Personal Feelings and the Communities They Birth

“Now Jason’s getting married in the blink of an eye. / I got an invitation but I didn’t reply. / Tell your little brother that we put down the gloves. / And give him all of my love.”

One of the two new songs that the Killers included with last year’s greatest hits compilation was a pretty good love song in the broken-hearted, “how will I live without you” tradition. The singer can’t get over her, even though all his friends tell him she’s “Just Another Girl.” The verse written out above evokes something important about romance, something that makes romance important. There are lots of lines in love songs about the surrounding world fading into insignificance because you and I and the feelings between us are all that exist anymore. This verse is just the opposite. The world still exists, and its romantic possibilities are functioning as hoped for this Jason, mutual friend of the singer and his ex, even if not for the singer. It turns out that Jason isn’t just a mutual friend; he’s the Girl’s brother. Romance, instead of narrowing the world down to a pair of lovers, opened it up. He loves the Girl, and he loves her brother too. He’d like to celebrate the brother’s wedding, but now that’s a place he shouldn’t be, and that’s another piece of what he’s lost.

After I shared this analysis with my wife, she repeated the story of an ex-boyfriend. Some months after breaking up, she was volunteering in their town’s hospital when a small girl who’d been hit by a car was brought in. The only thing identifying her was a piano book with her first name on it. My wife knew a piano teacher in the vicinity of the accident and called her. She learned the girl’s full name, the name of her ex-boyfriend’s little sister. The hospital chaplain saw her shock and took the phone from her. When the girl’s mother, in whose house my wife had been many times, arrived, my wife stayed out of the way, not wanting to complicate a bad situation. It turned out that the accident was fatal. My wife attended the funeral, but again she felt awkward being there and didn’t interact with the grieving brother and mother.

On one hand, affairs of romance are among the very most personal and private things that people do, and yet they shape society. It’s the sort of combination that leads some who can to write songs and sing them out loud.