Literary Discussions

Posted on November 23rd, 2007

 

Several years ago, a dear friend wrote me and asked me to speak on love.

 

Here is my reply:

 

We do not have to worry about how to tell when it is love, for Love tells us.

 

The touchstone of true love is a lifetime of shared commitment. Failure of this test does not mean that we have not loved or cannot love, but passage of this test is proof positive of love indeed.

 

Years after we had parted and gone our separate ways, I told my beloved from my college years, "as Robert Frost once said, home is where, when you go there, they have to let you in, and I know your heart is home for me, for whenever I come to you, I know that you must let me into your heart."

 

We need to be needed and we need to need.

 

We may look to many songs and poems to learn different aspects of love.

 

One old song says "Love is a many-splendored thing" while another says "falling in love with love is falling for make-believe".

 

There is even a song which says, "when I'm not near the one I love, I love the one I'm near."

 

"Better to have known love and lost, than to never have known love at all".

 

There is love of neighbor, love of country and love of God.

 

There are selfish and selfless forms of love. There are selfish loves which smother and destroy and there are loves which give life and meaning both for the giver and the recipient.

 

We see love as instinctive in infants. There is no child which does not love its caregiver, no matter how flawed or abusive they might be.

 

We love because we seek love in return. The love we seek is a validation of our own self-worth, that someone would care if we were not here. The essential message of the movie "It's a Wonderful Life," with Jimmy Stuart, is that the world would not be the same place had we not passed through it.

 

In the movie version of Brideshead Revisited (from the novel by Evelyn Waugh), Sebastian, a tragic alcoholic, has found and taken in someone even more tragic and helpless than himself. Sebastian explicitly says that anyone must be in quite a sorry state to need the likes of a Sebastian to look after them. Yet, Sebastian finds meaning and self-worth and validation in this relationship where he feels needed.

 

To love is to find value, worth. To be loved is to have value and worth.

 

Aristotle said: A friend is another 'I'

 

There is a love which strikes us unexpectedly, like lightening on a stormy night, like the song "some enchanted evening, you will see a stranger, across a crowded room" or the song "strangers in the night, exchanging glances, lovers at first sight".

 

There is a different sort of love which grows through years of shared experiences, which is the love that is possible in arranged marriages. Mohandas Gandhi and Kasturbai were married at the age of 6 and spent a lifetime together. Gandhi, in old age, wept inconsolably when his lifetime companion, Kasturbai, passed away.

 

We see such a love expressed in the song from "Fiddler on the Roof," "Do you love me?"

 

We do not choose our parents, and yet we love them. Sometimes we do not choose our life companion, and yet we grow to love them through shared experiences.

 

We may even learn of bizarre loves as in the movie "Kiss of the Spider Woman": A complex and universal story of friendship and love, "Kiss of the Spider Woman" explores the enforced relationship -- through imprisonment -- of two men with radically different perspectives on life. Molina is a flagrant homosexual window trimmer convicted on a morals charge and Valentine is a clandestinely-held revolutionary who has been endlessly tortured by prison authorities in a non-specific Latin American metropolis.

 

Definitely, love is quite necessary and required for life. An infant will die without some form of love, even if only a feigned love by some nurse caretaker. Experiments in nurseries indicate that if an infant is fed and cleaned, but never given affection, that it grows sickly and dies. I know this only from reading, and cannot personally vouch for the scientific accuracy of this observation.

 

Various religions speak of love. The Bible says somewhere that God is love.

 

The Psalms say "how blessed is it for brethern to dwell together in unity / it is like the oil running down the beard of Aaron". This passage from the Psalms speaks of the sort of love found in monasteries, which is not a sexual love. One sees an analogous love in the military between comrads-in-arms who have seen many battles together.

 

That love which the world spends most of its time discussing is the love which draws two people to share a life together. For the vast majority of us, that love is heterosexual love, which draws us to someone of the opposite gender, yet for a sizable minority in the world such love is for someone of the same gender.

 

Most of us know what it means to live with another person in one fashion or another. Most of us have lived with parents, siblings, relatives. We share the daily tasks of eating, sleeping, cleaning, working and recreation.

