on love, in several forms

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley by Richard Rothwell

Today was one of those rare, special days (yes, they are rare and special even for us unemployed people) in which I had nothing to do: just a stretch of pure, unmined time, in this wide open city, to pass however I wanted.

So I went to a museum, which is what I always do when a bucketful of empty hours – that special resource – threatens to fill itself with watching makeup tutorials on YouTube and gradually eating half a jar of cashew butter on my couch.

On my dad’s recommendation, I went to the Morgan Library, which is currently exhibiting a selection of rare manuscripts from the University of Oxford’s Bodleain Library.

I mostly decided to visit the Morgan because this particular exhibit, in all its Britishness and rare manuscript-ishness, reminded me of the British Library, which I visited often when I studied in London. I lived very near the BL, and I used to love walking up that ugly stretch of Grays Inn Road, the conduit between central London and its northern territory beyond St Pancras. I always considered that area a “realer” London than its elegant center – maybe because that particularly charmless, very gray, very loud neighborhood reminded me a lot of New York.

I had some transformative experiences at the BL: breathing in the very same air that rounded the edges of Kerouac’s original “On the Road” manuscript; decoding Beethoven’s turbulent chicken-scratch; marveling over Jane Austen’s ruler-straight penmanship. I felt so good there, so right, like I belonged not just in this city – truly the city of my dreams – but within this tacit society of bibliophiles.

But I also went to the Morgan in the hopes that, maybe, what my solo trips to the BL did for my love of London, this exhibit could do for my love of New York.

I love New York, I do, but it feels more like the love between two long-married people, or what I imagine that love is like. That love is a subtler, tamer thing than its original iteration, a thing that can go unsaid and unacknowledged for long stretches of time. It’s a love which smoothes to the constancy of quiet co-habitation, to the implicit understanding that that love exists.

I live with New York, but I don’t tell it that I love it. New York certainly doesn’t tell me how much it loves me.

But what I ended up feeling at the Morgan exhibit was not a resurgence of love for my city, but a resurgence of love for love’s sake. Of all the manuscripts I saw – and there was some really crazy shit there, like Kafka’s diary (!), the torn remainders of a Sappho poem, salvaged from an 18^th-century garbage heap (!!), and a 13^th-century manuscript of the Magna Carta (!!!) – what drew me the most was Mary and Percy Shelley’s joint diary, and the pages of Frankenstein which Mary wrote and Percy edited.

The couple kept their diary while on a tour of Europe just after they married in 1816, taking turns writing entries, sometimes writing entries together. Relics are so powerful, so solid, and in this way sometimes more affecting than the impalpable written word: around that little diary, I could see the husband and wife huddled together, their dreamy, possibly lonely, internal worlds overlapping for a few wonderful moments.

This physical evidence of the couple's collaboration reaffirmed my belief not just in love, or in marriage, but in the possibility of true partnership. In equal representation within that partnership. Mary created Frankenstein, of course, but without Percy’s edits – which he employed forcefully, sometimes dashing out entire lines and writing in new passages – the story that’s come down to us would be only a shadow of what it came to be.

I do have a soft spot for the Shelleys, because Frankenstein is one of my favorite classic novels; and Percy Shelley, the quintessential Romantic poet, is one of my personal tragic heroes. But I don’t think anyone with eyes and a heart could help but be affected by the interplay of their scripts on the page, which reveal not just a loving relationship, but a relationship steeped in deep mutual respect.

Percy Bysshe Shelley by Amelia Curran