In Love with Love

When Ted Lavendar was shot and killed Lieutenant Jimmy Cross had been lost in thoughts and daydreams of Martha. As described on page 11, his love for her was a “dense, crushing love.” He had been looking at her pictures, sucking on the pebble she had collected from the beach and sent him and daydreaming of a life with her. He pondered what kind of love she meant when she signed her letters “Love, Martha”, knowing it probably wasn’t the love he wished it to be. He also spent a great deal of time contemplating whether or not she was a virgin and who took one of the pictures she sent him. He was obsessed with this idea of a life with her, an idea of a love that didn’t actually exist. 

It goes on to say “…his love was too much for him, he felt paralyzed, he wanted to sleep inside her lungs and breathe her blood and be smothered. He wanted her to be a virgin and not a virgin, all at once. He wanted to know her. Intimate secrets: Why poetry? Why so sad? Why that grayness in her eyes?” Later we read, “He was just a kid at war, in love. He was twenty-four years old. He couldn’t help it.” What he was afraid to admit, although he knew it was true, was that this “love” was not real love. It was not reciprocated and in realizing that he wished he knew her “intimate secrets” he reveals that he didn’t really know Martha well enough to be in love with her, further proving that he was merely in love with the idea of her; the idea of love and a life with her.

While lost in these thoughts something terrible happened and the day went completely off course, leaving Lieutenant Jimmy Cross to question whether or not things would have been different if he had not been so wrapped up in a fictional love story with Martha.  I think the song Runaway Train by Soul Asylum is a great depiction of how being so focused on one thing can cause other aspects of life to spin out of control. For this particular selection it’s the lyrics that really drive home this idea of being on a destructive path and having to mentally regroup and get focused on the job in front of you.

“Can you help me remember how to smile?
Make it somehow all seem worthwhile
How on earth did I get so jaded?
Life's mystery seems so faded

I can go where no one else can go
I know what no one else knows
Here I am just a-drownin' in the rain
With a ticket for a runaway train

And everything seems cut and dried,
Day and night, earth and sky,
Somehow I just don't believe it

Runaway train, never going back
Wrong way on a one-way track”
Seems like I should be getting somewhere
Somehow I'm neither here nor there