Falling Out

In one of the many extraordinary footnotes in his Varieties of Religious Experience, William James appends a story that confirms his opinion that "conversion" comes in many forms. If the gaining or losing of religious faith offers the prototypical form of the experience, and the Protestant narrative of irresistible grace its ur-text, there are nonetheless a thousand other human experiences of forming and forsaking convictions that have since been modeled on it.

Thus, James writes: "I subjoin an additional document which has come into my possession, and which represents in a vivid way what is probably a very frequent sort of conversion, if the opposite of 'falling in love,' falling out of love, may be so termed." He goes on to quote at length from a young man's account, as he describes how he first developed an obsessive attraction to another person—and eventually snapped out of it. "The queer thing," he writes, "was the sudden and unexpected way in which it all stopped."

In effect, the young man realized he had created an idol that bore little relation to the person actually before him. He had worshipped a Galatea of his own making, on the model of D.H. Lawrence's "image-making love."  After finally realizing this, he proceeded to commit the injustice people always do in his situation—that of blaming the other person for having failed to live up to his own mythic projections.

Indeed, he comes to acknowledge that he has done as much: "I can see that I had gone unnecessarily far in that direction," he says — that of blaming the other for his own illusions. But more important, he is free now—renewed and made whole: "I felt as if a load of disease had suddenly been removed from me."

Of course, the official and publicly-sanctioned version of the narrative is supposed to go the other way. One ought to fall in love, rather than out of it, just as one is supposed to find religion, not lose it. We live in a society of faith, steeped in optimism, and when the modern notions of romantic love were constructed in the last half-century or so -- mostly in the workshop of secular pop music -- the dominant story was the one that mirrored our society's earlier narratives about how the religious experience was supposed to go.

God may have been replaced by the notion of the sweetheart, and divine grace by love-at-first-sight, but otherwise the discourse was the same. Children were encouraged to trust that unquestioning belief would always be rewarded. The lyrics to the Supremes' "You Can't Hurry Love" read an awful lot like a struggle to retain one's faith in the wisdom of divine providence. How often is the conclusion of sentimental films and music presented to us as the lesson that "fairy tales come true"? And do I have to mention "I'm a Believer"?

Yet losing faith is as much a part of the human experience as gaining it, for all that it is not so socially condoned. Falling out of love happens just as falling into it does. And indeed, it may be the more powerful experience, precisely because it never figures in our society's dominant narrative, and is therefore vastly more surprising when it comes. For this reason, the moment of falling out of love often figures as one of the most stirring in any literary account.

As described it is always an experience instantaneous and irrevocable, just as the young man in William James' quotation describes it. Ernest experiences it thus in The Way of All Flesh: "the scales fell from [his] eyes as they had fallen when Towneley had said, 'No, no, no.'  He said nothing, but he woke up once for all to the fact that he had made a mistake in marrying."

However unfairly, Winterbourne has just the same sort of reaction as Ernest does when he sees—shocking!—Miss Daisy Miller alone with a man in the Colosseum at night, at the conclusion of Henry James' novella. James (who was not yet in a position to read his elder brother's book, with which we began, as it would not be written for another two decades or so) even uses similar terms: "Winterbourne stopped, with a sort of horror, and, it must be added, with a sort of relief. It was as if a sudden illumination had been flashed upon the ambiguity of Daisy’s behavior, and the riddle had become easy to read."

Relief he feels, you will note—and there is relief too in Ernest and in the young man in William James. To fall out of love is always in some way liberating. It rids the subject of a mass of illusion. It is an encounter with truth, and the truth will make you free.

Even for William Butler Yeats, the experience was not all loss, and no gain. To be sure, on the day he found out that Maud Gonne was going to marry another man (as described in Ellmann's account, and in his own poem "Reconciliation"), he was overwhelmed by sudden crisis—"the ears being deafened, the sight of the eyes blind/ With lightning[.]" But on the heels of this came something else too—a chance to shed old absurdities and myths: "We'll out, for the world lives as long ago;/ And while we're in our laughing, weeping fit,/ Hurl helmets, crowns, and swords into the pit."

And even pop music, which I blamed above for having captured in song only one side of the coin—when in reality human life is always at least two-fold—if we listen more closely, we realize I was being unfair. The greatest pop anthems are just as often about falling out of love as into it. If you have ever belted your heart out to "The Sign" or "Torn," you will know what I mean.

Indeed, you may share my desire that we might try putting Ellmann's account of Yeats' disillusionment to music. "He was broad-awake and thirty-seven years old, half of his life over," Ellmann writes. "What would he do now that his most cherished dream was gone?"

Am I the only one who's hearing Natalie Imbruglia's voice in my head right now?