simple passion

annie ernaux, ann beattie, & why having an all-consuming crush is good, actually

Chilly Scenes of Winter (1979)

In 1991, Annie Ernaux published Simple Passion, a slim, essay-length book recounting her obsessive, transformative passion for a younger, married man. Simple Passion is about Ernaux, much more than it is about her lover, A, and is written mostly about the time spent in his absence—the ritualistic preparations for his visits, the long, intensely interior periods spent waiting for his calls, the transformative process of coming to terms with his final, permanent absence from her life.

Meeting my own A, experiencing the transformative sensorium of emotions that came along with knowing him, being faced with a shocking, newfound sense of my own ability to love, was above all else, a humbling experience. Fleetingly, being loved back mattered more than anything, enough to destroy the relationship altogether. But in my most connected moments, when I was alone, or walking through the city, simply reflecting on how I felt about him, I felt a sense of deep peace that was unattached to any outcome.

The beauty of Ernaux’s writing about A is located in her avoidance of typical egoic tropes surrounding what we think of as “passion” for another person, or obsession. The narrative is void of malice, selfishness, cruelty, or violence. No if I can’t have you, no one can. Instead, it concludes with gratitude, a simple, resonating recitation of the gifts acquired through knowing A:

“…thanks to him, I was able to approach the frontier separating me from others, to the extent of actually believing that I could sometimes cross over it.

I measured time differently, with all my body.

I discovered what people are capable of, in other words, anything: sublime or deadly desires, lack of dignity, attitudes and beliefs I had found absurd in others until I myself turned to them. Without knowing it, he brought me closer to the world.”

Ernaux’s gratitude is so great that she begins to feel she has indulged in a great luxury, writing in the book’s final pages: “When I was a child, luxury was fur coats, evening dresses, and villas by the sea. Later on, I thought it meant living the life of an intellectual. Now I feel that it is also being able to live out a passion for a man or a woman.”

This framing of passion as a luxury certainly resonates—it does feel like an extravagant privilege to be able to focus all your energy on loving just for the sake of it. While I had to compartmentalize in order to attend work and pay my bills, Ernaux was in the unique position of making her passion into her work by writing about it. This is, indeed, a luxury.

Still, I was stuck on luxury, the many possible implications contained in this single word. For one, it is a term saturated in associations of capital and marketplace value, and it felt strange to assign any kind of quantifiable value to love, something that by nature eludes transactional logic.

And also, while we’re parsing love and passion in these terms, the word luxury is doubly curious in that it alludes to a sense of extraneousness. A luxury is something that exists beyond the realm of basic needs, which makes passion, in this context, seem like a special treat, a sort of cherry-on-top to an already satiated existence. However, Ernaux’s writing and my experiences alike had shown me passion could only grow out of a place of deep lack.

Is passion a luxury only afforded to those privileged enough to fully give themselves over to it? Or is it a consolation that gives us respite from the violent mundanity of everyday life, available to anyone who is lucky enough to find it? This is what I found myself thinking about for weeks, passing men in tailored suits on my way to work in downtown Chicago, taking the bus home through trash-strewn streets at night. When I was actively engaged in a passion for a man, it felt like I had found something that could help me spiritually transcend my circumstances, the brutal alienation and minor humiliations of my day-to-day life, the pervasive sense of lack existing alongside the endless storefronts, people, and supposed possibilities. It also made me feel spoiled, like I wouldn’t even have time to feel everything I felt for him if I had real responsibilities, if I was more of a grown up, if I was more engaged in Real Life.

Somehow both privileged and striving, indulgent in love yet ultimately bereft of it, I felt honestly tortured by the fact that my experience of passion was so obviously alienated and reflective of my existential status as a materially broke and emotionally stunted millennial woman in a major city (to all of us lowkey 21st century narcissists, is there anything worse than feeling like a cliché?). And yet, Ernaux’s framing of passion made it seem possible for such an experience to be both meaningless and meaningful, the two opposing states actually dependent on one another. I found this interesting.

It might help to come up with a working definition of “passion” here. In Ernaux’s writing, it appears as something adjacent to obsession—intrusive, all-consuming, dependent on a loss of one’s rational faculties. For a passion to develop, the object of one’s desire must be in some way unavailable, so that true, reciprocal love is prevented from blossoming. The passion then becomes a sort of placeholder for the actual presence of the lover.

The feeling this produces is bittersweet: though the lover is never fully available, the passion is gratifying in that it assumes it’s subject’s perfection. Though A was never a full part of Ernaux’s life, as a boyfriend, husband, or even friend, his distance allowed her to experience a love so unadulterated, it created a sea change that ostensibly brought her closer to others and herself. (I was able to approach the frontier separating me from others, to the extent of actually believing that I could sometimes cross over it).

