September 8, 2023
In the 12th century CE, the troubadour poets of southern France invented a new kind of love. It is an oversimplification, to be sure, this assertion that romantic love, or what came to be called Courtly Love, is a new contrivance. Lyrical celebrations of erotic and emotional attachment between two people, such as the Song of Songs, to cite an obvious example, were hardly unknown to earlier times. But there is still a truth to the assertion that the kind of romantic love celebrated by the Courtly Love tradition is different from earlier expressions of love, and one manifestation of that difference is a very different relationship to marriage, the subject of which the present newsletter is a continuation from last week. In Courtly Love, both the beloved and love itself are so intensely idealized that they often seem to lead beyond any possible happy ending in the ordinary world. Originally, romantic love of this type was a love outside of marriage. As the word “Courtly” implies, romantic love was a preoccupation of the aristocratic elite—and among the aristocracy, marriages were controlled and arranged. They were ways of disposing of estates and of cementing political alliances, in addition to the age-old goal of marriage, reproduction. The original purpose of marriage was not “romantic” but social.
The Song of Songs in Jewish Scripture or the Old Testament is an example of an expression of deep love between two people that is nevertheless contained within social assumptions. It is a dialogue between two lovers, the man and woman speaking in turn, so lyrically beautiful that it is still frequently incorporated into marriage ceremonies:
My beloved spake, and said unto me, Rise up, my love, my fair one, and come away. For, lo, the winter is past, the rain is over and gone; The flowers appear on the earth; the time of the singing of birds is come, and the voice of the turtle[dove] is heard in our land. (2:10-12, King James)
There is actually a hint of a narrative of the sort that would later be called romantic comedy. The woman is “black, but comely” and begs listeners not to judge her because she is a Dark Lady, even though she admits “mine own vineyard have I not kept” (1:6). Rather, she has gone in the streets alone at night, seeking her lover:
I opened the door to my beloved: but my beloved had withdrawn himself, and was gone: my soul failed when he spake: I sought him, but I could not find him; I called him, but he gave me no answer. The watchmen that went about the city found me, they smote me, they wounded me; the keepers of the walls took away my veil from me. I charge you, O daughters of Jerusalem, if you find my beloved, that ye tell him, that I am sick of love. (5;6-8).
The quest, however, is mutual. From the man’s point of view, in a famous line, the beloved is “a garden inclosed” and “a fountain sealed” (4:12), with obvious sexual implications: “Open to me, my sister, my love, my dove” (5:2), “sister” here meaning young woman, nothing incestuous.
But in the end the Song of Songs is a wedding song, its structure with alternating voices and a chorus of the women of Jerusalem resembling the kind of wedding songs popular in various cultures. In their folkish origins, such songs were sung by the young peers of the married couple on the way to and outside the door of the marital chamber, wishing blessings upon the marriage, including the most important blessing of fertility, which is why the songs often included a sort of humorous obscenity. Eventually, these songs developed into a literary form, the epithalamium or epithalamion (both spellings occur). The most famous in British literature is Edmund Spenser’s Epithalamion, written for his wedding in 1594 to Elizabeth Boyle, published the following year with the Amoretti, the sonnet sequence that transvalues the Courtly Love tradition by celebrating a romantic love that nevertheless culminates in marriage.
