Rod Dreher reflects on the confession of the sad and pitiable Elizabeth Wurtzel, who described her One-Night Stand of a Life in the January 14th issue of New York magazine. She begins, as Rod notes, writing what seems to be a confession but ends with (unless she’s being very subtly ironic, but I don’t think she is) a proud affirmation of the life she’s lived, which is as she’s described it better called the complete mess she’s made, because “this is it for me. I am a free spirit. I do not know any other way to be. No one else seems to live as I do. In a world gone wrong, a pure heart is dangerous.”
She laments that she has no intimate in her life, no husband or husband-figure, and for that matter few if any close friends. “The people to pity are those who desperately wanted marriage, but never found it, or had it taken from them by death or divorce,” Rod writes in Elizabeth Wurtzel Has Only Been To Me.
But to pity or admire someone like Wurtzel? Forget it. It’s not everyone’s desire to marry or settle down with a partner, but if that’s the choice you make, then own it. Regretting that you took the wrong path is a way of taking responsibility for your own freedom. I suppose you could say that Wurtzel is taking a kind of responsibility for her choices by writing an essay in which she concedes that she’s pretty much ruined her life, but doesn’t regret it because she has been true to herself. I don’t buy it.
He contrasts her choices with the choices for commitment, responsibility, and bourgeois domesticity others of us have chosen, telling charming stories of his own family and with proper indignation responding to Wurtzel’s description of the life his wife (and mine) chose as a kind of prostitution.
Prostitute. What does Elizabeth Wurtzel know about prostitution? It seems to me that one who makes money, status, and power relations the measure of the integrity of love between a man and a woman is a lot closer to having a prostitute’s mindset than she may think.
I think he’s right about this and everything else, but that he’s a little too hard on Wurtzel. Her beliefs about herself and the world are intensely stupid, not just foolish but stupid, but she is her stupidity’s main victim — and more to the point, we don’t know why she is as she is and whether with the same temptations we wouldn’t have wound up much the same as she did. The conviction that one must satisfy the self, whatever the consequences, and no matter what the evidence that this does not work, is never very far away from any of us. One can imagine one’s own face at the top of the article, or one like it expressing one’s own particular brand of self-deception, had things worked out differently.
The reality’s hidden for her and from her by the ideas behind that stale cliche about the purity of her heart. The “pure heart” Wurtzel thinks she has heroically served and for protecting whose integrity she’s suffered — the “pure heart” of contemporary Romanticism, also known as “authenticity” and the like — is just the expression of ego and desire and want, pure only in the sense that the self’s drive to assert itself remains unmixed with caution or prudence or concern for the needs of others or submission to any external authority.
That’s purity of a sort, but not the sort by which the pure of heart see God, and not the sort that makes you happy.
January 8th, 2013 | 4:48 pm
“The conviction that one must satisfy the self, whatever the consequences, and no matter what the evidence that this does not work, is never very far away from any of us. One can imagine one’s own face at the top of the article, or one like it expressing one’s own particular brand of self-deception, had things worked out differently.”
Your empathy is welcome–many of us do seek assertive selfish satisfaction, but often via means different, more subtle, than Wurtzel’s escapades. Nonetheless, such self-assertion is a reduction of desire, an immaturity of desire. Desire, truly pure and unreduced desire, inspires the human person to seek God. Even better, God’s desire for us inspires our desire to aspire to He-who-makes-us. The great paradox is found in the truth that only in the total gift of one’s life and sell, is the Alive Man born anew in us and thus we our born anew as a manalive (or womanalive). Absent the maturity and sacrifice to truly seek Thou-who-seeks-us, desire is never nourished, never grows, and eventually turns into despair–which only ends in a pitiful desperate voluntarism. Most of us our guilty of this voluntarism, to some degree, in our pitiful refusals of the daily graces that our hearts desire ignites in us. Thus we pray, Christ, have pity on us.
January 8th, 2013 | 6:24 pm
What an agonizing diary entry. Pure torment and confusion, lies built upon lies until the world is upside down. Almost reminiscent of Fyodor Karamazov.
Well, God bless Ms. Wurtzel. I really mean it. Redeemer Presbyterian is probably around the corner from her, maybe even a good parish here and there…. God is nearest to those who are most broken, to those who know their rebellion.
In the meantime, I look forward to sharing Ms. Wurtzel’s torment with my prostitute of a wife and my parasites, oops, I meant kids.
January 9th, 2013 | 6:04 am
“…the self’s drive to assert itself remains unmixed with caution or prudence or concern for the needs of others or submission to any external authority.”
Yup, that pretty well sums up the reason for so many divorces among Christians. ( I just read a blogger who bemoaned the announcements from a half dozen friends who had announced their divorces in the last month plus saw a facebook bumber sticker re: homosexual marriage: “If WE can’t marry then YOU can’t divorce”)
Wurtzel is but an extreme example of this spirit gone to seed.
January 9th, 2013 | 12:22 pm
I can’t argue with Mills’s evaluation of Wurtzel, but can’t quite sign onto Dreher’s root-and-branch critique of her stance, either. For whatever reasons, some folks have more issues than a handful of isolated life choices can fix. I can’t know how Wurtzel would have fared if she’d settled down with someone and gone domestic … but my personal guess is, she’d be only marginally happier than she is now, her luckless significant other would be a LOT less happy than wherever he is now, and she wouldn’t be a well-known, published author. In other words: depending on one’s character, one’s life choices might come down to the least of available evils.
January 9th, 2013 | 2:01 pm
It must be terrible to have no real sense of home and the stability that comes with that.
I live in a modest enough farmhouse, but fifteen generations of my family were born, lived and died in it and, perhaps, as many more were nourished by the produce of the same land. With that comes neighbours: the dozen or more families one dines with twice a year, because one’s father dined with their father or grandfather.
I do not think I should like city life very much.
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