Kavalier and Clay - Lessons

So, I am re-reading “The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay” and I just love this line…


  “But Josef, like many boys of 19, was under the misapprehension that his heart had been broken a number of times, and he prided himself on the imagined toughness of that organ.”



 When I was younger (and even now sometimes), I remember feeling like this quite a bit. That all my crushes or what have you, were all these tragic love stories in which I was the lovable heroine who was jilted in love and not to blame for the crush never becoming more. I think as we get older we realize that we aren’t as tough as we always thought we were from our many “lost loves”, yet we realize that the loss is not as dramatic as we once thought it was either. This is probably because, as we get older and begin to have the heartaches that we romanticized about as children, we realize that what we imagined as toughness was merely ignorance and pride. And I don’t use those words to insult myself or anyone else as children. They are simply just words to describe the feelings.