Husband or lover

Saturday morning. Laziness and irresolution. From my chair, and looking up through the top-side window, the beauty of the cold, ice-water droplets clang to it and the naked tops of black trees, with their thin, upper branches piercing the undefined mass of grayish sky, straightly frozen into it, lead me astray, as one wishes to capture time and get it rather here, motionless, as like in a photograph, but to use and enjoy it in so many different ways at the same time, with no remorse. And so my life flows, determine-less, with parts of me pulling and straining in opposite directions, as many as you can think of.

Sontag gives some qualities of a husband: reliability, intelligibility, generosity, decency, moral goodness. And also she gives out qualities of a lover: temperament, moodiness, selfishness, unreliability, brutality. "And, as in life, so in art both are necessary, husbands and lovers. It is a great pity when one is forced to choose between them" (Camus' Notebooks, 1963). Is that us men tend to choose between as well?

The problem might not be the election, but the level of attachment we are able to maintain to such choice. Perhaps, women really look for one thing or the other and some women actually need both husbands and lovers, but all are reluctant to accept hybrids.

And here upon lies the tragedy of some men, whom have been shaped neither in one form nor the other by inner, unattainable forces. There you have, I can think of, some young beggars, faithful as dogs, tender as summer nights (the comparison is inevitable), who have lost their decency and self-pride, but would be reliable if only someone they care of could touch their hearts before the no-return state. There you have, on the other side, so attractive big motherfuckers, brutally dishonest and frivolous, but just too selfish to cast their lives in a vulnerable state.

"Again, as in life, so in art: the lover usually has to take a second place. In the great periods of literature, husbands have been more numerous than lovers; in all the great periods of literature, that is, except in our own. Perversity is the muse of modern literature. Today the house of fiction is full of bad lovers, gleeful rapists, castrated sons _but very few husbands" (id.), and that just puts some of us out of the equation.