Romantic Illusions: A Selection from Adam Gopnik’s At the Strangers’ Gate (2018)

“Forty years is the natural gestation period of nostalgia, the interval it takes for a past period to become a lost time, and, sometimes, a golden age. There’s a simple reason to explain why. Everybody’s shocking first intimation of the setting sun—which takes about forty years to happen—inspires a look back at the sun rising, and its imagined light makes everything from then look golden. Though pop culture is most often performed by the young, the directors and programmers and gatekeepers—the suits who control and create the conditions, who make the calls and choose the players—are, and always have been, largely forty-somethings. The four-decade interval brings us back roughly to a point when they were becoming aware of themselves. Forty years ago is the potently fascinating time when we were just arriving, when our parents were youthful and in love, the Edenic period preceding the fallen state recorded in our actual memories. . . .

The point of a romantic illusion is not that it is an illusion but that it is romantic. The romance renews the illusion. . . . No one really surrenders an illusion in the face of a fact. We prefer the illusion to the fact. The more facts you invoke, in fact, the stronger the illusion becomes. All faith is immune to all facts to the contrary, or else we would not have such hearty faiths and such oft-resisted facts. . . .

The world can never be as convincing as a couple is. But a couple is too insulated to remain a world. Somehow we found our way through the first marriage that people make, two people bound together by desire and laughter and ambition—the first marriage, before children come, and desire becomes duty, laughter loyalty, and ambition a grimmer kind of responsibility. . . .

All unhappy marriages have many different quarrels in them, while all happy marriages have the same quarrel, over and over again. And that is how you know that it’s a happy marriage—that there’s one quarrel that two people have from the day they’re married to the day they die. It’s not that they don’t have a quarrel, it’s not that that quarrel is not, on its own terms, often quite violent. It’s just always the same—so that the couple come to know all the steps and the dance of that particular quarrel.”—Adam Gopnik, At the Strangers’ Gate: Arrivals in New York (2018)