J. was wondering today why people get so excited when they get together. Why do they forget good manners and all, and get noisy and oblivious to everything around them? My answer is, of course, because they stop fearing death for a moment, the crowd makes them feel safe, and so they feel immortal, they relax, they enjoy themselves, freely and plainly, without the chronic concern for the danger around the corner.
Today, we were 14 yachts sailing off the island of Menorca, with over one hundred people on them, heading out at sea to eat, drink, swim and be merry in a pre-wedding party for J’s cousin, a young girl from the South of Texas. Everyone showed up displaying their best gold, mostly from the jewelry chain store Tiffany’s, stating their best behavior, segregated across the parking lot while waiting to board, like the Montagues and the Capulets in an unspoken competition. But that was quickly proved not to be necessary. It was not the gold nor the hierarchy that made them strong, it was actually them getting together, leaning on each other, catching up on the bigness and smallness of life in leisurely gossip. Getting drunk together. Swimming together. Dancing together. Enjoying themselves in the safety net created momentarily by the presence of everyone else.
When the boats returned to the harbor in the evening, everyone was unkept and unworried about their appearance, a little or a lot tipsy, the very opposite of how they had started the day. They hugged each other and they waved good bye, indiscriminatingly. But I imagined that as soon as they parted ways, once they found themselves again in the isolation of their own bedrooms, under the dimmed lights and the complicity of their partners, each of them looked back upon the day and assessed how everyone else looked like, how they were dressed, what did they say, how much they ate, turning the tongues into scissors once again, without understanding for a moment that it was the forgetting of all assessments and comparisons that had made the day memorable.