I’m working on a theory that I introduced in my Stendhal wrap-up essays that I believe applies across my work. It goes something like this:

Many of the most important decisions we make in life are ultimately inexplicable. They are driven by feelings, held deeply in our nervous system, and we simply do not know why we believe passionately this way.

It might involve who you love, what kind of work inspires passion in you, your favorite foods, places and sensations that bring you joy. And if you try to analyze why you love these things so much, you are left with that wonderful line of Catullus that Montaigne quoted in On Sadness: any love we can describe burns on a small pyre.

This is what I call the inexplicable. It is our core, emotional belief system. But there’s something strange and paradoxical about the inexplicable — our consciousness, that thing governed by the brain and reason — cannot stand the existence of something inexplicable, because things that appear to come to us prior to rational thought upset the brain’s supremacy. The brain must construct systematic scaffolding around these beliefs to give the appearance of command and control.

And that is where we enter the realm of the confounding. These are the full sets of complimentary ideas and systems surrounding your core beliefs that turn something simple, but unexplainable, into a vast puzzle, the kind of thing the mind loves to turn and ruminate over.

A wonderful example of this is one I have cited before — Marcel Proust’s fourth part of “In Search of Lost Time,” the book “Sodom and Gomorrah.” This book is centered around the concept of intermittences of the heart and uses two episodes of this phenomenon. The first, Marcel has a flash when tying his shoe of his grandmother doing it for him and it brings back a flash of affection in his youth towards his grandmother, emotionally transporting him through time.

The second time it occurs, Marcel is with his sometimes-girlfriend Albertine, when she explains to him where she is going on vacation with and why and he suddenly realizes that she has amorous relationships with women as well as men.

My theory of “In Search of Lost Time” is that this should have been a great clarifying moment for Marcel, one where he recognized that the thing he loved about Albertine all along was her queerness, the fact that by loving her he could embrace his unusual sexuality. (Marcel Proust, a gay man, couldn’t write a gay novel in early 20th century France, so he basically created a romantic epic where his alter ego was in love with a lesbian, allowing him to explore queer sexuality in an exotic manner that wouldn’t offend the tastes of his times.)

But instead of embracing this inexplicable fact about himself, Marcel creates a confounding drama where he draws Albertine even closer, basically entraps her into a romantic relationship, and then subjects her to endless rounds of jealousy and spying, trying to figure out something he knew all along, that she wanted to be with women.

This is what human beings do all of the time and I think it’s due to that flaw in our consciousness. The brain creates the confounding drama, something that can be observed and picked apart, to divert attention from the inexplicable reality at the center of it all.

And this is not just true for love, it applies to all aspects of human existence, including our politics. All of us have certain political beliefs that fall into that same inexplicable category. But instead of holding onto these idiosyncratic views, we attach them to broad belief systems, whatever most comfortably fit with the things that matter most to us.

So each of us drags along this big bag of ideology — not so different from the streaming services we have to buy month after month just to watch one or two shows we like — and we end up in confounding political dramas, sometimes getting into pitched political battles on issues we don’t really care about because they’ve been packaged into the thing that means the most to us.

I believe that the only escape from this predicament in all phases of life is to embrace friendship as much as possible, to de-emphasize the things we are passionate about and to instead focus our energies on building stronger connections to people we like. We should spend more of our time doing things with dispassionate affection — things we don’t necessarily care about doing all that much, but that bring us in touch with people we like, things that maybe mean something to them.

It’s only by de-emphasizing our passions and learning to compromise that we let the air out of confounding situations in life. We have to learn to like more than love, accept our passions as quirky little possessions that are important to us, but not everything.

We have to trick our minds into not creating all the drama and forcing the rest of the world into these grand epic battles. It’s how we find personal happiness and also get humanity off a path towards destruction.

By the way, the new Big Thief album “Double Infinity” dropped today, and listening Adrianne’s lyrics, it seems to echo much of what I wrote in this essay. The second song on the album, Words, is all about the importance of our subconscious and the inability of words to change reality. But it’s the song “Double Infinity” that fully dramatizes the ideas I’ve been circling. This nearly brings tears to my eyes, it’s so perfect:

[Verse 1]
In the arms of the one I love
Still seeing pictures of
Another from the future or the past
What's lost or waiting

[Verse 2]
Troubled mind let me rest
My life is full, my heart is blessed
And still you put me to the test
Of losing and of gaining

[Verse 3]
Angel come, take my hand
Hold me close, let me land
On my feet in the sand
With the winds around me raging

[Verse 4]
I've been too long behind these walls
Inside this house ignoring calls
And time moves like the water falls
Unrelеnting, cascading

[Verse 5]
The trees on fire, the rivеrs flood
And all the banks are soaked in blood
A mirror makes a portrait draws the shadow
And the shading

[Verse 6]
The butterflies on the summer breeze
The wildflowers sway with ease
At the bridge of two infinities
What's been lost and what lies waiting

[Instrumental Break]

[Verse 7]
Beauty speak to me
Let me know you, let me see
Myself inside your mystery
Through the crystal cage of aging

[Verse 8]
Longing to go back again
To be someone I've never been
I echo and I seek to win
Mourning and celebrating

[Verse 9]
Fastening so desperately
To vision and to memory
At the bridge of two infinities
What is forming, what is fading

[Verse 10]
Deep within the center of
The picture is the one I love
The eye behind the essence
Still unmovable, unchanging

[Outro]
The eye behind the essence
Still unmovable, unchanging