Desire

Chloë: The future is all programmed like a computer — that’s a proper theory, isn’t it?

Valentine: The deterministic universe, yes. […]

Chloë: But it doesn’t work, does it?

Valentine: No. It turns out the maths is different.

Chloë: No, it’s all because of sex. […] The universe is deterministic all right, just like Newton said, I mean it’s trying to be, but the only thing going wrong is people fancying people who aren’t supposed to be in that part of the plan.

Valentine: Ah. The attraction that Newton left out. All the way back to the apple in the garden.

On a spring afternoon in 2005 I volunteered with a homeless outreach program at my college for the first time. This experience led me to a lifelong commitment to service and justice, which I understand as integral to the practice of my faith and vocation. I tell people I was motivated by my religious and political beliefs, the feeling that I needed to put my money where my mouth is, but that’s only partially true. The whole truth is that I volunteered for that program because, on that spring afternoon in 2005, a girl I had a desperate, hopeless crush on asked me to. The commitment ended up being bigger, and more lasting, than the desire that inspired it; but I know what the first domino was.

The following semester, in December 2005, I saw a student production of Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia which was, in its own way, just as lifechanging. Twenty years later, I’m still comfortable calling Arcadia my all-time favorite play. Even that is putting it too mildly: it’s one of my all-time favorite pieces of writing, period, on the Mount Rushmore of works that’s always in the back of my head when I write fiction.1

This past week, I participated in the Jesuit Media Lab’s Easter Season Zoom Theater Retreat featuring the play, run by the inimitable Renée Darline Roden. It was a really great experience — not just the chance to revisit the play, but to reflect on it with a thoughtful group — and gave me a chance to think about what the show means to me. I considered writing something about Arcadia here after Stoppard died last fall, but didn’t feel like I had anything to say at that moment aside from “Arcadia good, Stoppard good writer.” (I also haven’t read Coasts of Utopia yet and don’t feel like I can do a Stoppard retrospective until I have; it’s on my bedstand). Even this relatively short essay has gone through multiple revisions (I’ve scheduled and cancelled this to go out at least twice) because I haven’t felt like I’m doing it justice. Maybe that’s impossible: it’s a dense play and I have twenty years of thoughts about it. So instead of trying to write something definitive, I want to focus in on one aspect that I find especially resonant: Arcadia’s treatment of desire.

If you haven’t read or seen Arcadia, it’s a difficult play to adequately summarize. It takes place in an English manor house, in the same room, across two time periods: the Regency of the early nineteenth century and the present day. In the Regency storyline, a drama plays out between the tutor of the noble family’s daughter, a visiting poet, and several others living in or staying at the house. Lord Byron is involved too (off-stage). In the “present” storyline, two academics of the period with different goals research said drama by way of the scant written record and wild conjecture. Each storyline is full of unrequited longing, people falling in love (or lust) with people they really shouldn’t, and smart people doing foolish things because, in the end, they have hearts too. It’s also about history, poetry, scholarship, math, determinism, free will, time, Romanticism and Enlightenment, human progress, and sex. It’s very funny and very sad.

As a romantic who considered a Classics major for a semester and likes to laugh and be sad in equal measure, I was basically the target audience. It also helped that I was a decidedly lovelorn romantic. One line, spoken by the character Lady Croom, hit me like a ton of bricks: “It is a defect of God’s humor that he directs our hearts everywhere but to those who have a right to them.” I mean, you can imagine. In your twenties having an unrequited crush feels like you’re God’s personal punching bag, when the truth is that you’re just in your twenties and Extremely Stupid (pardon the technical term) and give your heart away far too easily. Or that was my experience, anyway.2

But it also resonated with truths I was just beginning to realize about human relationships, and the impact of desire on our lives — especially unrealized, or redirected, desire. I became, and remain, fascinated by it. It’s appropriate to talk about desire, of course, while reflecting on a Jesuit Media Lab program because desire is so central to Ignatian spirituality. St. Ignatius’ unchecked desires for fame, wealth, and sex led him astray when he was younger. But it was also his heart (with some critical input from his head) that led him to God and the path to sainthood. God calls us through our desires, often leading us towards what we need even as we just pursue what we want (c.f. my service origin story).

I could write a lot more about the Ignatian discernment piece, but this isn’t that essay (and I might pitch that essay so 🤫). Instead I want to focus on how Arcadia treats desire and history. The researchers in Arcadia’s present day storyline — Hannah, Bernard, and Valentine — do eventually piece together most of the events of the Regency storyline. But they don’t know the actual people involved, and so they miss out on the meaning of those events. They can only work backwards, drawing conclusions that fit their own biases (Bernard, for instance, is convinced that Lord Byron was central to the drama and refuses to consider that he was a marginal player). Hearts can be secretive, silent things and they don’t always leave written records explaining themselves. Hannah and company get the data, but not the desire.

