“The only people who can still strike us as normal are those we don’t yet know very well.”
By Maria Popova
“An honorable human relationship … in which two people have the right to use the word ‘love,’” the poet Adrienne Rich memorably wrote, “is a process, delicate, violent, often terrifying to both persons involved, a process of refining the truths they can tell each other.” But too often, we mistake for love feelings rooted in the pleasant untruths of delusion — about ourselves, or the other, or the possibility that exists between the two. Anyone who has ever been vitalized by the electricity of infatuation has also burned with disappointment as the fantasy of the idealized beloved has crumbled into the reality of a living and therefore flawed person. And yet one of the great paradoxes of the human heart is that we go on falling in love — or in what we think is love, or hope might be love — anyway.
Nearly two centuries before the French philosopher Alain Badiou examined the delicate psychoemotional machinery of why we fall and stay in love, his compatriot Stendhal set out to outline the dark side of life’s most radiant experience in his “crystallization” theory of the seven stages of infatuation and disillusionment. But infatuation, argues Alain de Botton in a portion of The Course of Love (public library), isn’t a maladaptive mutation of our love-faculty — rather, it is an essential feature of it.
Illustration from the vintage Danish primer An ABZ of Love
De Botton writes:
Infatuations aren’t delusions. That way they have of holding their head may truly indicate someone confident, wry, and sensitive; they really may have the humor and intelligence implied by their eyes and the tenderness suggested by their mouth. The error of the infatuation is more subtle: a failure to keep in mind the central truth of human nature: that everyone — not merely our current partners, in whose multiple failings we are such experts — but everyone will have something substantially and maddeningly wrong with them when we spend more time around them, something so wrong as to make a mockery of those initially rapturous feelings.
The only people who can still strike us as normal are those we don’t yet know very well. The best cure for love is to get to know them better.
Though De Botton is being, of course, at least semi-facetious in this last sentiment, it does raise one inescapable question about the tradeoffs between normalcy and desirability, for in the desired stranger of our fantasies the abnormalities we witness are charming quirks, whereas in the partner of our reality they are flaws so alarming as to be feared fatal.
In this sense, there might be no “cure” for love, but there is one mighty defense against the pathology of continual disappointment that can plague our intimate relationships — an unbegrudging acceptance of imperfection and frequent low-level letdown between even the most well-intentioned of partners, which works much like a vaccine enlists a small dose of the weakened microbe in fortifying the larger organism against the disease.
What makes infatuation so intoxicating is precisely its imperviousness to disappointment, for it is rooted entirely in a chimera of the other, enshrined in the illusion of perfection. What makes love so rich and rewarding is the moving frontier of mutual discovery and understanding with each experience of disappointment, as we continually calibrate our flat fantasy of the idealized beloved to an ever-expanding reality of a dimensional person.
“Creative work bridges time because the energy of art is not time-bound… This makes our own death bearable.”
By Maria Popova
“Only art penetrates … the seeming realities of this world,” Saul Bellow proclaimed in his spectacular Nobel Prize acceptance speech. “There is another reality, the genuine one, which we lose sight of. This other reality is always sending us hints, which without art, we can’t receive.”
Few writers have given voice to that other reality and to art’s vital role in human life more eloquently and ardently than Jeanette Winterson, who has contemplated with uncommon insight the question of how art transforms us — a question the varied facets of which Winterson explores in a fantastic talk from the 2010 Edinburgh Book Festival.
Art is such a relief to us because, actually, it’s the real world — it’s the reality that we understand on a deeper level… Life has an inside as well as an outside, and at the present, the outside of life is very well catered for, and the inside of life not at all… We can go back to books or pictures or music, film, theater, and we can find there both some release and some relief for our inner life, the place where we actually live, the place where we spend so much time.
[…]
We do have an an inner life, and that inner life needs to have respect and needs to have some nourishment for itself. And that’s why art can never be a luxury — because, if it is, being human is a luxury; being who we actually are is a luxury. Life can’t be about utility — it has also to be about emotion, it has to be about imagination, it has to be about things for their own sake, so that this journey of ours makes sense to us and is not simply something that we’re rather fretfully trying to get through another day, another week, another month — that pressure that we so often feel… Reading books really does take your hand off the panic button, it allows your breathing to return to normal, it allows you to occupy the space isn’t entirely ruled by other people’s demands and by utility.