 

It is possible to live with someone without loving them and it is possible to love someone without living with them, but the highest expression and test and proof of love is your love for someone you live with daily.

 

In the delightful play "Our Town" by Thornton Wilder, a young man, about to marry, expresses great anxiety about what they will find to discuss each day, for the thousands of days that constitute a lifetime of marriage. Years later, that same character laughs, because what seemed a problem was never really a problem at all. There were always plenty of things to talk about.

  

Thornton Wilder won a Pulitzer price for the play "Our Town". It is quite possible that Thornton Wilder was gay. I have read that, after his death, it was revealed that Wilder was a homosexual, a fact he kept hidden during his life.

 

Karl Maria Kertbeny (or Benkert) [Hungarian] Coined the word "homosexual" in 1869.

 

Karl Maria Kertbeny (1824-1882)

 

Karl Maria Kertbeny was a Hungarian writer who is remembered today mostly for coining the term "homosexual" as a replacement for the pejorative term "pederast" that was used in the German and French speaking world of his time. Though he claimed not to be homosexual himself, Kertbeny said that his sense of justice made him cry out against sodomy prosecutions. Kertbeny argued that homosexuality is an inborn disposition, so laws like Paragraph 175 that punish it are unjust.

 

Kertbeny's writing career produced many books, but almost nothing of literary merit.

 

I mention Thornton Wilder's sexual orientation simply because so many writers, artists and philosophers have been gay and yet have written works which influence our understanding of what love is.

 

While we are on the subject of Thornton Wilder and his play, "Our Town," take a look at this excerpt from an article on AIDS and the terminally ill:

 

Quote:

Originally Posted by regarding Our Town

...anybody who's living with a terminal or a chronic condition is forced to look at their own mortality. For a lot of people who successfully go through the adjustment process and aren't stuck in it, it's real freeing to begin to savor each moment of life, to see fully all the colors that are there, smell fully all the smells, taste all the tastes, hear all the sounds, feel all the feelings you can. It gets back to Thornton Wilder's play 'Our Town' about this girl who was part of a community but who then dies. She comes back as an invisible spirit and watches the townsfolk, her former neighbors. And she see how very little actual living the people do when they're caught up in the middle of it, how they all just kind of sleepwalk through life.

(end of quote)

 

 

I don't think that sexual orientation makes a big difference in one's capacity to love another during a lifetime of cohabitation. There are both straight and gay couples who are successful in committed love relationships, and there are many of both orientations who are failures (and some who are chronic failures).

 

It is difficult to speak about love without speaking about sex. It is perhaps easier to speak about sex without love than to speak of love without sex.

 

It is easier to make a lover out of a friend than it is to make a friend out of a lover.

 

It is rare in any relationship for two people to love each other equally. There is usually one person who loves more and another who loves less. Sometimes, in life, you must make a conscious decision and commitment as to which role you wish to play.

 

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Compare a line from e.e. cummings poem :

 

Quote:

your sex squeaked like a billiard-cue

chalking itself, as not to make an error,

with twist spontaneously methodical.

 

..... with this line from Wallace Steven's poem "Le Monocle de Mon Oncle":

 

Quote:

If sex were all, then every trembling hand

Could make us squeak, like dolls, the wished-for words.

 

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In the 1980s I lived and worked in New Haven, Connecticut (near Yale University)....

 

Japanese Sushi restaurants were beginning to gain popularity in the USA, but there was only one such restaurant in New Haven at that time.

 

The two restaurant owners were a somewhat portly middle-aged man of Irish ancestry (who was gay), and the chef, who was a much shorter, slender Japanese man (also middle aged). They were lovers who had lived together for many years.

 

I went to the restaurant often, and got to know many people well there (customers), and also the Irish owner....

 

Im' sure that most people perceived them as quite an unlikely couple to share life together.

 

One day, the Japanese chef returned to Japan for a visit. After several weeks returned to his life (and companion) in New Haven...

 

I had some talks with the owner (the Irishman).... about various personal things...

 

He told me that one day he asked his companion "Do you love me?", and the chef answered... "Love? ...

Love!...

What is this talk about love?....

We are CONNECTED!"...