Sexy Fairies and Spoiled Duchesses
In the night, I wake up after a few hours of sleep. My body is rested and my mind, vigilant, alert, pacing. I pick up the Kindle and press on the light, entering another world.
On November 6th, I downloaded Sarah Maas’ A Court of Thorns and Roses. From the beginning, I was there: a girl in a forest stalking a wolf, the pine needles crunching under her feet, her body strong and hungry. As she is lifted into a court ruled by a handsome, cursed fairy prince, I follow an old familiar story into a new setting, familiar paths drawing me out of my time as I cross over the border from reality to imagination.
Meanwhile, on Monday nights, I get on-line and join my London Literary Salon reading group. Some of us are in London; others in the US — spread across time zones. We are working our way through Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. On my own, I tried and failed to read this book many times. Now, in the company of others, reading parts aloud, the book opens like a flower. Reading becomes an act of paying attention, in a book about how we exist in time and in the timeless both at once.
We have made it to the third volume, The Guermantes Way. In the first two volumes the sensitive young artist encounters the world around him. Now, he enters society; longing for beauty, he finds a desert.
The leader of this world is the Duchess de Guermantes; first seen in the distance like a golden orb. Entering her inner circle, he sees her true nature. A woman gifted with everything: looks, charm, money, status, she spends her power on petty tyrannies. She tears up people’s sense of reality, making them adhere to her own, because she is bored with everything, including herself. Being stuck with her feels like being trapped inside a stuffy room on a sunny afternoon at a party full of mean girls.
Mostly since November 6th, I have felt locked in time and space with people I find almost impossible to fathom. I thrash against my bonds each night. The fantasy romance provides a quick and easy exit into another world; Maas’ imagination is immersive and detailed.
I also get the plot I crave: a wounded lover who seems to have infinite power reveals through many trials a hidden vulnerability; slowly, antagonism turns to love. The sex is hot but even hotter is the moment when the emotional carapace dissolves into a compelling need to connect. A bond is forged across borders: human/fairy; male/female. I dive into this book at 3 am almost as medicine. It’s a break glass in emergencies reading.
I am trying to move from fear and pain, to curiosity and open-heartedness. I retain my faith in democracy — ultimately, as our true and only path to human flourishing, and I have to accept the result chosen by the citizens with whom I share a bond. I believe in my familial link with all humanity, my fellow earthlings — so far, not fairies, cyborgs, zombies or vampires. In our imagination, of course we find our way to love them, too.
As for the spoiled duchess, she’s always been here and always will be. The gifted beauty at the pinnacle of her society, who has all and yet still hungers for more, draining other people around her, for no good reason other than that she can: she is part of us too. We cannot escape her company.
Meanwhile, every time I open the book where she appears, or any book at all, I receive infinite riches. My heart goes out; my mind expands. Nothing is a stranger to me. I feel gifted by something the duchess can never understand. Ozymandias’ snarling lip fades into the sand. Shelley’s poem travels on and on.
