Reading Alain de Botton’s book(his first!), Essays In Love. It’s a delightful read with fun story and some decent thoughts on love that feel like he’s discovering them as he’s writing them down, which allows me to take them in easier even if I don’t fully agree. However I sounded in my last post, I haven’t given up on love and its forms. Here are a some from the first half of the book:
“We fall in love in love hoping we won’t find in another what we know is in ourselves, all the cowardice, weakness, laziness, dishonesty, compromise, and stupidity. We throw a cordon of love around the chosen one and decide that everything within it will somehow be free of our faults. We locate inside another persona perfection that eludes us within ourselves, and through our union with the beloved, hope to maintain (against the evidence of all self-knowledge) a precarious faith in our species.”
“The telephone becomes an instrument of torture in the demonic hands of a beloved who doesn’t ring.”
“It is one of the ironies of love that it is easiest confidently to seduce those whom we are least attracted. My feelings for Chloe meant I lost any belief in my own worthiness.”
“On his first date with Chloe: Silence was damning. A silence with an unattractive person implies they are the boring one. a silence with an attractive one immediately renders it certain you are the tedious party.”
“I wasn’t thinking anything cruel while I ran my hands and lips across Chloe’s body, it was simply that Chloe would probably have been disturbed by news that I was thinking at all. Because thought implies judgement, and because we are all paranoid enough to take judgement to be negative, it is constitutionally suspect in the bedroom. Hence the sighing that drowns the sounds of lovers’ thoughts, sighing that confirmsL I am too passionate to be thinking. I kiss, and therefore I do not think – such is the official myth under which lovemaking takes place, the bedroom a unique space in which partners tacitly agree not to remind one another of the awe-inspiring wonder of their nudity.”
“It can seem as though we’ve met them somewhere before, in a previous life, perhaps, or in our dreams.”
“Therefore, in the mature account of love, we should never fall at first glance. We should reserve our leap until we have completed a clear-eyed investigation of the depths and nature of the waters. Only after we have undertaken a thorough exchange of opinions on parenting, politics, art, science, and appropriate snacks for the kitchen should two people ever decide they are ready to love each other. In the mature account of love, it is only when we truly know our partners that love deserves the chance to grow. And yet in the perverse reality of love (love that is born precisely before we know) increased knowledge may be as much a hurdle as an inducement – for it may bring Utopia into dangerous conflict with reality.”
“It was perhaps a pedantic matter over which to come to such a decision, but shoes are supreme symbols of aesthetic, and hence by extension psychological, compatibility.”