One more question on the Carver reading

So what do we talk about when we talk about love? That would have been my choice for a question for the Carver story. And my first attempt at an answer would have been: prodigies, mostly. Most people if you asked them what they thought about baseball, wouldn't reply with a George Will/Ken Burns/Roger Angell prose poem about the game's eternal springtime and the Ages of Man. Most people if you asked them about baseball would tell you about the no hitter they saw, or the game the other night where a guy hit three home runs, or that incredible play by the shortstop that you just wouldn't believe.

It's the same way with love, I think, and I certainly think it's that way with the characters in this story. Terri wants to tell us about Ed. No doubt Ed was the most intense experience of her life, but for a lot of the reasons brought out at our discussion, Ed's feeling for Terri might not be the best example of love and might not even be love at all. Likewise with Mel's story about the old couple, and not just because Mel starts talking about it when they're into the second bottle of that lousy cut-rate gin. The old people have made a big impression on Mel. But Mel knows next to nothing about them: they're practically mummies. Yet despite two marriages, several children, and more than forty years on earth, for Mel the old guy says more about love than anything he cares to offer from his own experience.

Most people talk about love the way they'd talk about baseball but with this one big exception: nearly everyone wants to be able to say they've played in love's major leagues and that they know something about it. Mel's quick to validate the bona fides of everyone in the room: You're in love, we're in love, he says. But are they really? And if they are, what explains the bleak picture of four drunks sitting silently in the darkness at the end of the story with one of them just wanting to walk out alone into the desert, one of them recalling with no aversion those wonderful days when her head was being banged on the floor, and one of them more than a little bit envious of an eighty year old in a full body cast?

But that's what talking about love can do, because when we talk about love, we're talking about what must be our deepest hopes and dreams, and given the usual shortcomings of the human condition, for most of us those will be hopes and dreams that are largely unrealized.

At the end Laura says she's never been hungrier in her life. It's not for food.