a different sun

She made a decision to grow her heart toward a different sun, she said, and gradually that's what happened. It was a decision, she said, and then it was her life.

[John Burnham Schwartz]

    This passage has been on my mind a lot lately. The book that it is from--a novel called Claire Marvel--is excellent, among my top ten. As explained in a review that I wrote after first reading it:

This is a very sad book. A stylistic combination of Losing Julia and An Elegy for September [which I loved but seemingly anyone else has hated]. There are no good guys or bad guys, in a sense, and it is all very illustrative of itself. Hard to explain, yet very simple. It is about love, and not love.

    At the point from which the passage is taken, the protagonist is staying with a family friend in France and reading his father's journals. He reads of a relationship with a young woman who was not his [the protagonist's] mother—the woman who would, late in life, become this family friend. The protagonist's father eventually left the young woman and she was heartbroken. "C. nursed her hurt for a long while, and L. offered consolation. He was patient, even reverent, and he was loyal. She made a decision to grow her heart toward a different sun, she said, and gradually that's what happened. It was a decision, and then it was her life."
    Is that possible? Can one make such a decision, logical and controlled, to feel nothing, or to feel, but for someone else? And if one can, is that feeling real? Or is it always to be a hobbled feeling, and asterisk, a "but for..."? Will it eventually become as real as the initial feeling, felt for someone else? Or perhaps even more real because it is shared, and even initially overlapped by the patience and kindness and loyalty of that person with whom it is shared?
    There have been times in my past when I wished to feel nothing. Oddly, there have been memorable times in my recent past when I have thought that I should wish to feel nothing, that the lack of feeling (or the ability to throw aside the feeling) would save me. But I have, at those moments, chosen to hold particularly close to the feeling because I know that it is true. I don't hurt because I want to, I hurt because I do. And God help me if I don't.
    And there have been memorable times in my recent past when I have wished for others to feel...less. Not 'nothing', perhaps, but certainly less. Because the seeming 'depth' of the feelings--or at least the depth of the expression, or the willingness of the expression--is uncomfortable and inconvenient and troubling. Like flowers after a funeral, what is one to do with all of the 'extra'? Some is nice, flattering, comforting, comfortable. Too much is...stifling. Uncomfortable. It makes one wonder if the emotion behind the giving is really what it seems, or driven by guilt or the desire for a response. What response is right? Appropriate? Expected?
    I don't know what the answers might be. Or if there are answers at all. I only know that there are questions, always questions.
    And perhaps a different sun?