On Choosing Safety Instead of the Beloved

Lorrie Moore’s Wings, published in The Paris Review, tells the story of KC, a failed musician adrift in a world of dead dreams, odd gigs, and dwindling love. Living in a borrowed house with her partner Dench, she navigates the quiet collapse of a life that once aspired to art and authenticity. Beneath its wry humor and mundane detail, however, Wings unfolds as a metaphysical allegory. Dench is not merely KC’s lover—he becomes a symbol of the spiritual beloved, a kind of divine figure in disguise. He is magnetic, erratic, poetic in fragments, but also aimless, selfish, and in some materialistic sense, unreliable. Like many figures in metaphysical literature, Dench evokes deep longing without offering resolution. And that tension—between the yearning for something transcendent and the weight of its imperfection—reveals a deeper crisis in KC’s soul: a failure not simply of love, but of knowing.

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"He played her more songs. Then as something caught fire between them, and love secured its footing inside her, when she awoke next to him with damp knots in the back of her hair like she'd never experienced before, the room full of the previous night's candles and the whiff of weed, his skin beside her a silky calico of cool and warm."

"Soon she was close to begging. Just a little sparky bark, darling."

Like many lovers in metaphysical allegory, Dench stirs deep yearning but, in KC’s eyes, ultimately proves difficult to entrust with full devotion. He moves through life with a kind of improvisational grace—creative, sensitive, and full of raw potential—but he lacks material grounding. His love is sincere, but he cannot offer stability or provide the material security she increasingly craves. His long-term plans remain undefined, more a horizon than a destination, and the journey with him feels endless and unmoored. She, as much as he, drifts from project to project, sustained more by feeling than foresight. He speaks more of childhood wounds than of shared futures. KC begins to long for something more fixed, more structured—something Dench, despite his presence and occasional brilliance, cannot offer in this material life. And yet, it’s not that he deceives her. Rather, he mirrors the very ambiguity within her: the tension between passion and practicality, freedom and responsibility, soul and survival. In the end, what falters is not simply their love, but her ability to remain faithful to its uncertain, open-ended form.

"She and Dench had not developed their talents sufficiently nor cared for them properly--or so a booking agent had told them."

KC's deep crisis runs through Dench but extends into a world that has taught her to trade purpose for possessions, and love for security. Trapped in the logic of materialism, she drifts between a faltering partnership and a culture that measures worth through ambition and, well, matter. Things. Objects. The hollow emblems of what our culture calls “the good life,” or more often, “the safe life.” She scavenges coins, hoards stamps, sells her hair, and begins trading her presence for a promise of stability. Her betrayal of Dench is spiritual: a soul that chooses comfort over the fire of real love.

And if Dench embodies divine love—Eros itself—the way God chooses to be loved, then where does that leave KC? Perhaps Dench is something more: a herald—a daemon or divine intermediary in the Platonic tradition—whose presence, however maddening, stirs the soul into motion. In this rhythmic dance of active and passive, something awakens in her—an elevation of possibility. And yet she turns away. She fails the beloved out of fatigue. Not because she doesn't love him, but because she needs security.

"It broke her heart that they had come to this: if one knew the future, all the unexpected glimpses of the beloved, one might have trouble finding the courage to go on. This was probably the reason nine-tenths of the human brain had been rendered useless: to make you stupidly intrepid. One was working with only the animal brain, the Pringle brain. The wizard-god brain, the one that could see the future and move objects without touching them, was asleep. Fucking bastard."

Footnotes

Not Merely a King: The One Who Heals, Orders, and Guides the Soul explores Plato’s vision of the true king (or beloved) in The Statesman—not as a mere political figure, but as a divine herdsman who heals the soul, discerns its nature, and guides it through a sacred inner art. Read it here: https://www.amphitheus.com/passages/not-merely-a-king-the-one-who-heals-orders-and-guides-the-soul