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Sitaram
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Joined: 14 Sep 2005
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 Posted: Sat Sep 17, 2005 1:48 pm Post subject: What Is Love? |
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| Sitaram wrote: |
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 Valentin 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 was a Hungarian writer who is remembered today
mostly for coining the term "homosexual", in 1869, 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:
...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.
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.
Compare a line from e.e. cummings poem :
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":
If sex were all, then every trembling hand
Could make us squeak, like dolls, the wished-for words.
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!"...
In the original Greek of that epistle, the word is the famous "agape",
which was sometimes translated in the King James version as "charity",
but at other times as "love."
So, when the King James version speaks of "Faith, Hope and Charity" it is
really saying "Faith, Hope and Love."
In modern Greek, if one says "agapimene", as an adjective, it means
"beloved", but can be said of a child or a sibling or a parent, or a close
friend. But if one says that two people are "erotevmene" (note the root
Eros), then one definitely implies a sexual dimension to the couple.
In the Tagalog (Pilipino) language, if I say to someone "mahal kita" I may
mean an agapic form of love, but if I say "ini ibig kita" then there is no
mistaking that I have sexual feelings.
In America, perhaps the words "like" and "love" have come to serve this
distinction. A girl will tell a boy, "I like you, but I don't love you."
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