A man goes to the window to watch people passing by. If I happen to be passing by, can I say he went there to see me? No, for he is not thinking of me in particular. But what about a person who loves someone because she is beautiful? Does he love her? No, for a disease can destroy the beauty without destroying the person. Yet, this disease will put an end to his love for her.
And if someone loves me because I have a good memory or because I am very intelligent, do they love me? Me, myself? No, for I could lose these qualities and still be myself. But where is this “self,” if it is neither in my body nor my soul? And anyway, how can you love a body or a soul except for the qualities it has? Could you love a soul all by itself? Of course not, and it would be wrong. Therefore, we don’t love other people, but only their qualities.
-Blaise Pascal, Pensees
That passage was brought to my attention a few years ago, at a curriculum planning meeting for Trinity School. The eighth grade students had spent some time discussing it and had come to the interesting conclusion that, in loving someone’s qualities, we must love them because of that person’s history. The connection was, I believe, that an individual’s history forges or refines these qualities that we love. Their point has some merit.
This can’t mean we love that history itself. There is much in my husband’s history that I wish had never befallen him. But I definitely see how his history has formed him, and so there is nothing in his past that I am not, perhaps sometimes in a weird way, grateful for.
We recently celebrated our fifteenth anniversary. Our first date was my nineteenth birthday; we married when I was twenty and he was twenty-three. In many ways, we grew up together. But we also, obviously, had some history before we met.
I got a new glimpse into some of that history last Saturday, at the 20th reunion of Hickory High School’s class of 1985, and I have to say that July 23 will definitely go down as one of the best days of 2005. I had a Great Time.
It was good to be able to put tangible, three-dimensional, full-fledged people with the names I had so often heard. There was Nikki DeJulia, who is Every Bit as adorable in person as she was as Bill’s date to the senior prom. And Steve Djakovich, an Absolutely Enormously Tall individual, whose name so often flies by in conversations Bill has with high school friends. Lisa Rommel and Kathy Reed made me laugh, telling stories of the football players who were also dancers in the musicals and lifted their female partners without, it seemed, any effort at all, at times forgetting to put them down.
We had a tour of the high school, virtually unrecognizable after its mult-million dollar face-lift. We hung there in the gym for awhile, snagged on memories of the former cheerleaders. And on the football field I got to stand on the Very Spot where Bill broke his collar bone. He was a wide-receiver and had the ball, only to be tackled onto his head and shoulder by a Large defensive end. There was some discussion, there on the field, as to this fellow’s name, and his whereabouts, and what became of him. I have to admit to some gratitude towards him: Bill’s scar is very…. Manly.
We lingered, too, in the auditorium, a space, Bill said, that looks nothing at all like it did when he was in high school. But I walked over to the orchestra pit and stared up at the stage anyway, trying to make his high school self materialize there. He was the dread pirate Frederick in Pirates of Penzance on that stage; the next year he played the lead in Brigadoon. “Have you seen Brigadoon?” so many of his classmates asked me that evening. And my answer is yes, that he and his then room-mate, soon-to-be best man Made me watch it one evening, early on. But it was one of those videos we all have of our high school productions from the eighties, with the stage and sound so far away, the players mere spots of bright light in the distance. Listening to his classmates last week, I wished again that I could have been there and watched him even though (and I have told him this Many Times), had he known me in high school he would have paid me No Mind.
But he pays me mind now. And How. And that was what I felt, walking away from that reunion: Infinite Gratitude that, of all the people he might have chosen, I managed somehow to get him to fall for me. And gratitude, too, to have a peek at who he was in middle and high school, as seen through the eyes of the people who knew and loved him then. There’s no wonder as to why.
http://www.trinityschoolnc.org/ci.html
http://www.hermitage.k12.pa.us/hhs/
