Sonya isn't good

Still processing THREE HOUSES.

Studying OCTET, I bought the libretto, there is so much more to the piece than the album and I want to understand how it all fits together.

If there were one thing I could ask Dave Malloy it might not be anything to do with his compositional process, because that's both personal (from his perspective) and figure-out-able (from mine), and anyway I'm not trying to copy him (put a pin in that), I'm working towards making art that exists as its own integrated experience, outside of me, an experience anyone can have if they do the work.

But I might ask him if he still thought Sonya was good.

I compared myself to Sonya, once.

It was the kind of evening that I was pretending was a date; the person on the other side of the two-top was pretending it was just drinks, and we both knew exactly what was going on.

And so I told him that I felt like Sonya, which was an appropriate comparison to make at the time because we were both lying to each other, each of us hoping to trick the other one into falling for (or into) something.

I also told him I felt like Sonya because I was young enough to assume it might be attractive to present myself as insecure. This was in fact the truth, as a secure person would not have put herself in this situation, but it was also another kind of trick.

I was an administrative assistant at the time, which made it even easier to make the comparison. I described the scene in which Sonya and Natasha enter the ballroom, both equally pretty – he had never read War and Peace – and then I described the scene in the epilogue, in which Natasha calls Sonya a sterile flower. I told him that was what I feared.

If I had known enough to know myself, I might have understood that my fear was well-founded. Sonya loses her humanity through a series of lies and evasions that she literally calls self-sacrifice.

Natasha sees this, from the start of the story – notice how she continually visualizes Sonya as a cat – but she does not understand it until the end.

Here is the paragraph that reveals and ruins Sonya:

Sónya burst into hysterical tears and replied through her sobs that she would do anything and was prepared for anything, but gave no actual promise and could not bring herself to decide to do what was demanded of her. She must sacrifice herself for the family that had reared and brought her up. To sacrifice herself for others was Sónya’s habit. Her position in the house was such that only by sacrifice could she show her worth, and she was accustomed to this and loved doing it. But in all her former acts of self-sacrifice she had been happily conscious that they raised her in her own esteem and in that of others, and so made her more worthy of Nicholas whom she loved more than anything in the world. But now they wanted her to sacrifice the very thing that constituted the whole reward for her self-sacrifice and the whole meaning of her life. And for the first time she felt bitterness against those who had been her benefactors only to torture her the more painfully; she felt jealous of Natásha who had never experienced anything of this sort, had never needed to sacrifice herself, but made others sacrifice themselves for her and yet was beloved by everybody. And for the first time Sónya felt that out of her pure, quiet love for Nicholas a passionate feeling was beginning to grow up which was stronger than principle, virtue, or religion. Under the influence of this feeling Sónya, whose life of dependence had taught her involuntarily to be secretive, having answered the countess in vague general terms, avoided talking with her and resolved to wait till she should see Nicholas, not in order to set him free but on the contrary at that meeting to bind him to her forever.

It is similar to the passage in Middlemarch in which Dorothea is asked to sacrifice her future, especially because Dorothea (like Sonya) has grown up believing that "only by sacrifice could she show her worth."

The difference in this case is that Dorothea says no and Sonya says yes.

The other difference is that Sonya turns her yes into a gambit:

Now that she knew that the renewal of Natásha’s relations with Prince Andrew would prevent Nicholas from marrying Princess Mary, she was joyfully conscious of a return of that self-sacrificing spirit in which she was accustomed to live and loved to live. So with a joyful consciousness of performing a magnanimous deed—interrupted several times by the tears that dimmed her velvety black eyes—she wrote that touching letter the arrival of which had so amazed Nicholas.

Sonya has been duplicitous throughout the book, including the section in which she betrays Natasha – and the fact that her actions prevent Natasha from running away with Anatole does not make them any less of a betrayal – and she hopes that this particular lie will trick Nikolai into marrying her while simultaneously convincing the rest of the Rostovs that she had done everything in her power to prevent the marriage.

Instead, Sonya loses – not just Nikolai, but also the possibility of becoming a real person – and so Natasha says, in the epilogue:

“‘To him that hath shall be given, and from him that hath not shall be taken away.’ You remember? She is one that hath not; why, I don’t know. Perhaps she lacks egotism, I don’t know, but from her is taken away, and everything has been taken away. Sometimes I am dreadfully sorry for her. Formerly I very much wanted Nicholas to marry her, but I always had a sort of presentiment that it would not come off. She is a sterile flower, you know—like some strawberry blossoms. Sometimes I am sorry for her, and sometimes I think she doesn’t feel it as you or I would.”

Sonya lacks egotism, the desire to become an integrated self, and so she can never be good because she, herself, integrated and whole, can never be anything.

One of the last Substack posts I read, before I committed to stepping outside of the systemic algorithmic parasocial internet (audience capture going both ways, after all), had to do with a quasi-scientific attempt to rank people by attractiveness, and to prove that everyone thought that certain types of people were more or less attractive than others, and to surprise everyone by revealing that we all thought we were a bit more attractive than we actually were, according to the collected data.

Well.

(No, seriously, I'm making a point with this, and it's at the end of that pin I placed earlier.)

I tell Larry every day how much I love to look at him, and when I saw that Substack post that revealed, through some kind of rationalist survey or whatever, that people who looked like us were just kind of middling pretty – see for yourself, here's our wedding photo – it made me feel like something I had always known had just been proven.

We are ordinary people, he and I.

We only seem extraordinary, to ourselves and to each other, because we're happy with who we are and what we're doing.

And so if you asked me whether I would give Larry up to have, for example, the inside of Dave Malloy's mind, or his accomplishments, or his accolades, I wouldn't even consider it.

And if you asked me whether I would give Larry up to have had the kind of musical theater training I wanted in college, where they took the piece I had written when I was eighteen and helped me work and rework it until it were as good as, for example, IN THE HEIGHTS, and then if I suddenly had Lin-Manuel Miranda's opportunities in front of me, if all of this could have happened in exchange for the life I have right now, I wouldn't switch.

This isn't just because Larry is the best person I've ever known, and sometimes when I say this he makes a joke like "you should have met more people," and sometimes when I say this I tell him that I hope everyone thinks that about whomever they're with, especially if they married them, and every time when I say this he tells me that it's the same for him, we feel the same about each other, and because of that we can be ourselves without being duplicitous or sacrificial.

It's also because I don't want anybody else's life and I don't want anybody else's work.

I want my own, even if it never becomes great.

That's what it means to be good, I think.

I'd be curious to know whether you agree.