The Middle

I just watched Before Sunrise and Before Sunset back-to-back. I’ve seen them both once before (although I did miss roughly the first half of the former the first time around), but this time they struck me in a newly profound way. I enjoyed them a bit more than the first time, and that’s not to say that I didn’t enjoy them then.

Now, like any great film, they’ve left me in a state where I can’t really focus on anything else; I can’t really think about the things that are happening in my life, the plans I have for tomorrow, for the weekend. I’m still trapped in that little universe, the one I escaped to for several hours, where I watched their story unfold. I think a lot about the themes that are present, the ways in which the characters’ lives unfold in the company of each other.

I know it’s all fictional and they’re not real, but truly great art transcends the medium and touches a common human thread. It stands to reason that I project myself onto the characters and interpret the story through my own eyes, through the lens of my own life. It’s like a love song on the radio, where instead of “Jesse” and “Celine” you’re more likely to just hear pronouns like “you” and “me”, but it’s the same concept—you can appreciate what the song is about because you’re able to hear it in relation to your own life. If it’s something you’ve experienced personally, then you can sympathize with it; if not, then you can acknowledge the disparity and imagine yourself in the situation. It's in this way that you can appreciate a World War II drama even though you never fought in World War II yourself.

I’ve been doing this since I finished watching tonight. It’s got me thinking about the very cinematic, very romantic notion that there is one very special person with whom we could be meant to be with. As the films pose it, it’s not a question of whether that person is perfect, but more of a question of whether there is a powerful, undeniable bond that is present and felt almost immediately. (If you haven’t seen them, I won’t spoil how either one ends.) It's a question of whether that bond stretches over years, over oceans.

I began to think about the polar extremes of the way people tend to think of love:

“I don’t have time for love. I need to focus on my career and success. I need to be happy with me and my life before I can be happy with someone else.”

...or...

“I don’t see the point in having money and a career if I can’t share the joys with my soul mate. I don’t think I can be happy alone.”

We’ll call the first group Cynics. They have big aspirations, or they want to have them at least, and they won’t be satisfied with life unless they never feel, at any point, that they’ve done all there is for them to do. They’re achievers. They have no doubt about it. Love, to them, is an afterthought. It’s a facet of life that is subservient to other more self-sufficing subjects, like success and money. They’re not satisfied with love as a goal because they see that love is fickle, fleeting.

We’ll call the second group Romantics. They might have aspirations and dreams as well, but they can’t possibly be convinced that there isn’t someone out there who is meant to be with them—a soul mate. Much of their satisfaction and happiness comes from the validation that accompanies love and relationships. It’s self-affirming, in a good way. It’s sometimes the case that they’ll put everything in their lives on hold to pursue love. They feel like if they’re alone then there’s simply no point to anything else; there is no happiness to enjoy, no success to find, no joy.

How do these people end up feeling at the ends of their lives when they look back? The Cynic, with all his success and wealth, may come to feel very isolated and alone. He may come to find that the joys of his life are hollow without someone to share in them, someone to share them with. He has lived for himself and not for someone else and he has never known that selfless caring and devotion that accompany love. He begins to fear the thought of dying alone.

On the other hand, the Romantic may come to the end of his days and feel that he was put on this earth to accomplish something that he never accomplished. He put some idea or some aspiration on hold for the sake of cultivating and nurturing a complex relationship with another human being, and as he reaches the twilight of his life he may begin to regret that. He may feel like his own comfortable happiness has usurped any chance of leaving a mark on this world that he was here, some contribution to humanity, some piece of history.

The problem is that neither of these is right. The problem is that there has to be a middle somewhere. The problem is that I can’t distinguish just where that would place me. Sometimes it’s one side and the next day it could be completely the opposite. The questions that the Cynics ask themselves, and the questions that the Romantics ask themselves, I find myself asking them day after day, and I’m only 26. I’m sitting and thinking and suddenly, in my mind, I’m 36; then I’m 46; then I’m 56, and so on. And at each point, I ask myself whether I chose one side or the other and whether it made me happy. I hope I never have to choose only one side, but I don’t know, or I don’t understand, how the middle can exist. It’s represented by a balance of two completely different forces that don’t seem to be able to coexist. Maybe it’s clearer than that, and maybe it’s easier than that, and maybe it makes more sense as you get older. Or maybe it just makes more sense when you’ve found it. Or maybe it makes more sense if, when you do think you’ve found it, you don’t lose it, either one, whichever it is.

I’m going to post this tonight before I change my mind and decide not to. I went to the trouble of writing it, after all. Julie Delpy, if you’re reading this, if I had the choice of never seeing you again or marrying you, I would most certainly choose the latter.