Losing It
Infidelity Inc.
Cupid is armed and dangerous
Passionate and penniless in Paris
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BY ALAIN DE BOTTON | A few years ago, I was browsing in a bookshop in Paris when my eye was caught by a quote on the cover of a paperback: "To be psychologically alive means either being in love, or in psychoanalysis, or in the spell of literature." The book was called "Tales of Love"; it was written by psychoanalyst Julia Kristeva; and because I had always liked her first name (I'd been in love with a little one with glasses at 9), I bought the book. Unfortunately, Julia let me down badly, for in over 300 pages, she did nothing to elaborate on the fascinating sentence that her publisher had so cunningly placed on the back cover. Still, the thought seemed valuable and stayed with me: of an important connection between love and reading, of a comparable pleasure offered by both. A feeling of connection may be at the root of it. There are books that speak to us no less eloquently -- but more reliably -- than our lovers. They prevent the morose suspicion that we do not fully belong to the human species, that we lie beyond comprehension. Our embarrassments, our sulks, our feelings of guilt, these phenomena may be conveyed on a page in a way that affords us with a sense of self-recognition. The author has located words to depict a situation we thought ourselves alone in feeling, and for a few moments, we are like two lovers on an early dinner date, thrilled to discover how much they share (and unable to touch much of the seafood linguine in front of them, so busy are they fathoming the eyes opposite). We may place the book down for a second and stare at its spine with a wry smile, as if to say, "How lucky I ran into you." It explains why literature is such a consolation when love has failed. When I first read of the plight of Goethe's Young Werther, I was at university, 21 and, of course, the lovelorn Werther. My Lotte was Claire (she lived down the corridor, studied macrobiology and had shoulder-length chestnut hair in a center parting), and the rival Albert was played by Robin, an economist who she'd been seeing for three years -- testimony, if one needs it, of the miraculous ability of novels to mold themselves around, and illuminate, our own lives. The idea that we are not alone in the world is a cosy one. Nevertheless, there is a darker side. We still like to feel special, to feel unique, and this is not something literature suggests we in fact are. Take the following: "Some people would never have fallen in love if they had not heard there was such a thing." I recall reading this gem from Françoise La Rochefoucauld on a flight between London and Edinburgh. "For God's sake, that's my idea!" was my immediate response, and I stared crossly out of the window at the cottony Midlands. "He's stolen my thought." But this seemed unlikely, given that he was born in the spring of 1613 and I in 1969, so more generously, I reflected, "Maybe I've stolen it from him" -- equally impossible, given that I had until then never laid eyes on the author's maxims. It suggested an answer at once humbling and ennobling: that both La Rochefoucauld and I have lived in the same world, and could hence at times be expected to think roughly the same thoughts, even though he was a genius and I am not. (La Rochefoucauld would immediately have picked up on the self-pity in this last comment, and could well have squashed it with a withering, "There are few people more convinced of their own genius than those who complain of how stupid they are"). It is a thought that threatens our sense of identity, which is based in part on an idea of difference. What if exposure to literature reveals too much of what we have in common with others? What can we say -- and write -- if all of our most private experiences turn out to be the well-trodden thinking grounds of other writers?
Part of learning to read -- and, by implication, to write -- is accepting that our personalities are not as watertight as we like to imagine, that many things we think of as private are in fact not very personal. This is not to say that they are impersonal -- a word invoking the service one gets in fast-food restaurants -- rather that they are common to all human beings. The price of discovering that one is not isolated is a recognition that one is also not unique.
Alain de Botton is the author of "How Proust Can Change Your Life." He lives in England and is staying at home reading books this Valentine's Day. |
