When Hannah and I got married nearly five years ago, we agreed to read vows of our own writing at the ceremony. When the time came for me to read my vows, I was so overcome with emotion I found the words on the paper could do nothing to capture the sensation of the moment, opting instead to speak freely in the moment — in other words, to ramble without a plan.
For our five-year vow renewal, I resolved to avoid being so verklempt. Where my own words had failed me five years before, I would attempt to rely on the words of others; the following are some quotes which gesture toward my feelings about the most special person I know.
Wittgenstein says the inexpressible is contained — inexpressibly — in the expressed.
Though it gets less attention than his more reverential Whereof one cannot speak thereof one must be silent, it may perhaps be the deeper idea. Its paradox gives us why we speak, why we pursue communication through words. It doesn’t feed or exalt any angst one may feel about the incapacity to express, in words, that which eludes them. It doesn’t punish what can be said for what, by definition, it cannot be. Nor does it play at miming a constricted throat: Lo, what I would say, were words good enough. Words are good enough, or at least they can be.
In five years I’ve looked anew at unnameable things, at things whose natures flicker and flow. And you, wherever you stood, never mimed a constricted throat. In fact you ran a lap or two ahead of me, words streaming in your wake. How could I ever catch up (by which I mean, how could you want me?).
In the final reckoning there is only love, only that divinity. That we are capable only of being what we are remains our unforgivable sin.
Gene Wolfe, Book of the New Sun
According to Barthes, the subject who says I love you is like “the Argonaut renewing his ship during its voyage without changing its name.” Just as the Argo’s parts may be replaced over time but the boat is still called the Argo, whenever the lover utters the phrase I love you, its meaning must be renewed by each use, as “the very task of love and of language is to give to one and the same phrase inflections which will be forever new.”
You’ve punctured my solitude, I told you. It had been a useful solitude, constructed, as it was, around solo camping trips, extended bike rides, flirtations with sobriety and other dreams to kill long nights, to say nothing of the manic bouts of creativity, learning to address no one. But the time for its puncturing had come. I feel I can give you everything without giving myself away, I whispered in your closet-bound four-poster. When one does solitude right, this is the prize.
Our first months as a couple were dizzy with luck, unable to contain the nearly exploding fact that I’ve so obviously gotten everything I’d ever wanted, everything there was to get. Beautiful, brilliant, quick-witted, articulate, forceful, you. Every night was a journey to a new city to share music with friends and strangers alike. Before you, Deborah Hay’s mantra What if where I am is what I need was a means of making peace with unfortunate, even catastrophic circumstances. I never imagined it might apply to joy, too.
When you are older, perhaps you will come to understand that of all the emotions – and indifference, too, because even indifference is an emotion of a sort – only love sees the unveiled truth.
Gene Wolfe, Book of the New Sun
We hadn’t been planning on getting married per se. Sure, the topic had come up before: we knew we felt differently about each other than anyone else before. But when we woke up on the morning of January 22nd, 2019, we didn’t know my grandmother was headed for the hospital or that we’d be driving there to meet my mom in the waiting room. If someone were to ask me if I wanted to get married, I’d have had no answer. But the muteness of the desire stood in inverse proportion to its size. I had felt the desire before, but in recent years I had given it up, or rather, I had given it over. And then there we were. Maybe it was age or maybe impatience telling us give it over would need to turn into go get it, at that very moment.
We haven’t yet stopped trying to explain to each other what these words mean to us; perhaps we never will.
You go from dream to dream inside me. You have passage to my last shabby corner, and there, among the debris, you’ve found life. I’m no longer sure which of all the words, images, dreams or ghosts are ‘yours’ and which are ‘mine.’ It’s past sorting out.
Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow
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