There are stories that you can write, and there are stories that you can’t write. And, in the end, you write the ones that you can, and that allows you to bear the ones that you can’t. There’s nothing, I think, particularly upsetting about that — it’s simply a strategy of survival. And it’s also how we allow ourselves agency in the world, instead of being completely overwhelmed by the things that happen to us. We are, by the writing of that story, by the way that we tell what’s happened to us, giving it back to ourselves instead of being powerless within it.
Language fails us … in times of great grief, in times of extremity, in times of stress. What can we say, where can we find the words that will somehow make bearable the pain that we’re in at the time?
That’s why I always go back to the poets, or I turn to some of my favorite passage — because there are the words. Somebody has deep-dived them for me and brought them back to the surface, and deep-dived them in the place where there are no words, that awful place where language doesn’t take us, where we cannot say, where we cannot speak. And the reason why we can trust our writers, our poets, our artists is that they are able to deep-dive those place and bring it back up, so that you can find it, so that you are not without language, so that you are not in that terrible place where there’s nothing that can be said.
It’s very good to have those poems, those passages in our minds … to find a language that we can use at those times, because we can’t trust it to the soap opera clichés of television, we can’t trust it to soundbite journalism, we can’t trust it to that volume of data lacking all meaning that invades us and bombards us every day. For the real things in our lives, the deep things in our lives, we have to find a language which is an equivalent to the emotions that we feel. And that’s really only possible through literature, through poetry, because their language is working at its most powerful, is working at its height. It’s not that it’s artificial — it’s simply that it’s the place we cannot find in the normal discourse of everyday. It’s a heightened language because it speaks to us in those heightened situations.
At the moment of real stress or distress … you need to find that language, and then you can create your own. And it’s kind of homeopathic, isn’t it? You only need the homeopathic dilutions of poetry — a line of poetry, sometimes even a single word — and that then seems to effect great change within the body and the self, even if these tiny, little quantities.
Creative work bridges time because the energy of art is not time-bound. If it were we should have no interest in the art of the past, except as history or documentary. But our interest in art is our interest in ourselves both now and always. Here and forever. There is a sense of the human spirit as always existing. This makes our own death bearable. Life + art is a boisterous communion/communication with the dead. It is a boxing match with time.
“Joy … follows rightly confronted despair. Joy is the experience of possibility, the consciousness of one’s freedom as one confronts one’s destiny… After despair, the one thing left is possibility.”
By Maria Popova
“There is no love of life without despair of life,” Albert Camus observed as he contemplated the relationship between happiness and despair shortly before his compatriot Jean-Paul Sartre penned his famous line that “human life begins on the far side of despair.” And yet we tend to relate to despair with extreme aversion, perceiving it as a source of suffering rather than a vitalizing force.
Few experiences spur despair more readily than the assault on freedom and the loss of agency — our sense that life, circumstance, or some other external actor is thwarting our desired outcomes.
But freedom and despair, argues the great existential psychologist Rollo May (April 21, 1909–October 22, 1994) in his 1981 book Freedom and Destiny (public library), are not the two poles of our spectrum of desire — rather, they are complementary forces that counterbalance each other. By recalibrating our relationship to despair, we stand to know freedom more intimately and completely.
Rollo May
May examines the centrality of freedom in our value system and our elemental experience of life:
The capacity to experience awe and wonder, to imagine and to write poetry, to conceive of scientific theories and great works of art presupposes freedom. All of these are essential to the human capacity to reflect.
[…]
Freedom is also unique in that it is the mother of all values. If we consider such values as honesty, love, or courage, we find, strangely enough, that they cannot be placed parallel to the value of freedom. For the other values derive their value from being free; they are dependent on freedom.
[…]
Freedom is thus more than a value itself: it underlies the possibility of valuing; it is basic to our capacity to value. Without freedom there is no value worthy of the name. In this time of the disintegration of concern for public weal and private honor, in this time of the demise of values, our recovery — if we are to achieve it — must be based on our coming to terms with this source of all values: freedom.
Illustration by Lisbeth Zwerger for a special edition of the fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm
But because the concept of freedom is so multifaceted, so dimensional, and so entwined with everything we hold dear, it is also difficult to capture its complete meaning. May offers an insightful and inspired definition:
Freedom consists of how you confront your limits, how you engage your destiny in day-to-day living.
[…]
Human dignity is based upon freedom and freedom upon human dignity. The one presupposes the other.
