Writer's Diary

7/20/25

A long night of socializing at the party I threw at BCTR left me with a strong impulse to exile myself home—alone, in the air-conditioning—simply to be alone for the first time in twenty-four hours, maybe more, not quite literally (but close)—and, taken less literally, longer still.

I picked up The Crisis of the Aristocracy by Lawrence Stone, a book I’ve been dipping into these last few weeks—a funny thing to be reading at 2 : 35 a.m.—a chapter called “The Marriage and Family.” There’s something almost comforting about how different life was, and how totally unromantic and unbourgoisie the Elizabethans view of marriage, child-rearing, and conjugal relations was; the familiar bourgeois family unit with its anxieties and moral was still relatively far away in time.

Marriage and child-rearing were remarkably harsh and businesslike, and most first marriages could be expected to be interrupted not by divorce but by the death of either spouse, because people died so often and so suddenly.

The lower classes, meanwhile, were punished for sexual impunity, while aristocrats, not unexpectedly, engaged in every manner of tryst and dalliance. (It makes Hinge and situationships and contemporary skittishness about intimacy seem not so bad.)

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But it begs the question: what is right? If our sense of “normal” is a matter of historical happenstance—then what?

The question of “what is right, or natural, or decent” seems more important, to me, therefore, than “what is normal?”