https://lithub.com/on-envy-unsatisfied-desire-and-not-waiting-for-permission/
Extract
Michele Filgate: Taylor, in your novel Stranger, Father, Beloved your character Michael sees his wife talking to another man at a party and is certain that’s the man she should have married. From the outside Michael is a successful man with a nice house and a perfect family, or so it seems. So why is a man who seems to have everything envious of a moment of passion he witnesses between his wife and a stranger?
Taylor Larsen: I love the question because it contains the answer. He sees passion for a second and that’s what’s missing from his life. He is one of these people who is so caught in his head and disconnected from his real desires that he actually sees two people having a spontaneous, beautiful moment and is so envious and it just ignites in him this desire to be spontaneous, to be in the moment. As someone who is sort of an intellectual, I can relate to that feeling of feeling really disconnected and wanting passion, which is kind of what I think everybody really wants deep down.
Photograph by Sean Fitzroy.
MF: Jamie, in Fire Sermon you write, “C.S. Lewis says that if we were able to return to the locus of our nostalgia, the place or person or spot of time in which we experienced joy, we would find only more nostalgia. As far back as we could go—a view from a childhood window, patterned light on a nursery wall—we would find only an unsatisfied desire that is itself more desirable than any other satisfaction. An indication not of the illusion of our existence, but of its ultimate reality elsewhere. A home we once knew but can’t quite remember, to which we will someday return.”
And that’s just beautiful, I think it’s an appropriate way to look at envy, this idea of the unsatisfied desire being something we have always known but we can’t always grasp.
Jamie Quatro: That envy in ourselves, if we kind of take a step back from it, and evaluate it and observe it and think, well, what is it that I’m envious of, that can be an indication of something, like from that passage, some longing that we have in ourselves—possibly a calling.
For example, when I was growing up and kind of starting to get my feet wet writing and I would go to these readings, and I would go to these events and I would see authors sitting up front, I had this feeling in my stomach like—I want that, I want to do that. And now I’m like why did I want to do that. [laughter] It’s terrifying. But truly I would feel this passion and I think that it was like the coin flip of envy. I was envious but I was also excited and it motivated me and it made me want to go home and write. So I think if you can step back from your own envy and see those things and evaluate and it and say, OK I think this is an indication of something, an indication of my calling. Let it motivate me and flip it on it’s head like Kate said, it can help you with motivation.
Someone told me that when you envy someone else that implicit in that idea is that you believe there is a pie and only so much of it available, and if someone else gets a piece of that pie that’s less pie for me. But that’s bunk. [If] we encourage and support each other the more success there is, it multiplies. To remember that when you feel that envious feeling.
In the NYT women are asking how to respond when men at work call them “sweetheart”
The more you know yourself, the more patience you have for what you see in others.
In human hearts there is an unhealed wound
Fried orange rind with duck’s legs and whispers of potato
https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/love-poems
It is too often forgotten that the gift of speech, so centrally employed, has been elaborated as much for the purpose of concealing thought by dissimulation and lying as for the purpose of elucidating and communicating thought.
How my heart speaks 