Attend Benjamin Kleidmans
Wedding.
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Matt’s Notes
Benjamin Kleidman is a new character in Papa’s Diary, and while we don’t know much about him I wonder how his wedding made Papa feel.
Papa was, I think, too caring and romantic to feel envious or begrudge anyone else his happiness, but in recent weeks his own bachelorhood, his own sense of emotional stasis, his own longing for family life had dogged him to increasingly depressing effect. As he wrote in early August, people like Benjamin “have realized their sought happiness and have other ideas now which matrimonial evolution brings along” while other friends were “long married and [are] fathers or mothers…I am still weaving my dreams.”
Perhaps Papa’s one-line account of Benjamin’s wedding, without even a detail about where it was or who he saw there, indicates what his mood was like when he got home. Did he plan to write more about it but find himself unable to concentrate, distracted by thoughts of his own solitude and the testimony of his spare, unchanging rooms? Was his next thought, never written, a question about when he, too, might learn what Benjamin, like so many of his other friends, now knew?