Problematizing Love

When you realize you want to spend the rest of your life with somebody, you want the rest of your life to start as soon as possible. ~ When Harry Met Sally (movie)


Love has been the subject of interest of a great number of writers. Rumi (1207-1273), the great Persian poet and sufi guru, wrote about the divine love. Shakespeare (1564-1616), the great English poet and dramatist, explored love through his sonnets and tragedies. Pablo Neruda (1904 -1973), the great Chilean writer and the 1971 winner of the Nobel Prize, etched love in thousands of his poems. Jane Austen (1775 -1817), the great English novelist, posited the prejudice that comes with love. Regardless of race, sex, genre, location and medium, writers have attempted to explain about love (or to problematize it, as we call it in literature).
My perception of love has changed over time. I guess there is an obvious parallel between my perception and my palpable experience in love. One would think that by now I would have given up on love but somehow I haven’t. I wish I had, though, because sometimes I think loving someone is a weakness that eats up the heart and drains one physically, emotionally and spiritually, until one has nothing left to give. But on the other hand, love is also a feeling of hope and faith that a person would have to feel in order to be sane.
But perhaps what I’ve read all this while has also shaped my perception. I’ve read countless prose and poems that deliberate on love. But none left as much impact as Louis de Bernieres’ Captain Corelli’s Mandolin. The minute I came across this snippet (Captain Corelli's Mandolin, pp 344-345) of what love is, I couldn’t help but concur with the same notion!

Love is a temporary madness, it erupts like volcanoes and then subsides. And when it subsides you have to make a decision. You have to work out whether your roots have so intertwined together that it is inconceivable that you should ever part. Because this is what love is. Love is not breathlessness, it is not excitement, it is not the promulgation of promises of eternal passion, it is not the desire to mate every second minute of the day, it is not lying awake at night imagining that he is kissing every cranny of your body. ...Love itself is what is left over when being in love has burned away, and this is both an art and a fortunate accident.

Originally posted on http://izzyz7.reciter.com on 2 August 2007


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