Loss: When yearning is pleasure

Abstract

19 Longing is itself a pleasure. Sometimes it’s the greater pleasure. I once yearned for a stu≠ed rabbit, embraced and adored it every time I went to The Moon and Sixpence, the gift store in Newton Upper Falls that lay on the route of my family’s weekend errand run. The rabbit cost about fifteen dollars, which was a lot for an eleven-year-old in 1985. It had a pink silk ribbon around its neck and movable limbs and fuzzy white fur resembling the poufs of the angora rabbit, Precious, that hopped around the grounds of my summer camp in Maine. Part of the appeal of the rabbit, both the real one and the one in the shop, was that I had to go to it; that I did not, could not, possess it. Then one day at camp I got a package. My parents had bought me the rabbit. They might as well have boosted a religious icon from a church and shipped it to Camp Three Pines in a cardboard box. O≠ the altar, out of context, the icon was just a picture, and the rabbit was just a toy. I didn’t play with it. I’d never wanted to play with it, I understood as soon as I lifted it out of its tissue-paper bed. I’d wanted only to want it. Loss When yearning is pleasure Sarah Manguso essay 20 | SARAH MANGUSO Perhaps I was hungry for religious experience; what I had then was Sunday school at a Reform Jewish synagogue, where we were taught to read and sing Hebrew phonetically and assured that Jews didn’t need to believe in God. But I wanted to believe in magic, hence the pewter crescent moon I pinned on my jean jacket, hence the silver bell that quietly gonged when it bounced on my chest as I walked. Hence all the little sacred things I bought at The Moon and Sixpence, the tarot cards and the woven mandalas. I didn’t want to erase the distance between me and the great mysteries. I wanted to maintain them, and to wear and possess the things that reminded me that I was surrounded by powerful forces I couldn’t change. I wanted the great mysteries to swirl around me more than I wanted success, or possessions, or boys to kiss. I wanted to write a love letter and never send it; I wanted to keep my feelings to myself and never tell anyone, never relieve any of their thrilling pressure. I didn’t need to try to psychologize my yearning or eliminate it or hide it. I wanted to harbor it for myself. In the Boston of my childhood, where everyone seemed to be at least a little bit Italian and a little bit Irish, the Pats and Celtics and Bruins and Sox, especially the Sox, were revered as gods. It was impossible to live in my corner of the world without gaining some understanding of its dominant culture, of what it is to follow a team with unwavering attention. Even if I didn’t understand it, I saw the e≠ect of it on the faces and lives of the true believers like my father and the flocks depicted in the stands, on television, in the rain. The Sox symbolized all that could yet couldn’t be. Believing the Sox could win a World Series was an irrational choice made deliberately. I asked my friend Jimmy, who was from Boston and was the sort of sports fan who wore team jerseys and endured a baseball season as a spiritual voyage, about the Soxes’ six pennants and subsequent failures to win the Series. Why did they always lose? “Let’s take ’em in order,” he said in his radio voice, perfectly calm. And over the next several minutes, without stopping, he recited the litany from Johnny Pesky’s slow throw home in 1946 to Bill Buckner’s LOSS | 21 losing the ball between his legs during Game 6 in 1986. I sensed his comfort in the certainty that the Sox were the team that could play well but would always lose. And then it was...