And yet we often lose sight of this daily self-creating aspect of freedom — May laments that we seem to have “too easily and readily seized upon freedom as our birthright and forgotten that each of us must rediscover it for ourselves.” Therein lies the central paradox of freedom — its indelible interplay with destiny, which Simone de Beauvoir captured beautifully a decade earlier in contemplating how chance and choice converge to make us who we are. Freedom, in this sense, lies in what we choose to do with the cards we’ve been dealt — but the cards are the cards.
May writes:
Freedom owes its vitality to destiny, and destiny owes its significance to freedom. Our talents, our gifts, are on loan, to be called in at any moment by death, by illness, or by any one of the countless other happenings over which we have no direct control. Freedom is that essential to our lives, but it is also that precarious.
When this precariousness plunges freedom to the existential bottom — when life hurls us into undesirable circumstances and razes us on the loss of agency — we succumb to despair. But here, in one of the book’s most revelatory parts, May makes a counterintuitive point — he frames despair as a constructive emotion, “often a necessary prelude to the greatest achievement.” When despair pins us to rock bottom and forces us to let go of everything we’ve clung to, including our own neuroses and illusory hopes, it allows us to build ourselves up anew in a way not possible within the comfortable parameters of life unperturbed by the unexpected.
May examines this fertile despair:
I am speaking of despair not as a “cosmic pout” nor as any kind of intellectual posture. If it is a mood put on to impress somebody or to express resentment toward anybody, it is not genuine despair.
Authentic despair is that emotion which forces one to come to terms with one’s destiny. It is the great enemy of pretense, the foe of playing ostrich. It is a demand to face the reality of one’s life… Despair is the smelting furnace which melts out the impurities in the ore. Despair is not freedom itself, but is a necessary preparation for freedom… Reality comes marching up to require that we drop all halfway measures and temporary exigencies and ways of being dishonest with ourselves and confront our naked lives.
In a sentiment of sobering pertinence to our own cultural climate, May adds:
The function of despair is to wipe away our superficial ideas, our delusionary hopes, our simplistic morality… It is important to remind ourselves of these points since there are a number of signs that we in America may be on the threshold of a period as a nation when we shall no longer be able to camouflage or repress our despair.
Those who can feel healthy despair are often those who also can at the same time experience the most intense pleasure and joy… We believe more firmly in the dignity and the nobility of being human after seeing a performance of tragedy rather than comedy: the characters and the tragic downfall of Hamlet, Macbeth, Lear, or even of Harry in The Iceman Cometh give us a conviction of the significance of life. As we leave the theater, we are not only relieved, we are inspired. The despair we have felt in the drama highlights its opposite, the nobility of life.
[…]
The worst condition of all is to boast about never having been in despair, for that means that the person has never been authentically conscious of himself.
But because despair, as anyone who has experienced it knows, seeds a state of profound unhappiness, May draws a vital distinction between happiness and joy, while noting that the good life invariably includes both at different times:
Happiness is a fulfillment of the past patterns, hopes, aims… Happiness is mediated, so far as we can tell, by the parasympathetic nervous system, which has to do with eating, contentment, resting, placidity. Joy is mediated by the opposing system, the sympathetic, which does not make one want to eat, but stimulates one for exploration. Happiness relaxes one; joy challenges one with new levels of experience. Happiness depends generally on one’s outer state; joy is an overflowing of inner energies and leads to awe and wonderment. Joy is a release, an opening up; it is what comes when one is able genuinely to “let go.” Happiness is associated with contentment; joy with freedom and an abundance of human spirit… Joy is new possibilities; it points toward the future. Joy is living on the razor’s edge; happiness promises satisfaction of one’s present state, a fulfillment of old longings. Joy is the thrill of new continents to explore; it is an unfolding of life.
A generation after Anaïs Nin extolled the generative power of inviting the unknown, May argues that what differentiates joy from happiness, above all, is their respective orientation to the familiar and the possible:
Happiness is related to security, to being reassured, to doing things as one is used to and as our fathers did them. Joy is a revelation of what was unknown before. Happiness often ends up in a placidity on the edge of boredom. Happiness is success. But joy is stimulating, it is the discovery of new continents emerging within oneself.
Happiness is the absence of discord; joy is the welcoming of discord as the basis of higher harmonies. Happiness is finding a system of rules which solves our problems; joy is taking the risk that is necessary to break new frontiers.
[…]
Joy … follows rightly confronted despair. Joy is the experience of possibility, the consciousness of one’s freedom as one confronts one’s destiny. In this sense despair, when it is directly faced, can lead to joy. After despair, the one thing left is possibility. We all stand on the edge of life, each moment comprising that edge. Before us is only possibility. This means the future is open.
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