Hi!! For the Taylor ask game (if you’re still doing it): “Chloe or Sam or Sophia or Marcus,” please? It feels like such a pivotal song on TTPD to me, but I never seem to see it talked about!
Hi!!!! (She says a year later, I’m so sorry.)
Okay the thing about Chloe et al. (one of my favorite swiftie song nicknames) is that it is so much more straightforward than many on Tortured Poets. Story-wise to me. At least to me.
(To me is the important caveat for all of these thoughts because I have become more reticent to analyze Taylor's music with time? At least in a specific up-close way with each song because I feel like it gets more complicated and my takes feel increasingly important. So anyway this whole thing had a big “TO ME” caveat.)
ANYWAY. I say it's straightforward because I think it's about---and I'm so sorry I hate to talk about Taylor songs in this way actually, can't wait until 100 years and everyone in Taylor's music has been forgotten but the songs remain----Matty and about the Matty storyline of TTPD. It's about the situationship of it all. And by straightforward I mean that I think that this song tells the whole story of the situationship incredibly straightforwardly and more straightforwardly than any other song on the album. (Say straightforwardly one more time, Maria.) More thoughts below.
So to me (I'm so sorry I keep saying this) it's very traceable. It's almost line by line traceable. The first verse is, essentially, I watched your life happen (your hologram stumbled into my apartment etc.) and you watched my life happen (dating someone who looked like they would have bullied you in school etc.) and we both just watched it happen. We just let it happen. It makes me crazy because it IS the situationship of it all. That is what a situationship it is!!!!!!!!! It is nothing happening. The song is obsessed with this concept--it plays with it over and over. It comes back to it again and again. It just didn't happen. Like it never happened.
Then the second verse is about why nothing could happen. And again--it's so straightforward. You said some deeply upsetting things--you said some things that I can't unabsorb. You turned me into an idea of sorts, you didn't treat me like a person (by the way has anyone ever clocked an artsy man's tea like Taylor does in this line? takes my BREATH away) and you had a drug problem that I couldn't be around. That i COULDN'T watch happen. And then it's all the things she did in the wake of not being able to watch it happen. I changed into goddesses, villains, and fools / changed plans and outfits and lovers and rules etc. etc. ---another aside, what an INSANE WAY TO SUM UP HER LIFE as seen in the light of this situationship and yet IT RINGS SO TRUE. I couldn't deal with the fact that nothing could happen so I did all these things in the wake of it. To distract myself. To try to fix it. To try to outrun my desertion of you.
And that's why the emotional thread of the song --or maybe not thread more like emotional dagger--is in the chorus. If you want to break my cold, cold heart---aNOTHER aside I love when Taylor describes her heart as cold because we know it isn't but at this point, after all of this, it IS and idk I can't even analyze this phrase it just goes like a dagger into me and I resonate so much---just say, 'I loved you the way that you were.' If you want to tear my world apart just say you've always wondered. It's not just that this didn't happen but that reminder both that her past self is gone and that terrible, haunting, tormenting question of could it have happened? was this my chance at the Great Love? and now it's gone forever? could I have been happy forever if we had both made different choices? Did you love me then so you'll never love me now? And is that the only kind of love I'll ever find? That is the thing that drives her mad.
And then the bridge. Listen, the whole song plays with time. Shuffling it around like she's playing with it in a kaleidoscope. The way that you were. And the bridge takes it all the way back to the moment "I crashed into you" and there was a spark or a connection or a possibility or SOMETHING but also brings us back to a new truth of the song and another aspect that makes that line in the chorus about loving her the way that she was such a dagger. And that is that at the time she didn't know what to do in the face of Whatever This Was! That she still feels somehow like she messed it up because she was too young to know what to do! --too impaired by my youth to know what to do is one of my favorite lines she's everrrrrrrr written btw I can't believe---Which is what makes it all so tragic if that version of her is the one that is loved!
Anyway she keeps going moving chronologically forward. So it didn't happen ---what do I do now? If I do this (sell my apartment) and you do something else (have some kids with an internet starlet) ---clocked his tea again I fear---will it fix this?? Then we get to maybe my favorite part of the song which is her reflecting so deeply on situationships no one has ever done it better before or since.
Could it be enough to just float in your orbit
Can we watch our phantoms like watching wild horses
Cooler in theory but not if you force it
To be, it just didn't happen
This captures both the truth and the pain of it all. You can't force something to be ---it just didn't happen it just didn't happen----and all the power of a situationship is essentially all the power of a possibility, of a dream. She is asking such a fascinating question here which is, essentially, can I just let this be???? Is the best thing to do nothing because that's how I preserve whatever this is?? And she was right! (And she was wrong.) All the power that a situationship has is just the promise of something, the potential of something. And it IS a real power. In a way, for a time. That is where its power comes from, from the fact that isn't real but maybe it could be. But eventually that power disappears anyway. With time. Because it isn't reality. Because it's just shadows on the cave. (Watching our phantoms like watching wild horses is the most insane and wonderful and evocative way to capture this feeling and put it into words btw. The writing in this song is so breathtakingly brilliant and she's doing it almost casually!!! The heart of the song is expressed in the simplest language imaginable and then she reaches out to put an off-hand feeling into words that I can't believe have been strung together in the way she does. Okay I'm getting hyperbolic. But it's crazyyyyyyyy. Anyway!!!!!)
