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THE COURSE OF LOVE   I read a post written by Alain de Botton on WeChat Moment the other day. At the end of the article, I realized it was to promote the book, The Course of Love, but the Chinese version. I was thinking: why not search for the original version? The post is well written. The book must be good too. Thanks to the amazing Taobao, I found it! I couldn't wait to read the book when I got it. And it turns out not a pure narration, but a novel in general and some notes in between.  After finishing this book, I posted something on my own WeChat Moment: "A truly wonderful book about LOVE, but I might not recommend any friend to read it because I hate to be a party pooper. I'll still be a strong believer in true love and soulmates, just not in fairy tales anymore." And with a picture from the book attached.  In short, the book inspires me as usual. It tells some truths about love. Like many other truths, they might not be so pleasant to hear. Now I'm writing down some notes from the book that I can refer to later. Just for myself, perhaps.  1  1 1. A marriage doesn't begin with a proposal, or even an initial meeting. It begins far earlier, when the idea of love is born, and more specifically the dream of a soulmate.  2. For the Romantic, it is only the briefest of steps from a glimpse of a stranger to the formulation of a majestic and substantial conclusion: that he or she may constitute a comprehensive answer to the unspoken questions of existence. The intensity may seem trivial, humorous even, yet this reverence for instinct is not a minor planet within the cosmology of relationships. It is the underlying central sun around which contemporary ideals of love revolve.  3. Love is a skill rather than an enthusiasm. 4. He has, without knowing how, richly succeeded at the three central challenges underpinning the Romantic idea of love: he has found the right person, he has opened his heart to her and he has been accepted. 5. And yet he is, of course, nowhere yet. He and Kirsten will marry, they will suffer, they will frequently worry about money, they will have a girl first, then a boy, one of them will have an affair, there will be passages of boredom, they'll sometimes want to murder one another and on a few occasions to kill themselves. This will be the real love story. Welcome to   LUNA PAN'S NEVERLAND 6. We don't need to be constantly reasonable in order to have good relationships; all we need to have mastered is the occasional capacity to acknowledge with good grace that we may, in one or two areas, be somewhat insane.  7. The most superficially irrational, immature, lamentable but nonetheless common of all the presumptions of love is that the person to whom we have pledged ourselves is not just the centre of our emotional existence, but also, as a result and yet in a very strange, objectively insane and profoundly unjust way, responsible for everything that happens to us, for good or ill. Therein lies the peculiar and sick privilege of love. 8. They watch her fall back to sleep, her eyelids trembling a little, Dobbie tucked in next to her. They stay awake a while, moved, because they know their little girl will have to grow up, leave them, suffer, be rejected and have her heart broken. She will be out in the world, will long for reassurance but will be out of their reach. There will, eventually, be some real dragons, and Mama and Dada will be quite unable to dispatch them. 9. Marriage: a hopeful, generous, infinitely kind gamble taken by two people who don't know yet who they are or who the other might be, binding themselves to a future they cannot conceive of and have carefully omitted to investigate. 10. 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. 1 1 THE COURSE OF LOVE 11. Marriage: a deeply peculiar and ultimately unkind thing to inflict on anyone one claims to care for. 12. "We accept not to panic when, some years from now, what we are doing today will seem like the worst decision of our lives. Yet we promise not to look around, either, for we accept that there cannot be better options out there. Everyone is always impossible. We are a demented species." 13. No relationship could start without a commitment to wholehearted intimacy. 14. Love is a skill, not just an enthusiasm. 15. Pronouncing a lover "perfect" can only be a sign that we have failed to understand them. We can claim to have begun to know someone only when they have substantially disappointed us. Welcome to LUNA PAN'S NEVERLAND 16. Love begins with the experience of being understood in highly supportive and uncommon ways. They grasp the lonely parts of us; we don't have to explain why we fins a particular joke so funny; we hate the same people; we both want to try that rather specialized sexual scenario. It cannot continue. When we run up against the reasonable limits of our lovers' capacities for understanding, we mustn't blame them for dereliction. They were not tragically inept. They couldn't fully fathom who we were—and we could do no better. Which is normal. No one properly gets, or can fully sympathize with, anyone else. 17. They seem "difficult", of course, within the cage of marriage; when they lose their tempers over such petty things: logistics, in-laws, cleaning rotas, parties, the groceries ... But it's not the other person's fault, it's what we're trying to do with them. It's the institution of marriage that is principally impossible, not the individuals involved. 18. We take this idea of love with us into adulthood. Grown up, we hope for a re-creation of what it felt like to be ministered to and indulged. In a secret corner of our mind, we picture a lover who will anticipate our needs, read our hearts, act selflessly and make everything better. It sounds "romantic"; yet it is a blueprint for disaster. 19. Rather than some notional idea of perfect complementarity, it is the capacity to tolerate dissimilarity that is the true marker of the "right" person. Compatibility is an achievement of love; it shouldn't be its precondition. 20. — "Sorry, Mr Sfouf, that I haven't always been who you wanted me to be." — "Yet you've been so much more." 图/Luna 文/Luna 风格/秀米 WELCOME TO LUNA PAN'S NEVERLAND |
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