Henry, come on

April/May 2025

Earlier this spring, I promised to return to Lana Del Rey’s new single “Henry, come on.” I didn’t feel comfortable just jumping into thought about the song, but I did identify its spiritual cousin, “How to Disappear,” from the “Norman Fucking Rockwell” album. As noted in that last essay, “How to Disappear” is one of those Lana songs where she lionizes the striving — but never quite achieving —kind of man who always falls into her orbit. It ends with an unresolved chord and a promise, outside of the rhyming scheme, to always be there, to not go anywhere.

Henry is the same kind of not-quite-a-loser, not-quite-a-success man, but nearly six years later, it’s a very different Lana. First of all, it’s obvious that it was originally conceived as a country song and, thank God, Lana chose not to follow the path of everyone else in the music industry these days. In fact, the song subverts its country expectations rather brilliantly, throwing in a powerfully reverb-driven lead vocal, a string section and even a strategically placed harp. But there’s another surprise lurking in the song — Lana revealing herself as a deity, of sorts. She knows that she’s changed into a very different creature and she’s leaning into the meaning of her transformation:

And it's not because of you
That I turned out so dangerous
Yesterday, I heard God say, "It's in your blood"
And it struck me just like lightning
I've been fighting, I've been striving
Yesterday, I heard God say,
"You were born to be the one”
To hold thе hand of the man
Who flies too close to thе sun

This is such a fascinating lyric. In essence she’s saying: No, Henry, I didn’t become this creature capable of ripping men’s hearts out because of something special about you. Listen up, because you probably don’t know who you are dealing with. I don’t just pray to God, he talks back to me. And when I prayed on walking out, he told me I had no choice, it was in by blood.

And more than that, he told me that all my fighting and striving had a purpose, that I was destined to hold the hand of greatness, of a man who will strive so high that, like Icarus, he will fly too close to the sun before he burns. Notice that she’s still destined to be with a man who doesn’t reach the great heights. And even though she’s an all-powerful creator of worlds, it’s still him who is taking the lead.

But Henry, come on, we both know that’s not you. So hang up your cowboy hat and move along.

The song is a fascinating mix of personal wisdom and narcissistic insanity. But being a pop star would do that to anyone, I suppose. As for me, I emotionally feel closer to the old Lana, the one who is willing to stand by no matter what. I guess it’s because I spent so much of my life in a relationship but not in love. I’m not interested in settling for anything less anymore and, by experiencing it in any form, I’m also not inclined to surrender it.

UPDATE: I keep going back and forth on this piece, wondering if I reveal too much or maybe invite in a certain audience with the subject, then bait and switch them into a relationship blog post. I return to it because Lana has a way of bringing up these kinds of feelings in me.

The truth is, no one ever asks about these kinds of questions with me, so if I don’t bring them up myself, the subjects just fall into silence or allusions to my thoughts and feelings on blogs about other topics. I really should’t pretend that I actively seek out or want people to talk about my private life. It seems odd for someone who writes so much personal detail on a blog, but I’m actually a very private person.

There’s a great deal that I don’t share online or anywhere else. And since I’ve stopped engaging with Montaigne’s writing directly, there’s been a decreasing volume of me in my writing. Having said that, it’s true that over the last few years, people rarely ask what’s going on in my personal life. I don’t know if they don’t care or if they’re afraid to ask … or if they assume I’m too old to be thinking about such things anymore.

There’s actually one person who I don’t talk to that often, but every time I run into her she does ask and I appreciate that. She’s someone I met on a dating app four years ago, but we never actually went out on a date. She had a mile long list of dealbreakers at the time, and I was nixed because my marriage had ended only a year before, she required men she dated to be single for longer.

Anyway, we remained friends and because she lives fairly close to me, I see her from time to time. Whenever we reconnect, I always get the feeling that I’m being sized up again, as in her thinking “why exactly did we never date?” But by the end of the meeting, it seems clear that her memory’s been jogged.

