Many years ago an aging member of the house of Hanover, on learning that the
duty of providing an heir to the throne of England had suddenly befallen him and
his brothers, confided his alarm to his friend Thomas Creevey: "...It is now
seven-and-twenty years that Madame St. Laurent and I have lived together; we are
of the same age and have been in all climates, and in all difficulties together,
and you may well imagine the pang it will occasion me to part with her...I
protest I don't know what is to become of her if a marriage is to be forced upon
me..."
Amused by the Duke of Kent's predicament, Mr. Creevey recorded the incident
in his diary and preserved for us a timeless declaration. The man who made it
was not overly endowed with brilliance, nor had he led a noteworthy life, yet we
remember his cry from the heart and tend to forget his ultimate service to
mankind; he was the father of Queen Victoria.
What did the Duke of Kent tell us? That two people had shared their lives on
a voluntary basis for nearly thirty years--in itself a remarkable achievement;
that they had survived the fevers and frets of intimate relationship; that
together they had met the pressures and disappointments of life; that he is in
agony at the prospect of leaving her. In one grateful sentence, the Duke of Kent
said all there is to say about the love of a man for a woman.
And in so saying, he tells us much about love itself. There is only one kind
of love--love. But the different manifestations of love are uncountable:
At an unfamiliar night noise a mother will spring from her bed, not to return
until every corner of her domain is tucked safely round her anxiety. A man will
look up from his golf game to watch a jet cut caterpillar tracks through the
sky. A housewife, before driving to town, will give her neighbour a quick call
to see if she wants anything from the store. These are manifestations of a power
within us that must of necessity be called divine, for it is no invention of
man.
What is love? Many things are love--indeed, love is present in pity,
compassion, romance, affection. What made the Duke of Kent's statement a
declaration of love, and what makes us perform without second thought small acts
of love every day of our lives, is an element conspicuous by its absence. Were
it present, the Duke of Kent would have left his mistress without a pang; the
sound barrier breaking over her head would not rouse the mother; sinking his
putt would be the primary aim of the golfer; the housewife would go straight to
the store with no thought of her neighbour. One thing identifies love and
isolates it from kindred emotions: love admits not of self.
Few of us achieve compassion; to some of us romance is a word; in many of us
the ability to feel affection has long since died; but all of us at one time or
another- be it for an instant or for our lives- have departed from ourselves: we
have loved something or someone. Love, then is a paradox: to have it, we must
give it. Love is not an intransitive thinglove is a direct action of mind and
body.
Without love, life is pointless and dangerous. Man is on his way to Venus,
but he still hasn't learned to live with his wife. Man has succeeded in
increasing his life span, yet he exterminates his brothers six million at a
whack. Man now has the power to destroy himself and his planet: depend upon it,
he will - should he cease to love.
The most common barriers to love are greed, envy, pride, and four other
drives formerly known as sins. There is one more just as dangerous: boredom. The
mind that can find little excitement in life is a dying one; the mind that can
not find something in the world that attracts it is dead, and the body housing
it might as well be dead, for what are the uses of the five senses to a mind
that takes no pleasure in them?
Having at long last realized that he must love or destroy himself, man is
proceeding along his usual course by trying to evolve a science for it. The
ultimate aim of psychoanalysis, when its special brand of semantics is put to
rout, is to release man from his neuroses and thus enable him to love, and man's
capacity to love is measured by his degree of freedom from the drives that turn
inward upon him. As one holds down a cork to the bottom of a stream, so may love
be imprisoned by self: remove self, and love rises to the surface of man's
being.
With love, all things are possible.
Love restores. We have heard many tales of love's power to heal, and we are
skeptical of them, for we are human and therefore prone to deny the existence of
things we do not understand and can not explain. But this tale happened:
On an August evening in a tiny Southern hospital, an old man lay dying. His
family had been summoned, among them his eldest grandson, a boy of sixteen. The
boy's relationship with his grandfather had been a curious, almost wordless one,
as such things often are between man and man. All that day the boy said nothing.
It seemed that he could not talk. He would not wait out the old man's dying with
the rest of his family in the hospital lobby; instead, the boy found a chair and
stationed himself in the corridor beside his grandfather's door, where he sat
all day, oblivious to the starched scurryings of hospital routine. Late in the
evening the family's doctor found the boy still sitting, still silent. The
doctor said, "Go home, son.
There's nothing you can do for your grandfather."
The boy took no notice of him, and the doctor went into the room only to emerge
moments later, looking bewildered. "Er--son," said the doctor. The boy looked
up. "He's asking for something to eat. He's better." Showing no sign of
surprise, the boy nodded: "I reckoned it was about time he was hungry," he said,
his first utterance of the day. Then he picked up the chair, put it back where
he found it, and walked down the corridor, stretching his lanky frame and
yawning. "Where are you going, boy?" called the doctor.
"To get him a
hamburger," answered the boy. "He likes hamburgers."
There is no satisfactory explanation for extrasensory perception--it simply
is. There was no rational explanation for the old man's recovery--it simply
happened. One may only wonder.
Love transforms. Why is it that the quotidian we are seeking, when we can't
find it in the Bible or in Shakespeare, most often turns up in Don
Quixote? Because Cervantes, from sheer love of life, made the nuances of
life immortal. Why, when we are familiar with every line, must we stop and
listen when "The Messiah" is playing? Because every note was born of a man's
love for God, and we hear it. Try this experiment: catch (if you can) someone
who loathes baroque music; play for him any part of Semele, then sit back
and watch his polite attention turn to compulsive attention--see your captive
become Handel's captive. Avarice never wrote a good novel; hate did not paint
"The Birth of Venus"; nor did envy reveal to us that the square of the
hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the squares of the two sides. Every creation
of man's mind that has withstood the buffeting of time was born of love--love of
something or someone. It is possible even to love mathematics.
The history of mankind contains innumerable testaments to the power of love,
but none touches the transformation undergone by the otherwise cantankerous St.
Paul when he addressed himself to the subject: loving, he wrote of love itself,
and he gave us a miracle. Listen:
"Though I speak with the tongues of men and angels, and have not charity, I
am become as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal.
"And though I have the gift of prophecy, and understand all mysteries, and
all knowledge; and though I have all faith, so that I could remove mountains,
and have not charity, I am nothing..."
After St. Paul, we have done our best, but our best has never come near him.
Love purifies. Suffering never purified anybody; suffering merely intensifies
the self-directed drives within us. Any act of love, however--no matter how
small--lessens anxiety's grip, gives us a taste of tomorrow, and eases the yoke
of our fears. Love, unlike virtue, is not its own reward. The reward of love is
peace of mind, and peace of mind is the end of man's desiring.
The first work of Harper Lee written for vogue
Source: David Marchese / Vulture.com |
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