If one can fall in love or crush with a novel’s Mr. Darcy, can it not be that the same can occur by reading letters written in similar relief on a Pentium processor? If before photography a miniature could suffice for knowing anything about that distant attendant lover, could now a thing of pixels accomplish the same?
No more than Tom Lefroy was capable of leaving the heart and longing of Jane Austin and likely was some later in Mr. Darcy – a different man in a newer world was staying where he started as well – in a mind or heart and somewhat disguised in stories.
Some things can’t be helped. Sometimes a trip ends in full falling and any bracing for it just leaves a different bone cracked.
Jane Austin met Mr. Lefroy and sat with him – Mr. Darcy only in a realm of fancy likely made up for substitution.
Virtual or real and whether or not there is or isn’t anything of value in either, better understanding or circumstance can go a distance to break any bone of contention.
Tom and Jane would have benefited by either having their own money but they didn’t and it wasn’t as simple then as now to find it new. Jane hadn’t yet been paid for any writing and even when she was it was a pittance compared to, especially, now but even then. So it seems that she had to settle, if that is how she saw it, for dreaming up her life or living through others in stories she concocted.
The one in a billion chance a contemporary couple might have met has now gone from arguing over whether to keep secrets on paper or in person to not arguing at all – to being over and only kept in one of their minds and maybe not the other – their bones of contention finally settled.
Was it real or not. He said it was real whether it was or not.
“I want it to be something more than good on paper,” she tried to keep from saying but couldn’t. “I long to hold your hand.” His intelligence an aphrodisiac – his written words drugs of love seething in her brain.
“Will you make me fly the distance to see you,” he asked her “or can we find a happy place somewhere between us?”
She couldn’t imagine any place where this could end up happy.
“I don’t fly.” Decisions could be made as easily by claustrophobia as the rich relations of Jane’s beau – broken hearts were no less valuable than any money. “No, stay where you are. Let’s reconsider. I’m sorry I asked.”
As hard as love is to lose, maybe the easiest way is to lose it for keeping in stories.
She wished she could ask Jane.
Writing Spool 