I recently read a review for All About Love by Lisa Appignanesi and decided it came close enough to add to the 2011 lust list. It reminds me of one of those forgettable nonfictional "love" psycho-anthologies I read earlier in the year (not worth trying to figure out which one, as the same sin seems to pervade all such compendiums). The authors try to define and explain "love" in all its permutations, from first love attraction, to passionate lust, to married comfort with its ancillary risks of adultery and divorce. It is almost that they have to be politically correct and push on to cover maternal love and friendship. Maybe love is too broad a word to write about ... it's like writing about "walk" ... to many various interpretations.
That said, LA has flashes of brilliant writing; her her insights when writing about Poe:
"... love ... a return to a primal sense of oneness where lover and beloved merge ... and there is no demarcation between inside and outside. We are recognized, known by, and know the other ... our best self comes into being, one filled with new potential ... the abiding loneliness, that emptiness that human beings are prone to recedes, at least momentarily ... a sense of pastoral at-homeness reigns ..."
As I culled her topics for wise words to impart to my soon to be married son and his wonderful fiance, I found plenty of quotes:
"Core to keeping the hopes we have of a relationship alive and making them as successful as we can may be a re-estimation of habit ... Our world of plenty and constant stimulus, our enshrinement of the excitements of youth and novelty, shroud habit with a negative aura ... A habit, as the dictionary tells us, is the protective garment we put on to go out into the social world ... Habit is also our "habitation," a place of security and our settled disposition, the way we prefer to live"
Her summary of Emmanuel Levinas' understanding of love:
"... a uniquely ambiguous relation, at once possessive and deferential ... Though motivated by desire and need, loves comes into authentic being only when a reciprocity is set up with the other; there is a simultaneous sense of needing without being able to bring the other into possession, the sense of being needed, but without surrendering to exploitation ... that freedom and bondage here coexist."
Quoting Shelley's The Cencis, a poem about libidinal siblings, near books end, LA reminds us all that desire is all in the yearning and recollection:
"Our breath shall intermix ... and our veins beat together; and our lips with other eloquence than words, eclipse the soul that burns between them, and the wells which boil under our being's inmost cells."
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