Interviewer: Ahem. Dear Maestro, do you think it's true, as Buddha says, that attachment is the root of all suffering?

Maestro: Well, perhaps it is true, but I don't see how we can avoid this messy thing of attachment. It's in the fiber of our beings. You're attached, to your family, to lover, to friends, and even to people who pass randomly through your life. How can you avoid it? You feel bonded. That's probably why we are artists, out of that great feeling.

It doesn't take much to make us feel bonded. You could go to a shrink who would come up with explanations about the peculiarities of your own attachment process, but it wouldn't change much. You're stuck with your attachments. It's nothing one should feel sick about, as if it were a sickness. In fact, it's good health. Your chemistry is working.

Romances are created about these firings, or maybe they are misfirings, of our chemistry. Boy X kisses Girl Y and he falls for her, as they say. He's stuck with it, no matter the realities that come to bear. Wuthering Heights kinds of stuff. Beethoven's Ninth kind of stuff, perhaps, if we were to view the insides of such chemistry or sentiment, whatever we should call it. Shakespeare was great at it. And also so good that people in general don't recoil in embarrassment at all this 'romantic nonsense,' as seems to be their instinct, practical creatures that they are, but seem in general to more or less 'get it.'

But I will say this, in conjunction with Buddha, or other spiritual writings, that in the process of attachment one becomes more and more selfless, even to the point of Buddhist perfection. Why not regard our capacity for attachment as the way we become better people, the way we become like our parents who loved and sacrificed for us.

And so we find a kind of odd message created in, say, advertisements, that love is, or involves, making a big show of things. When really, if it is the real thing, not at all about show. Leave the show up to way society should celebrate when love happens, like a traditional wedding festivity.

Anyway, that's what I get from doing my own math, that love is virtually invisible, like light, quantifiable not as a particle or a wave, neither. Is this a sad thing? Well, I'm afraid it can be, you know, like when Cordelia refuses to profess her love for her Dad, King Lear, and having been outrageously buttered up by his other two (less loving, more selfish) daughters, tells her, "nothing comes from nothing," and thus sets a course with inevitable conclusions and tragedy. Yes, it is sort of funny, that those gifted at a young age for the empathetic receive the punishment somehow.

Interviewer: Indeed. What can we do about it?

Maestro: Well, one can try to celebrate, or notice, or make light, of this apparently strange behavior. To Kill a Mockingbird has that in it. Chekhov, as in that story of the shy soldier who receives a kiss in the dark at a party... Or that other one of his, about the fellow who goes to spy on one of his enemies, posing as a lackey servant who ends up falling for his enemy's poor unloved wife. Chekhov is full of this curious effect. Lady with the Pet Dog, ending as lovers face a strange sad anonymity as far as being able to present themselves to society, doomed in their own special way. There's an enjoyable kind of modesty to his tales' characters, even in those who are not being so 'modest,' (in the sense that they are fulfilling their biological urges and desires) a shyness that once upon a time was equated with decency, and rightly so.

That is the strangeness of a situation portrayed in A Hero For Our Time, the strange almost mathematical playing out of the phenomenon of the heart's ways, so to speak. It is not the insensitivity, as one solicited literary agent saw in the manuscript, I think anyway, but the excess of sensitivity. Which maybe should be bred out of the race anyway.

But, dear interviewer, don't ask me. What would I know? I am just a lonesome middle-aged bachelor without a chance anyway, probably too conflicted to amount to much good, best left alone, no idea what to do with his life beyond a daily basis anyway. Like Beethoven. Someone who screws up whatever he touches.