Kid Tetris

If I compare my students today with my student contemporaries of the 1960s and 1970s, they certainly do seem to be more cautious and more calculating�about career choice, political engagement, and aspiration generally. They make prudent life plans, and they are unembarrassed by all their prudence. It would not surprise me if attitudes to romantic love have become similarly cautious and calculating, and perhaps also similarly ironic and detached. How could they not, if people are determined not to take large risks in any precinct of life?
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What is risky is not getting in touch with some trait that is dissimilar to some trait of one�s own. It is the whole idea of becoming vulnerable to an inner life that one cannot see and can never control. It is not qualitative difference, but the sheer separateness of the other person, the idea of an independent source of vision and will, that makes real love an adventure in generosity�or, if one is like Proust�s narrator, a source of mad jealousy and destructive projects of domination and control. And this has nothing at all to do with class difference, or gender difference, or even temperamental difference. It has to do only with the fact of human individuation�that minds and bodies never merge, that intimacy is not a fusion but a conversation.