I find it kind of amusing, actually, because I know exactly why we never connected that way — (the dealbreakers were just a pretext.) I’m the exact opposite, personality wise, than the type of guy she’s attracted to. She’s repeatedly getting into relationships with former military guys, borderline abusive, addicted, people who throw lots of stress hormones around. She either gets cheated on or finds out the guy is in another relationship, every damn time. And she usually reconnects with me when she’s either in between relationships or in a bad spot with someone she’s dating, so at first it looks so appealing — I really am the opposite of all that.

But the truth is, that’s asking too much … she’d likely be better off finding a guy who has some of those traits without the toxic elements. People like who they like and it’s hard to fight with these default settings.

I was reading Tolstoy’s biography recently and the book is filled with laments about his miserable marriage and, seemingly, regrets about every consumated relationship he ever had. And some of Tolstoy’s stories were triggering for me as well, reminding me of the worst aspects of my marriage and why I feel so much comfort in my single status these days.

But Tolstoy wasn’t all negativity about relationships, even in his advanced age. There was this really interesting anecdote in the biography where he read Chekhov’s short story “The Darling” and was enchanted by the lead character named Olenka, a woman who reshaped her personality around any man with whom she entered into a relationship. Chekhov clearly intended to criticize this element of Olenka's personality, but in the course of the writing, he became more affectionate towards the character.

Tolstoy, who had a very headstrong wife who challenged every decision he made throughout their married life, came across Olenka and thought -- yes -- this is exactly what I needed in a partner, someone who would become devoted to and supportive of my life's work. It’s a very old fashioned view of what a wife should be. And it's hard to argue that a more agreeable partner would have made Tolstoy a greater success -- perhaps the marital tension was a creative gift to him.

But from nothing more than a personal happiness perspective, he was probably right, he would have been better off married to an Olenka. I don’t have the same desires as Tolstoy, in fact the character of Olenka reminded me of aspects of my mother I find unappealing. But I did find alignment in the perverse discovery, perhaps too late in life, of what you desire in a partner.

For me, I have a selfish desire to be with someone who pays attention to my thoughts, feelings and ideas, has opinions about them, and who wants to see me push my creativity and have greater success, however I define it. It's hard for me to imagine entering into another romantic relationship if this element is missing. But it's also asking a lot. You don’t see dating profiles that read “Have you seen the movie ‘Phantom Thread’ and wanted to enter into a similar type of relationship … perhaps without the poisoning?”

And so, I remain attached to those who do take an interest in my sketches, rambles and side projects, in some manner, and I can't imagine letting go. I sometimes wonder if I actually have any readers or if I’m just imagining them inside a hall of mirrors. Proust would argue that it doesn’t matter, that the feelings are what drive our passions, not the other way around. In “The Fugitive” he writes:

Perhaps there is a symbolic truth in the infinitely small place taken up in our anxious feelings by the loved one to whom they relate. For her person itself has little to do with it; it is almost entirely concerned with the sequence of emotions and anxieties which chance made us feel for her at some time or other in the past, and which habit has attached to her.

Or, to borrow another route to these thoughts, via a post on Instagram I saw this morning, reading Murakami is like having feelings for a mysterious woman. You have no idea what’s going on, but you’re too emotionally invested to give it up. So ... I guess people may have a point in not asking me about my private life … there are no easy or simple answers here. Another thing Proust wrote:

Happiness alone is good for the body; whereas sorrow develops the strength of the mind.

And, perhaps by inference, I’m a little too concerned with building that strength of mind. But Proust argues that it’s ultimately all worth the trouble:

Since the electricity in lightning can power a camera, since the dull pain in our heart can raise above itself, like a flag, the permanently visible image of each new sorrow, let us accept the physical damage it does to us in return for the spiritual knowledge it brings us; let us leave our body to disintegrate, since each new particle that breaks away from it comes back, now luminous and legible, to add itself to our work, to complete it at the price of the sufferings of which others more gifted have no need, to increase its solidity as our emotions are eroding our life. Ideas are substitutes for sorrows; the moment they change into ideas they lose a part of their power to hurt our hearts and, for a brief moment, the transformation even releases some joy.