The souls that throng the flood
Are those to whom, by fate, are other bodies ow'd:
In Lethe's lake they long oblivion taste,
Of future life secure, forgetful of the past.
—Virgil’s Aeneid, Book VI
Kierkegaard would have been rather impressed with the unraveling of the tormented aesthetic, at once bathetic and significant, of the dissolution of this passionate intimacy that began with a metaphor, a 21st century unfolding of Kierkegaard’s aesthetic — immersion in sensuous experience; valorization of possibility over actuality — that, were it not for jet planes and instant messaging, would appear entirely contemporaneous to Johannes and Cordelia.
Survival stipulates that privileging present pleasure over anticipated future pain — both indeterminable, and ultimately carefully conjured up — inevitably leads to a reversal of that crude calculus, necessarily irrational, a calculus that simultaneously begs to be set free from algebraic conviction, a hallucination borne of a heuristic gone astray, a victim of our unknowability, a reflection of our frailty.
The histrionics of a tacit negotiation reach a fever pitch, and then: defeat — a tired acknowledgement of an end in the making, an end that’s becoming. It is perhaps a desperate act of self-care, an act of self-preservation (in plain, millennial-free terms), manifesting as if instinct: for the tormented to become the aesthete — the observed to become the observer — a preemptive act of catharsis, before us fades into oblivion.