“The only obsession everyone wants: ‘love’. People think that in falling in love they make themselves whole? The Platonic union of souls? I think otherwise. I think you’re whole, and then you’re cracked open. She was a foreign body introduced into your wholeness. And for a year and a half you struggled to incorporate it. But you’ll never be whole until you expel it. You either get rid of it or incorporate it through self-distortion. And that’s what you did and what drove you mad.”
Hard to sanction those words, and not only because of George’s mythopoeticizing turn of mind; just hard to believe in the disastrous potential of a character so seemingly unintimidating as family-bound, protected, suburban Consuela. George wouldn’t let up. “Attachment is ruinous and your enemy. Joseph Conrad: He who forms a tie is lost. That you should sit there looking like you do is absurd. You tasted it. Isn’t that enough? Of what do you ever get more than a taste? That’s all we’re given in life, that’s all we’re given of life. A taste. There is no more.”
“The dying animal”, Philip Roth
