Even as we arrive at an actual mathematical formula for lasting love, we remain tragicomically unskilled at anticipating — to say nothing of domesticating — the unpredictable, nonlinear dynamics of the human heart.

That’s what novelist and Believer magazine founding editor Heidi Julavits, who joins the ranks of history’s notable diarists, touches on with equal parts gentleness and precision in a couple of related meditations from the kaleidoscopically illuminating The Folded Clock: A Diary (public library).

In one entry, as she comforts a friend suspecting spousal infidelity, Julavits relays the curious findings of a study she had recently come across:

The marriages that last are the ones in which the two members regularly develop (but do not act upon) extramarital infatuations.

This, of course, makes sense — we know that love is a mode of “interbeing” and a “dynamic interaction” in which the opportunity to choose each other over and over is what sustains the longevity of a couple’s bond.

In another entry a few months later, pondering the curious psychology of the TV show The Bachelorette, Julavits revisits this subject and corroborates the empirical with the anecdotal, offering for the life of romance what Umberto Eco’s wonderful notion of the “antilibrary” offered for the life of reading:

Crushes thrive in small spaces. Humans must be programmed to respond positively when faced with a small sampling of other humans in, say, caves.

[…]

This has happened to me many times. It happened to me on a canoe trip; the minute we returned to civilization, I recanted my crush on the guy I’d angled to sit next to at the nightly campfires. I have been so cognizant of this phenomenon, and its inevitability, that I got nervous in college while waiting to hear where in France I was to spend my semester abroad, because I knew that a guy my friend was dating, someone I’d always found abstractly cute, was also going to France. Fortunately we were sent to different cities. Had we been in the same city, I am certain we would have fallen in love, or the sort of love that occurs in those situations, call it what you will, probably a mistake. This is also why I get nervous about going to art colonies, especially now that I am happily married to a man I met at an art colony. I don’t want to fall for anyone else — I am pointedly not looking to fall for anyone — but these situations conspire against our best intentions. Art colonies, often located in remote woods or on beautiful estates, are communities in which all the residents sever ties to the real world within hours of arrival; they are like singles mixers for the married or otherwise spoken for. (I was married when I met my now-husband, who was otherwise spoken for.) When I arrive at a colony these days, I take a measure of the room, I identify the potential problems, I reinforce my weak spots, and then I relax.

This kind of considered candor in the service of a larger truth is what makes The Folded Clock an immensely pleasurable read in its entirety. Julavits — who is at times self-deprecating to the point of tears that, having no other recourse in order to continue reading this undeniably marvelous text, eventually transmogrify into tears of delight — captures the book’s sensibility perfectly in one of the entires:

I’ve felt okay occasionally describing my diary as a “contemporary take on Walden.” Like Thoreau, I am pretending that I wrote this diary over the course of a year, when in fact I wrote it over the course of two years, two months, and two days (give or take). Like Thoreau, I wanted to “live deliberately” and was worried that if I did not I might, “when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.” Like Thoreau, I wanted to “live deep and suck out all the marrow of life.”

Unlike Thoreau, I have no fondness for sparse living. I do not covet hardship. I liked the idea of Walden, however, because it was written in a cabin in the woods. It’s a sort-of nature book that took place (at least the writing did) inside. Interiors are where I do my exploring. Interiors are my nature. I am an outdoorsman of the indoors… When I am there I am happiest. In my outbuilding I am sucking out optimum marrow.

Couple with some actual Thoreau, then fortify with the great Zen teacher Thich Nhat Hanh on how to love, Dan Savage on the unsettling secret of lasting love, Wendell Berry on freedom and marriage, and Kafka’s beautiful and heartbreaking love letters.