“Desire” doesn’t come up a lot when you’re talking about history in school (we’re talking generalized history classes here, the sort of thing everyone goes through, not the history nerds). That’s a subject for soap operas and literature, not serious academic study. If you’re studying, say, early sixteenth century Europe, it’s most important to learn how the medieval mind shifted into the Renaissance, the story of New World colonialism and the Protestant Reformation, the birth of humanism and global empires. “Who’s doing who” (or “who wants to do who”) is a sidebar, a fun little distraction before you get back to the important stuff.

Except, it actually is important. Early sixteenth century Europe is one of the most famous examples: how can you understand the history of the Reformation without Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn? But there are countless less famous examples, and even more — I believe — that we don’t know. Someone makes a decision because they want to impress someone else, and that decision ends up altering the fate of a nation; the result is recorded, the motivation is not (or, perhaps, rewritten to create a more politically useful narrative).

History must be about desire because history is, after all, about people. We learn history as dates, maps, wars, and economic/philosophical trends, but behind all of that are real, complicated, confounding people. To muddy the waters even more, our histories are written by people with their own agendas and biases. We learn history as a fixed thing because it’s in the past, but if you actually look closer it fractalizes, writhes, and occasionally bites you on the hand.

History also, as you may have heard, repeats. A major theme of Arcadia is that each generation sees itself as the one that will unravel all of the mysteries of the universe, throwing open the doors to progress. “It’s the best possible time to be alive,” Valentine enthuses, in a rare moment of passion, “when almost everything you thought you knew is wrong.”

The human folly is to recognize this and then think But this time we’re going to figure it all out, forgetting that our ancestors — who were our intellectual and emotional equals, if not technological — felt the same way and eventually crashed up against their own limitations. Septimus, a tutor in the Regency storyline, reflects on the great sweep of history and how, because of our limited time in it, we are both cursed and blessed to rediscover the same things again and again:

We shed as we pick up, like travellers who must carry everything in their arms, and what we let fall will be picked up by those behind. The procession is very long and life is very short. We die on the march. But there is nothing outside the march so nothing can be lost to it. The missing plays of Sophocles will turn up piece by piece, or be written again in another language. Ancient cures for diseases will reveal themselves once more. Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and lost to view will have their time again. You do not suppose, my lady, that if all of Archimedes had been hiding in the great library of Alexandria, we would be at a loss for a corkscrew?

This also means that we play out the same dramas again and again throughout history (that is, indeed, what happens over the play’s two storylines). One generation claims they have conquered irrational emotion and ushered in a new era of reason; the next claims that they have reclaimed the poetic human soul from cold science and restored the meaning of life. Both do dumb stuff because they like people they probably shouldn’t, or want things they probably can’t (or shouldn’t) have, or are afraid of things that make no sense. Desire, and the vagaries of the human heart, make a mess of the orderly, logical procession of things at all turns.

But that’s what it means to be human, and to discount the role of desire in our history means, effectively, dehumanizing our own story. Worryingly, so much of “human progress” seems designed to dehumanize us. Look at our tech bro aristocracy, the princelings of the AI age, busily inventing ways to further alienate us from our humanity and then blink, confused, when you ask them why. It’s possible to know everything and nothing at the same time. As Septimus laments: “When we have found all the mysteries and lost all the meaning, we will be alone, on an empty shore.”

Arcadia isn’t a terribly hopeful play (it ends with characters pondering the inevitable heat death of the universe) and Stoppard was by no means a religious writer. But to me (back in 2005 and today) it expresses something sacred by reminding us of the value of being human. That was the whole point of the Romantic movement, and while they were very dumb and catastrophically horny in many ways, they were also right that progress without human feeling, human desire, or human meaning is empty. You can’t eradicate desire, but you also shouldn’t want to. That raw drive for something more can lead us astray, but it also leads us to the things that matter. Without it, our lives are nothing more than dates on a timeline.

That’s not how I think about my life. I might organize it by dates, but I remember the hopes and goals that drove me through the years, the people I loved, the ones who loved me back and the ones who didn’t. My life isn’t the result of pure ideas and logical decisions: it’s shaped by mistakes, misapprehensions, and spending a lot of time and energy on dreams that were never going to come true, only to find in the ashes something that really mattered. My life, like yours, has been shaped by the mysterious, frustrating, tragicomic desires of my heart. You can tell a life story without those things, but you’ll never understand it.

Things Seen & Heard

• Want to read more of me musing about art and history? Check out this week’s Catholic Movie Club at America Magazine, where I wrote about Lech Majewski’s The Mill and the Cross (2011). I considered writing this essay about both that movie and Arcadia, before realizing that was way too ambitious and would end up with me banging my head against my keyboard. Still, one work definitely speaks to the other.

• If you want another Stoppard rec, my second favorite of his plays is The Invention of Love, which is even more romantic-Classicist bait than Arcadia. It’s about the British poet A.E. Housman, ideas of success, art, repression, and, yes, sex. Despite not having as seismic an impact on me as Arcadia — I’ve never seen it performed — I think I actually quote The Invention of Love more.

• I’m not pivoting to just writing about writing on here, I promise my next Substack will be about movies in some form 😁