The Three Marriages: Reimagining Work, Self and Relationship

My last encounter with David Whyte, Crossing the Unknown Sea, left me wanting more of his magical prose, those words that ebb and flow as surely as the tides. I would probably read a treatise on sheep farming if Whyte wrote it; after all, the closing paragraphs of Crossing the Sea - the "loves and affections [that] cannot be held in some limbo inside us...[that] have set off on a voyage from far inside us to find their homes in the clear light of day" (p. 244) - are still ringing in my ears many weeks later. If The Three Marriages does not quite live up to Crossing the Sea, it's only because Whyte set such a high bar.

He begins the book with an anecdote of being at sea prior to an important talk, not in the literal sense, but the figurative one, and search as he might, an appropriate topic would not come. We've all been there in some form or another, though few have the chops to spin it into 300 pages, and certainly not with the lyricism or the imagery that Whyte so consistently offers. Who but Whyte might look at all of mankind and offer the following observation: "By definition, all of us, living at this time are descended from a long line of survivors who lived through the difficulties of history and prehistory; most of whom had to do a great deal of work to keep the wolf, the cold and the neighboring tribe from the door" (p. 23)? I want such thoughts flittering and floating through my mind, please and thank you.

Admittedly, the first two or three score pages are somewhat uneven. Whyte is fonder of his poetry in this work than in Sea, and the inclusion of poetry in the midst of such prose lends the first part of the book an uneven tone. Even when it's not entirely my cup of tea, though, it's difficult to find fault with Whyte: the liberal helping of Dante and Austen, Stevenson and Homer, those I've read and those I've jotted down for future reading, turns The Three Marriages into a book lovers treasure hunt. (I especially loved the collection of "marriage warnings" halfway though, one of which literally caused me to LOL, its truth so bitterly on-point. The truth comes hard and fast in The Three Marriages, but it's possible that only The Nantucket Girl's Song vies with said advice to Fanny in pithiness.)

Not only does Whyte incorporate the works of the likes of Austen and Stevenson, but he uses their life stories to further his own arguments about marriage - to a life's work, as well as to another being. Alone among those with whom I have ever discussed Austen, I do not like her work. More to Whyte's credit, then, that I so enjoyed his incorporation and analysis of her writing into the larger whole.

And when he writes of work, real work, of the work we do when we find we made a certain way and bring into it our best versions of ourselves, there too, does Whyte convey with words the images we might have glimpsed briefly but lacked the linguistic vibrancy to put into real thought. Who, after all, doesn't want to work in the office that is "a magic island of constant busyness where all of [one's] colleagues...mov[e] hyponotically from fax to printer to filing cabinet to meeting, like an elaborate court dance" (p. 115)? And who cannot relate to the reality that "most work is done in the midst of a host of other clamoring, crowding priorities? The great swaying underground carriage of life" (p. 273)?

Whyte certainly is not in need of bonus points, from me or anyone else, but his introduction of Pema Chodron was certainly icing on the cake for me; in some regards, Whyte explains the who and what of Chodron better than she herself does. If I hadn't already read my way through so much of her writing, I would be now. Just as he wove Stevenson and Austen into two of the marriages, so to does Chodron get her turn, through the marriage with the self, as well as that of work. It is in thinking about Chodron that Whyte offers the powerful observation that "freedom comes through a persistent, all-encompassing tenacity" (p. 229).

As I lost myself in the last chapter of The Three Marriages - in which Whyte and a terrified yak herder set out through an honest to goodness quagmire at dark to search for a lost member of a trekking party - I realized that even beyond Whyte's lyricism, his storytelling is so far beyond that of most authors that he really could write a guide to farming that I would want to read now and in the future.

All of that said, my favorite part would still have to be Whyte's observation of work-work: "In building a work life, people who follow rules, written or unwritten, too closely and in an unimaginative way are often suffocated by those same rules and die by them, quite often unnoticed and very often unmourned" (p. 139). Truth.