It was a good day for visiting the Museum, because it was a pretty dreadful day for being anywhere else. It wasn’t very wet, it’s true, but it was very dark, the sky carpeted in grey pile. It wasn’t the best day for me to visit the Museum, however, because I was still pretty tired, and not thinking entirely clearly. Having done nothing but read about the Congress of Vienna, I was poorly primed for conversation. My one great idea was to ask Ray Soleil to came along; he was a far better guide for our out-of-town friend. There have been people in deepest mourning who sparkled more brightly than I did.

We ran through the Bernini show — again, for Ray and me; we saw it a few weeks ago — because it was right there, outside the cafeteria after lunch. (Yes, I was running on cafeteria speed today. A proper restaurant would have been a stretched-out waste.) The terracotta models of saints and angels that constituted the bulk of the objects on exhibit looked much older than they were; they looked like Shang dynasty funerary pieces. The features were sketchy and most of the pieces were damaged. If I squinted, though, and saw beyond the surface, the baroque contours of wing and drape reminded me what I was looking at. Everything actually beautiful was to be seen in a photograph or drawing of the project for which the model was a preliminary. Would it be neat to own one or two of these little clay statuettes? Cool, perhaps, but neat, no. They’re just dirty old bits of clay. They were probably not intended to survive into the Twenty-First Century. (There is an attractive head of St Jerome. But I have problems with Jerome — Jerome and Augustine. They’re deeply irritating figures, as regrettable in their line as Sandy Weill in his.)

Then, because our friend hadn’t been, we went upstairs to the paintings in the American Wing. My current favorite, Mary Cassatt’s picture of Mary Dickinson Riddle, was looking sharp, but John Kensett’s beautiful Eaton’s Neck was too subtle for me in my exhausted state. I wondered what it would be like to live with the picture. It would be creepy, that’s what; I’d think about how much it must be missed at the Museum! The exhibition entitled Faking It: Manipulated Photography Before PhotoShop was not bad, but it had a Barnumesque feel, because almost all photographs were manipulated in the old days. There were two well-remembered images by Jerry Uelsmann at the end. I loved them when they were new and I love them even more now. (I see how Victorian they are in their deliberateness; this grounds their vaguely surrealist fancy.) When Ray proposed that drawing an arc across the cloudy moonlight sky in the second image would transform it into a painted ceiling, I had to protest. Wrong trompe l’oeil!  

***

I read with great interest Emily Witt’s piece about Internet dating, in the current issue of the LRB. It’s a very intelligent essay, blending personal history with a bit of research into the origins of the game. Witt sounded like someone I’d enjoy talking to, in general; but also in particular, because she put in this bit of wisdom:

I went to a lecture by the novelist Ned Beauman who compared the OK Cupid experience to Carl Sagan pondering the limits of our ability even to imagine non-carbon-based extraterrestrial life, let alone perceive when it was beaming signals to us. We troll on OK Cupid for what we think we want, but what if we are incapable of seeing the signals being sent to us, let alone interpreting them?

By the end of the piece, Witt went further:

Internet dating alerted me to the fact that our notions of human behaviour and achievement, expressed in the agglomerative text of hundreds of internet dating profiles, are all much the same and therefore boring and not a good way to attract other people. The body, I also learned, is not a secondary entity. The mind contains very few truths that the body withholds. There is little of import in an encounter between two bodies that would fail to be revealed rather quickly. Until the bodies are introduced, seduction is only provisional.

We don’t know how to write about what someone else might find attractive about us — about, very specifically, our physical presence. Most healthy people, I believe, go through life without ever grasping such attractions as they possess clearly enough to state them. (The exceptions to this rule are probably mired in narcissism: they know far too much about themselves.) If I sign up for a dating service, I want to meet you, not encounter myself in a fun-house mirror. But I don’t know the first thing about you — that’s very much the point — so I have no idea what to say about myself that, assuming it appealed to you and you could understand what I was saying (and believe me), would make me a likely prospect for romance.

There’s another problem that Witt doesn’t mention: we have to meet people at the right time. Five years too soon, and I wouldn’t have been smart enough to see the magnficence of Kathleen, and she wouldn’t have had much to say to me. (Looking back, I see that it was very important for me that I fell in love with her at once. This was not a case, on my side, anyway, of taking a friendship further. Oh, no. I went straight to the finish line.) Five years earlier, I didn’t have the personal organization required to be a first-year law student at a decent school. Also, five years earlier, I was married to someone else. Timing, like the body, is “not a secondary entity.”

Please don’t think that I’m against Internet dating. Here’s Witt’s ultimate nugget of wisdom: “I soon discovered, as most do, that it can only speed up the rate and increase the number of encounters with other single people, where each encounter is still a chance encounter.” Speeding up the process is good. Witt met a lot of interesting people, as she says, and she learned a lot about interviewing (which she doesn’t say). She clearly learned how to have a good time just-for-tonight.

Internet dating is important largely because higher education comes at the wrong time for most people. It ought to occupy one’s mid- to late-twenties, after a substantial workplace experience during which being single is firmly normative. As thirty approaches, people today begin to be old enough to meet — to recognize and appreciate — a significant other. The current 19-22 window is ridiculously early; we might as well expect toddlers to be nubile. It isn’t just a problem of romance, either — it’s too early to make life-long friends as well. But college does remain the horn of plenty, the cornucopia of chance encounters with likely people. Which is why waiting seven years to go to law school and meet the woman of my dreams worked for me.

Drop me a line at rjk@dailyblague.com
This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 24th, 2012 at 4:30 pm.