I know the future is open and unpredictable. My style, though, is to want to close it — to make it predictable — at least the immediate future (3 months, 6 months, a year) or the longer future with respect to my most intimate relations. A completely open, unpredictable future makes me horribly anxious. I can’t imagine how I will function (because I assume functioning in an effective, creative — not blundering — way entails making plans). Of course, I’m fairly confident that I could function somehow — but on a lower level — even if I have no certainties before me. But it has never really occurred to me, I now realize, that this is anything but an undesirable (and, in the case of love, extremely painful and destructive) limitation. It’s as if I’m supposed to walk through a forest without being allowed to inform myself whether or not it’s full of wolves. Sure, I’ll cross the forest anyway— but it seems just stupid, a pointless risk, that I wasn’t allowed to inform myself first, when I know the information is available.
[There are two vertical lines next to this sentence in the margin.] Only now do I see the limits of my view of life — how carefully I limit surprise, risk-taking, unanticipated sources of change.
The fact is that I have been unusually loose and open to risk-taking in matters of work— tolerant and relatively anxiety-free in work situations that seem to arouse intolerable amounts of anxiety and insecurity in most other people. But I have been so damned cautious, self-protective, uninventive, anxiety-prone, and needful of reassurance in matters of love. I am so very much more cool, loose, adventurous in work than in love. So much more inventive. So easily convinced that if ‘this’ doesn’t work out, something else will — that there’s always ‘more.’ Just what I don’t feel about people — whether friends or lovers.
[In the margin:] ‘scarcity economy of love.’