The Broken Promise

Another quotation from Obedience, Struggle & Revolt that might resonate with The Blue Room:

“An old American vaudevillian of the thirties drank his career away, fell into universal disfavour, but was finally found and put into an old people’s home in California by a kindly producer who had once worked with him many years before.  Visiting the old actor on his deathbed, the producer said, ‘You are facing death.  Is it as people describe?  Is there a final sense of reassurance, a feeling of resignation, that sense of letting go that writers tell us consoles the dying?’  ‘Not at all,’ said the comic.  ‘On the contrary.  Death is none of those things that I was promised.  It is ugly and fierce and degrading and violent.  It is hard,’ he said, ‘hard as playing comedy.’  All I would add is, not as hard as writing it” (126).

I'm not 100% sure why it stands out so much to me, but I'm wondering if what the comic says is also applicable to sex as much as death.  It also never quite meets our expectations; never quite as beautiful and poetic as the writers say.  In reality, it is also a dirty (after all, bodily fluids are being exchanged), smelly, violent act that forces us into vulnerable positions.  And yet we crave it, are driven by it; need it to survive as a species.  It is as much as a part of existence as death is.