One must experience a sense of deep lack prior to meeting the object of their affection in order to develop an Ernauxian passion for them. The distant lover allows one to transcend their circumstances by creating a space to experience a wealth of feelings that otherwise would not have been possible given those circumstances, and this is the tie that binds.

Such a passion is the central drama of Ann Beattie’s Chilly Scenes of Winter, one of my favorite novels and an excellent case study on what it’s like to have an all-consuming crush. The narrative follows 27-year-old Charles, who, amidst the daily minutia of his dull-verging-on-dark life, finds a bright spot in his love for his ex-girlfriend Laura. Laura is unavailable because she is married, showing up in Charles’s life at unpredictable intervals, occasionally answering his phone calls or granting him a brief meeting. It seems to Charles that nothing matters, really, except the possibility of being reunited with Laura; surveying the spare facts of his life, the reader feels inclined to agree.

Beattie’s writing is minimalist, unemotional, and repetitive, conjuring in spare language the suffocating drudgery of the average American life circa 1976. Much of the book involves simple descriptions of Charles’s workplace, his home, the nearby pizza place, and this, paired with the setting’s chronic snowfall, creates a sense that his world is snow globe-small and crushingly simple, all avenues toward deeply felt emotion and connection effectively blunted by survival needs and social niceties.

Though the narrative is intensely interior, the only time it departs into the territory of emotion, or even fantasy, is when he thinks about Laura. His work is mind-numbing, meaningless, and lonely. His one friend, also his slovenly roommate, drives him crazy and sleeps with every woman who enters their house, including one of Charles’s ex-girlfriends. His father is dead, and his mother is a hysteric who spends most of her time in the bath and routinely threatens suicide. But, Charles repeatedly reasons, Laura might call tomorrow, and that would make everything alright.

The well-worn trope of loving an unavailable person feels like an immediate byproduct of living within the sort of disconnected, emotionally-stunted social sphere Charles finds himself in. Throughout the book, Charles never really broaches his feelings about anything, including his mother’s suicide attempt, with anyone, including himself. Perhaps any long-term relationship he would eventually forge would settle into the same comfortable, uncommunicative distance he shares with his best friend or his sister. Maybe it is Laura’s unavailability that allows him to conceive of her as a savior, something exceptionally antithetical to everything he knew before meeting her, a sort of holy grail. Sure, this is probably “unhealthy.” But exceptional circumstances also require exceptional feelings, something Charles, emotionally shut-down and sleepwalking through life, desperately needs to experience.

In this way Charles’s passion for Laura becomes a mode through which he can attempt to reconcile the scarcity of meaning, connection, and deep feeling in his life. Love is nowhere to be found in his working life, a subject of embarrassment in his friendships, strained and painful in his family life. But within the protected space of romantic love, where intimacy is still expected, even encouraged, Charles is able to dare to believe in something more.

The book ends with Laura renting a small apartment after leaving her husband for a second time. Unlike in the movie adaptation, which ends with a classic happy-ending reunion between the two, the book offers no such clear resolution. Whether Charles and Laura end up together is not the point, was never the point. The point was what they felt for one another, the gift Charles unwittingly received when he suddenly found himself able to feel things far beyond the strictures of his maddeningly insular life.

When I was a kid, enrolled in Catholic school and attending weekly Mass, I was taught that God’s love for humankind functioned similarly. Independent of circumstance, our actions, or god’s preferences, this love was inherent to the fabric of the universe and always present, awaiting discovery. It makes sense to me, based on this framework, that this sort of divine love wouldn’t be based on any individual quality the object of desire possesses, but rather on the will to experience love itself, as well as everything love can awaken, even the impulse to (re)create a world. This was the point.

In both novels it is passion, rather than an actual union with one’s object of desire, that gives life meaning. To have a passion for another, regardless of outcome, is to experience a radical paradigm shift, one that awakens you to your own ability to feel and love. Though it is easy to confuse with reciprocal, romantic love, a passion is really about engaging with the self—its desires, its abilities, its limits, and because of this, it is always a starting point, and never an end.

With distance I can see that my own encounter with passion offered respite from endless days of feeling nothing, an opportunity to feel love without any of the risk that necessitated my lack of feeling in the first place. What I learned was that a passion is not so much about impossible love as it is about becoming aware of what is possible. In a dead-feeling world, Charles’s world of bare trees and florescent lights, hospital gowns and sports bars, fast food and paperwork, you can still feel more than you thought possible, rewrite your reality, love like god.