Jayber Crow pp. 197-198
Sometimes I forget Jayber Crow is a story about unrequited love, as much as it is a story about Church.
Jayber is in love with Mattie Chatham who is, for most of the book, married to Troy. But that doesn’t stop Jayber from loving her and daydreaming about their running away together. (And yet–Jayber knows this is impossible. He cannot even imagine how she might signal to him her desire to run off with him.) He realizes what he’d have to ask of her, if she were to love him back:
“For something always exists before you get there with your desires and vision, and this simply had not occurred to me before in such a way that I could feel the truth of it. What did I have to offer?
If you love somebody enough, and long enough, finally you must see yourself. …
But this was not the end of my love for Mattie Chatham. After the figments of presumption and delusion had all fallen away and I again saw myself as I was and my circumstances as they were, I loved her more, and more clearly, than I did before. I became able to imagine her as she was and not as a subject of a dream. In my thoughts of her, she stood apart from me. I seemed to see her whole. When I realized the futility and absurdity of my old self-begotten desire, that was when the arrow struck. It entered my heart, and I could not pull it out. The hopelessness of my love became the sign of its permanence.
So it is that the life force may take possession of a man–so that in the end he may be possessed my something greater, no longer at all belonging to himself.”
I love this passage, as Jayber realizes that to love Mattie well means to love her for who she is, not for who he thinks she is. She becomes for him fully differentiated — wink, wink — at least as much as she can in his mind. This makes him love her more, which is beautiful. He is seeing more clearly. This is more than just some fantasy of his. He loves her, and he will love her till the day he dies, whether she returns his love or not.
(Sigh.)
July 7, 2014