It’s wedding season. Usually, at my friends’ weddings, someone reads an excerpt from a poem or a novel during the ceremony. Last weekend, it was i carry your heart with me, by E.E. Cummings, a saccharine and totally wedding-appropriate love note of a poem, and this excerpt from Tolstoy’s Family Happiness:
“I have lived through much, and now I think I have found what is needed for happiness. A quiet secluded life in the country, with the possibility of being useful to people to whom it is easy to do good, and who are not accustomed to have it done to them; then work which one hopes may be of some use; then rest, nature, books, music, love for one’s neighbor — such is my idea of happiness. And then, on the top of all that, you for a mate, and children perhaps — what more can the heart of man desire?”
I know I’m supposed to put my sense of irony aside during nuptials, but as I was listening to this (admittedly beautiful) passage, I couldn’t help but recall the actual plot of Family Happiness: the married couple soon realize how complicated, emotionally fraught, and full of compromises married life is as all of their naive, idealistic, youthful notions of matrimony are systematically smashed. Eek. Not to mention the author’s choppy romantic history.
Cummings, too, come to think of it. The poet had an affair with his college friend’s wife, had a child with her, married her, and left her within the year. His second marriage was even more disastrous.
Oh well. I suppose context is expected to be put aside in matters of the heart. No one’s perfect, and weddings are supposed to be perfect distillations of love and commitment. At the next one, I’ll try to focus on the words. I just hope it’s not Shakespeare.
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