Monday, February 14, 2011

On love

This is a very quick, but complex blog on love which came to me running in the rain at lunchtime today. It is Valentine's Day, so naturally my mind was thinking about love, and what exactly that means to me in my life.

And I thought about something very bizarre, but that seemed to make sense out of it all. I thought about the story in the bible about Jesus' 40 days and nights in the desert, on how the devil tempted him. I wondered if this is meant to be a metaphor for something quintessentially human about Jesus - what if in order to be able to feel true empathy, to be capable of real forgiveness, it is necessary to make bad choices, to face darker stuff in one's life?

This I believe is the essence of love - that in order to truly know and love ourselves, we need to make mistakes, to face difficult decisions, to wonder if we did the right thing, or even better, to know that we did not. And these very same principles are what define love between people, friends, marriages, etc. - that in order to truly love our partners, our friends, our children, we need to experience with them those vulnerable moments.

I've been working on the novel, steadily, and am coming to learn about and love a character whom I thought would be the most difficult for me to understand and/or feel towards, as I am not like her nor am I the opposite of her. The key to seeing her, to truly knowing her, has been watching her make mistakes, struggle, change, come to terms with those aspects of herself that are not perfect and are not part of her comfort zone.

At the same time, I have been reading Virginia Woolf's diaries, and I am feeling the sense of sadness coming over me - that she is so very hard on herself, so truly unforgiving, lacking all empathy towards her own self, her own work. I wish I could have met her, talked with her, made her see how very essential these aspects of self are part of the greatness that defines her work. I can't help but wonder if this inability to embrace those dark parts of herself is why she chose to end her life as she did.

And this is becoming an incredibly important part of my novel - this wrenching discovery of self that is followed by a level of comfort that one can never experience without falling apart.

4 comments:

  1. You are so very close in this piece to uncovering the very essence of loving ourselves and others - Forgiveness. Experiencing failure, our own. Experiencing failure, in those we love. But forgiving without condition. Frightening but the threshold of Love!

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  2. Yes, I feel it. It is amazing to be re-experiencing something that has touched me in life firsthand, in such a vivid way through fiction. I love you, Dad - especially for your struggle to live the good life.

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  3. And not only forgiveness but watching one fall apart. And feeling it through them and on your skin, with real empathy, like you can do. That, my friend, is real love.

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  4. Suzana, I am stealing that line for my novel.

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