ligatures that simultaneously vibrate in a siderial harmony and draw the lovers together. And that was exactly what it felt like: that the two of us were being drawn to each other by invisible and harmonious forces.

The bargain I’d made with myself at the beginning of all my running around was that anytime I wanted to I could always turn around and rejoin my life’s earlier course. But when I decided I wanted to, I found anger was blocking that path back. These songs may not have been precisely applicable to our situation, but they were precisely applicable to my mood. I knew how things were supposed to go, and if they weren’t doing that, there had to be an explanation, and I was going nuts trying to find it.