'My Heart Aches...'

Renoir: Upward PathI don’t like this kind of story. (How’s that for grabbing your attention? Shameless.)Tancredi is an old, jaded, womanizer. He typecasts his women and flirts with them until he gets what he wants. A “clever woman” is a pejorative (p.14), Sophie is “a piece of information to acquire” (p.25) and pretty women are “conquests” (p.13). At the end of chapter one, he watches her bare a “vulnerable” arm to fetch a golden bracelet from an old Italian fountain. How poetic, since he is an old Italian man “as shaken by this pang of authentic sentiment as if he had encountered a friend totally unchanged after an absence of twenty years.” (p.19). This is the typical beginning of a story which I do not like; they will fall in love and he will change into a better man. Disgusting. Pathetic.
I do, however, like this book. How does that work? I like this book in the way that I liked “Pride and Prejudice” but hated the film. I feel that if you took that film and made a book out of it, it would be sold in Safeway and have Fabio on the cover. Not really, but I’m saying that too much is lost when you become wrapped in the plot and lose Austen’s voice, and consequently, her point.
Hazzard’s point is not what I expected. The book is episodic and does not like to leave us on the edge of our seat. Hazzard doesn’t over-indulge in romance or first kisses or descend into melodrama; most of the “good stuff” happens off-screen. She stays detached from the plot yet intensely connected to the characters. It’s as if the romance is unimportant - what matters is the effect it has on two psychological entities and the changes which they subsequently undergo.
“It is glimpses, an impressionist painting, floating and mortal like summer, the season of its place.” What flowery garbage the book has inspired in me. Someone go through and count the times the word “mortal” is used. It’s an important part of this book though; limits give value. It’s why the Greek Gods envied us; we are mortal, and mortality gives meaning. Their relationship is painfully mortal, and the two are painfully aware of this fact.
Mathematician and philosopher Alfred Whitehead said “Art is the imposing of a pattern on experience, and our aesthetic enjoyment is a recognition of the pattern.” An easy application of this theory could be Shakespeare. “The lady doth protest too much.” That’s an easy one, she’s protesting TOO much, so she’s hiding something, suggesting her intentions may be the opposite. We have experienced this before, someone protesting too much for whatever reason, and Shakespeare (artfully, I must add) has pointed to this pattern in human behavior. We recognize and enjoy this. Note that our appreciation, or our “aesthetic enjoyment” of this line relies upon experience. Ask an intelligent ten year-old and he can probably tell you what this line means. What about, “To be or not to be”? Doubtful. This one relies upon the subject having considered death as a possible solution for the hardships of life. Again, experience is the criterion, and this is what I want to talk about:
“When we are young…we worship romantic love for the wrong reasons…,as we do Keats and…subsequently repudiate it. Only later, and for quite other reasons, we discover its true importance.” (p.25) I can’t say that Keats’ “Ode to a Nightingale” means anything radically different now than from when I first read it two years ago. I believe I don’t have the necessary experience to recognize its “true importance”. Even if my grandmother sat me down and explained what it means to her, I don’t think I would truly understand. I would be grabbing at something beyond my reach, like trying to tell the ten year-old, “Sometimes, when adults get very sad, they don’t want to live anymore…” In which sense does Sophie read? Tancredi? Before the summer? Afterwards?
As the passionate and “mortal” romance comes to an end, Luisa notes how similar Sophie is to her mother, who “having at an early age observed the consequences of strong feelings, had prudently excluded herself from an encounter with them.” (p.114) Tancredi seeks sagacious Luisa, because for him, “experience…was more poignant to him than grief or love.” (p.97) The last we see of him, he describes at length a beautiful and famous house built by a man with no family, who was never married, but devoted his entire life to restoring it. Tancredi, the architect, has never seen it.