My point is: the bridge asks the (correct) question of whether all the power of this remains if she does nothing but it ends on the note, again, of this not being reality and so it’ll be disappointing anyway. She can twist herself into endless pretzels and ask the most precise questions about shades of emotional nuance ever voiced by human mind but it’s always going to be disappointing. It's not satisfying because a situationship is not a relationship, is not a marriage, and is not a life. You've got to move on. And that's another reason I love this song. In the context of the Taylor Swift Lore and in the context of this album in particular this song is answered by other songs at other points in time. It is not the whole truth. The Smallest Man Who Ever Lived is what happens on the other side of trying to make this situationship a relationship. It is this situationship seen with the lights on. Actually he's sunk in stoned oblivion!!!! Actually this is HORRIBLE!!!!! Actually your younger self was right!!!! You couldn't watch it happen!!!!! But because she chose to live this out, because she was coming out of a horrible situation with one British Man and thought that maybe dating a Worse British Man Would Help, and because she's Taylor Swift and somehow always has all the resources to live out her very worst ideas in a way most of us could never dream of, she put all her theories to the test and found the resounding answer to them and moved the fuck on. (Sorry for swearing.) The magic of Taylor is that this song contains such real love and such real pain and the heart of the song will endure and does endure and yet also in her life specifically this song is over-over. There is no lingering question for her, there is no lingering romanticizing, and the only reason she was doing it anyway is because she was heartbroken over her 6 year relationship coming to a whimpering, pathetic end. (Not with a bang but with a whimper, Taylor would love that.)
ANYWAY thank goodness that God and Andrea Swift were both like "you're going to marry a football player who actually likes you enOUGH with these British con artists----" lol.
See I just feel like I walked you through this song line by line but didn't actually say anything better than the song does. (That's how you KNOW something is good, because your explanations of what it means always fall short and is always less powerful than what is actually said by the artist.)
Anyway hopefully something was enjoyable out of all of this to read--I have just been typing on my laptop like a crazy person in a way I haven't done since 2017 and reputation came out. Thanks for asking!! And I'm sorry it took me a year to answer!!!
one of the things we don’t talk enough about Taylor is the way she’ll write about a situation over and over from so many different perspectives. And it looks so different every time and yet you recognize some connecting thread that makes it all resonate.
Hii!! I’m a highschool student and I recently saw your post saying that One day in the life of ivan denisovich was an enjoyable read for you. I’m exploring the global issue of escapism for my English Essay, using One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. Could you suggest some points or examples from the novel that show how Shukhov (and the other prisoners) use small forms of escapism to survive in the gulag? I’d like to connect those moments to the broader idea of escapism as a coping mechanism to preserve identity. Thankyou so much in advance!
See, I actually don’t think he uses escapism as a coping mechanism. At least not particularly. I think he gets through because of his resourcefulness and the limited scope of his focus. He’s always thinking about what he needs to next: evaluating the quality of the floor cleaning he needs to do for this particular guard, thinking about what tricks he need to play to get the extra bowl at lunch, how to hide the scraps of things he finds outside in his mitten, the singular line of his brick-laying work. He’s always in the moment and always staying as sharp as he can so he can be ready to make his life a little bit better.
On a deeper level I think his matter-of-fact acceptance of his circumstances and his faith help him get through. But yeah. I see little to no escapism. My two cents anyway.
I almost forgot I was going to send you quotes! I have a whole document of my classroom quotes if you want but here are some:
“People wonder why the novel is the most popular form of literature; people wonder why it is read more than books of science or books of metaphysics. The reason is very simple; it is merely that the novel is more true than they are.” (G.K. Chesterton)
Literature adds to reality, it does not simply describe it. It enriches the necessary competencies that daily life requires and provides; and in this respect, it irrigates the deserts that our lives have already become. (C.S. Lewis)
“Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original: whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring twopence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it.” (C.S. Lewis)
“A story is a way to say something that can’t be said any other way, and it takes every word in the story to say what the meaning is.”
― Flannery O'Connor
“She read books as one would breathe air, to fill up and live.”
― Annie Dillard
“The very impulse to write springs from an inner chaos crying for order - for meaning.”
― Arthur Miller
I don’t think I properly thanked you for sending these!!! I used all of them and I love them. Thank you!!
No worries if this is too personal, but do you work at a private school, and if so, would you recommend it over a public school? I work at a public school and the micromanaging, lack of student motivation, and passing kids on has been rather soul-crushing lately.
I actually work at a public school! Ugh I feel you, but I do feel like for me it depends on the specific administration and general atmosphere than on the public/private divide?
Some of the issues persist regardless so you have my sympathies! It’s a hard job.
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