Romance and loss

I have been listening to Small Change a lot lately. It’s populated with beaten-down, world-weary souls, longing for small things: the end of the work shift, or a job at the filling station and a shot at the waitress in the diner. This is a life I have never known, and, I suspect, Tom Waits has never known (he was 24 when he wrote these songs and, by all accounts, did not have a particularly hard childhood—another testament to his genius).

I find the world he creates in this album extremely romantic. Why? Is it the simplicity of these lives? They just want a job that will pay the bills and time to spend with their baby. That’s the best they can hope for, and it’s a pretty reachable goal, unlike my own. They don’t chase after the trappings of the bourgeoisie—fancy clothes, gourmet food, the latest appliances—like I do. And they’re free. They’re on the road, or they have no ties to hold them to any one place, as I do.

I was talking to one of my friends about this, and she said, “But that’s kind of sad, isn’t it? If you’re free to go anywhere, that means you have no one who loves you back home.” I had to agree with her; it is sad. But I think that sadness is essential to romantic ideals. Think about the archetypes we idolize: the cowboy, the gumshoe, the vigilante; they’re all lonely; they all have demons. What’s so romantic about that? Why is Romeo and Juliet the quintessential romance, and not Much Ado About Nothing? It’s loss, not gain, that defines romance. We feel for those who have less than we do, and we can see their lives as perhaps more reachable than the lives of the rich and famous. We might wish we were rich and could live happily ever after, but it’s those who die young that we raise to sainthood. Do we really wish that for ourselves? Are we all, on some level, flagellants?