The Dying Animal by Philip Roth Page B

diseases of the retina became her life's passion.
    What did I say to her? Why do you ask? You too need the lecture on the childishness of coupling? Of course it's childish. Family life is, today more than ever, when the ethos is created substantially by the children. It's even worse when there are no children around. Because the childish adult replaces the child. Coupled life and family life bring out everything that's childish in everyone involved. Why do they have to sleep night after night in the same bed? Why must they be on the phone to each other five times a day? Why are they always
with
each other? The forced deference is certainly childish. That unnatural deference. In one of the magazines, I read recently about a famous media couple married thirty-four years and the marvelous achievement of their learning to bear each other. Proudly the husband told the reporter, "My wife and I have a saying that you can tell the health of a marriage by the number of teeth marks on your tongue." I wonder, when I'm around such people, What are they being punished for? Thirty-four years. One stands in awe of the masochistic rigor required.
    I have a friend in Austin, a very successful writer. Married young in the mid-1950s, then in the early seventies got divorced. Married to a decent woman with whom he produced three decent children—and he wanted out. And he didn't get out hysterically or foolishly. It was a human rights issue. Give me liberty or give me death. Well, after the divorce he went off to live alone and at liberty and he was miserable. And so within a short time he married again, a woman this time with whom he didn't plan to have any children, who already had a college-age child of her own. A married life
without
children. Well, sex had to be over in a couple of years, yet this is a man who was vigorously adulterous throughout his first marriage and focused on sex in his writing. On his own he could have begun to enjoy openly all that he finagled surreptitiously while married. Yet unsprung from his constraints, he's miserable from the first second and believes that he'll be miserable forever. He is at liberty in the face of the fullness, and he has no idea where he is. All he knows to do is to find his way back into the condition he could no longer stand, though now without the compelling logic of wanting to be married so as to have children, to raise a family, et cetera. The charm of the surreptitious? I don't disparage it. Marriage at its best is a sure-fire stimulant to the thrills of licentious subterfuge. But my friend's need was for something more basic to his safety than the adulterer's daily drama of fording a river of lies. That wasn't the kick he remarried for, even though once he was a husband again he almost immediately resumed pursuing the old delights. Part of the problem is that emancipated manhood never has had a social spokesman or an educational system. It has no social status because people don't want it to have social status. Yet this fellow's circumstances so favored living to the limit of his prerogatives, if only for the dignity of it. But deferring, deferring, deferring? Appeasing, appeasing, appeasing? Every other day dreaming of leaving? No, it's not a dignified way to be a man. Or, I told Elena, to be a woman.
    Was she persuaded? I don't know. I don't think so. Aren't you? Why, why are you laughing? What's so hilarious? My didacticism? I agree: one's absurd side is never unimpressive. But what can be done about it? I'm a critic, I'm a teacher—didacticism is my destiny. Argument and counterargument is what history's made of. One either imposes one's ideas or one is imposed on. Like it or not, that's the predicament. There are always opposing forces, and so, unless one is inordinately fond of subordination, one is always at war.
    Look, I'm not of this age. You can see that. You can hear that. I achieved my goal with a blunt instrument. I took a hammer to domestic life and those who stand