Taken from a review by Claire Messud of a new biography of Edith Wharton by Hermione Lee (NYT):
"As Lee sums it up, "She is interested in the negotiation between the desires of individuals and the pressures of convention, and she is fascinated by equivocation."
Lee exposes the ways in which Wharton's fictions drew obliquely but powerfully upon her own life and, with unprecedented success, sets their political and feminist significance firmly in context. Given Wharton's own fleeting and doomed romance with Fullerton, there is particular poignancy in Lee's observation that in "The Age of Innocence," Wharton in the end "chose unfulfillment for her lovers. That is what life is like, she tells us. Perhaps we are even meant to feel that there is some value for the soul in not getting what you want."
For those of you who choose to live in that grey half-light of unfulfilled desire, for those of you not daring enough to step outside the bounds of the lines you have drawn...for those of you who continually chose equivocation over risk...finally you have found someone who makes your case for you!
If you are honest about your equivocation, perhaps you find something useful in it...after all, there aren't a lot of saints. Lots of folks decide to stay in a dead-end job or marriage-or nurse the fantasy that what they don't have would be better than what they do. (What I find distressing is the number of people who lie to themselves, and to their colleagues and spouses, indulging in virtual adultery or spiritually checking out on their jobs or kids )
For you honest equivocators-I wonder...
What value do you find in not getting what it is you want?
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