For lack of a paperback to read during a long bus ride, I turned to Project Gutenberg on my phone and started re-reading Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus. I had forgotten the set-up of the story, in which a third-party narrator — Robert Walton — encounters the doctor while on a polar expedition. But before that happens, Walton is yearning for companionship and writes this tender passage in a letter to his sister:
I desire the company of a man who could sympathize with me, whose eyes would reply to mine. You may deem me romantic, my dear sister, but I bitterly feel the want of a friend. I have no one near me, gentle yet courageous, possessed of a cultivated as well as of a capacious mind, whose tastes are like my own, to approve or amend my plans. How would such a friend repair the faults of your poor brother! I am too ardent in execution and too impatient of difficulties.
Shelley had her own intentions for that sentiment that had nothing to do with why those words are such a kick in the gut to me, but still: sigh.
One of my favorite novels, and one I never tire of revisiting. Shelley had quite the knack for putting words to the feeling of complete adoration and admiration of humankind, in the context of being unable to completely connect with it in either its collective or individual forms.
I’d suggest also reading ‘Caleb Williams’ by her father. It’s clear that much of what she writes in ‘Frankenstein’ is an expansion of the ideas he first writes about in the story of a man unjustly accused and forced to reconcile ‘things as they are’ with ‘things as they might be’.