Love and failure
The Post's OnLove column talked recently to a psychologist and author espousing his theory that we have greater control over love than we often believe. I was with him that far. But the last quote from him lost me. "All I can say is there's nothing romantic about failure," he said.
I understood what he meant, the direction he sought to provide. But I couldn't have disagreed with him more. I've never found the possibility of failure anything less than romantic. Same held for our recognition of failure, our endurance of failure and our recovery from failure. I hate to fail, but I wouldn't thrive without that chance or the resultant desire.
The author's quote sat on my screen for a week before an appropriate response drifted near. In the introduction to his My Mistress's Sparrow Is Dead anthology of love stories, mentioned here previously, Jeffrey Eugenides considered what love meant in the context of love stories.
When it comes to love, there are a million theories to explain it. But when it comes to love stories, things are simpler. A love story can never be about full possession. The happy marriage, the requited love, the desire that never dims — these are lucky eventualities but they aren't love stories. Love stories depend on disappointment, on unequal births and feuding families, on matrimonial boredom and at least one cold heart. Love stories, nearly without exception, give love a bad name.
We value love not because it's stronger than death but because it's weaker. Say what you want about love: death will finish it. You will not go on loving in the grave, not in any physical way that will at all resemble love as we know it on earth. The perishable nature of love is what gives love its profound importance in our lives. If it were endless, if it were on tap, love wouldn't hit us the way it does.
February 14th, 2011 at 9:00 AM
[...] stories from the My Mistress's Sparrow Is Dead love and anti-love anthology, which I'm slowly… working my way through. Have some fun singing anyway, you know? No position's too perfect, and [...]