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heroic, what they call Junoesque. It was that there was just too much of what she was for any one human female package to contain, and hold: too much of white, too much of female, too much of maybe just glory, I don’t know: so that at first sight of her you felt a kind of shock of gratitude just for being alive and being male at the same instant with her in space and time, and then in the next second and forever after a kind of despair because you knew that there never would be enough of any one male to match and hold and deserve her; grief forever after because forever after nothing less would ever do.—William Faulkner
    We were never to be alone together again, except in remembrance. —Walter de la Mare
    I’m ninety-four years . . . and my mind is just a turmoil of regrets. ... In the summer of 1902 I came real close to getting in serious trouble with a married woman, but I had a fight with my conscience and my conscience won, and what’s the result? I had two wives, good, Christian women, and I can’t hardly remember what either of them looked like, but I can remember the face of that woman so clear it hurts, and there’s never a day passes I don’t think about her, and there’s never a day passes I don’t curse myself. “What kind of a timid, dried up, weevily fellow were you?” I say to myself. “You should’ve said to hell with what’s right and what’s wrong, the devil take the hindmost. You’d have something to remember, you’d be happier now.” She’s out in Woodlawn, six feet under, and she’s been there twenty-two years, God rest her,and here I am, just an old, old man with nothing left but a belly and a brain and a dollar or two.—Joseph Mitchell
    Occasionally in the middle of a conversation her name would be mentioned, and she would run down the steps of a chance sentence, without turning her head.—Vladimir Nabokov
    The only victory over love is flight.—Napoleon Bonaparte
TÊTE-Â-TÊTE
    The novelist Arnold Bennett once estimated that “not in one per cent, even of romantic marriages are the husband and wife capable of
passion
for each other after three years. So brief is the violence of love! In perhaps thirty-three per cent passion settles down into a tranquil affection—which is ideal. In fifty percent it sinks into sheer indifference, and one becomes used to one’s wife or husband as to one’s other habits. And in the remaining sixteen per cent it develops into dislike or detestation.”
    This is bitter wisdom indeed, and yet it conforms to what science now tells us about hormones, endorphins, and the shortlived phenomenon called limerance. Sexual infatuation requires separation, obstacles, distance. One cannot dwell in a white heat for long.
    But a fortunate marriage offers more than mere “tranquil affection.” It is, in essence, a civilization of two, and its greatest joyis a conversation that goes on for decades. Such intercourse between husband and wife, or between committed partners of any sex, requires time to develop and is, along with children, the real foundation for domestic happiness. Yet there is, wrote the novelist Robertson Davies in a letter, “a persistent idea that a marriage must be the continuation of a romance, when a minute’s reflection shows that it can be nothing of the kind. It must be an association of people of similar or complementary tastes who enter it with a firm resolve to make it work.”
    Shared memories, common pursuits, reliable support during times of crisis, even the same old arguments—these matter more than young people commonly realize. As the actress Mrs. Patrick Campbell once wrote: after the hurly-burly of the chaise longue comes the deep, deep peace of the double bed.

Five

BRINGING IT ALL BACK HOME
    What the mother sings to the cradle goes all the way down to the