Somehow or other the male beloved in the Song of Songs became identified with Solomon, so that the poem is also known as the Song of Solomon. The early Church Father Origen identified the female lover as the Queen of Sheba, who arrived from the South at Solomon’s court “to prove him with hard questions” (I Kings 10:1) because of his reputation for wisdom. Solomon acquitted himself so well that the two became lovers, an early instance of what we now call “sapiosexual.” What this portrayal of Solomon has to do with he of the 300 wives and 700 concubines is one of those “don’t ask” questions. In our time, Yeats has a delightfully mischievous poem called “Solomon and the Witch” based on some legend that a perfect sex act would restore the Golden Age. The poem records a post-coital conversation which makes clear that what just happened was good, even very good, but not quite that good, whereupon the Queen cries in the poem’s last line, “O, Solomon, let us try again!” There is some speculation that the imagery of the Song of Songs derives from early fertility rituals in which the woman’s body is identified with the fertile land, the woman’s darkness being that of the fertile soil. This has the virtue of providing an excuse for what otherwise seem some rather disconcerting metaphors about the beloved’s body. Young men are counseled not to model their love poetry upon such practice as saying “thy hair is as a flock of goats, that appear from mount Gilead” and “thy temples are like a piece of pomegranate within thy locks," not to mention "Thy teeth are like a flock of sheep that are even shorn, which came up from the washing; whereof every one bear twins, and none is barren among them” (4: 1-3). Whatever may have been true in the olden days, it is not going to go well if you tell a woman that her teeth look like a flock of pregnant sheep. At any rate, the point is that what begins with individual feeling and isolated lovers ends in social celebration like that of romantic comedy. Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, probably written for an actual wedding or with one in mind, is in one way of looking at it an epithalamion developed into a full-fledged drama, especially when we add to it the wedding march written for it by Mendelssohn.
The literary convention of the epithalamion is originally Classical, not Biblical. Nowadays, Sappho is famous for love poetry expressing lonely and intense desire, usually not requited, very modern-seeming in its subjectivity. But from what we can tell from the fragments that are almost all that survive of her work, she often worked within the convention of the epithalamion, the poems being sung and danced by a chorus. Her example influenced a number of later poets, including Catullus, whose poem 64, said to be modeled on a lost ode of Sappho, is about the most famous wedding in Classical literature, that of Peleus and Thetis, the mortal and the immortal, whose offspring was Achilles. This wedding was a famous subject of Greek art because absolutely everybody who was anybody attended: it was one of the very few occasions on which gods mingled socially with mortals. And yet, the result of this wedding was tragic, for the one person excluded from the guest list, Eris, or strife, took her revenge by throwing down the golden apple that led to the Judgment of Paris and the Trojan War. As if that were not ironic enough, the 18th Idyll of Theocritus, also said to be influenced by Sappho, concerns the marriage of Helen and Menelaus. One wonders what is being implied about the supposed blessings of marriage here.
Shakespeare’s romantic comedies often parallel the main lover’s plot with a parody plot among the lower-class characters. In the 16th century, Sir John Suckling—yes, his real name—wrote a parody-epithalamion of a rustic marriage that takes the form back to the obscene songs sung at the wedding-chamber door. The last stanza of “A Ballad Upon a Wedding” gives an adequate idea of the rest of it:
At length the candles out and out, All that they had not done, they do’t: What that is, who can tell? But I believe it was no more Then thou and I have done before With Bridget, and with Nell.
The Christian tradition, beginning in the New Testament itself, attempted to spiritualize the imagery of lovers and marriage, turning its earthly consummation into a symbol of a transcendent union. In the first century of the Church, this coincident with a devaluation of earthly marriage. Paul’s notorious statement, “It is better to marry than to burn” in lust (I Corinthians 7:9) is hardly a ringing endorsement, though it has to be understood within the context that the end of the world was widely believed to be imminent, so what was the use of getting married, given that Jesus had said that in heaven there is no marriage or giving in marriage (Mark 12:23). Marriage was not sinful, merely second-rate: the ideal was unmarried celibacy, which was presumed to approximate conditions in eternity, where people “are as the angels which are in heaven” (Mark 12:25). As Northrop Frye points out in Words with Power, however (189), there is an assumption buried in that phrase, and the assumption is not inevitable. In Paradise Lost, Milton insists that angels not only have sex but better sex, their spiritual bodies capable of uniting from head to foot. The marriage ceremony, echoing Genesis, says that married people become “one flesh,” so that when Jesus says that in heaven there is no marriage or giving in marriage, he must be referring to the kind of patriarchal possessiveness embedded in the Sadducees’ question to him about which of a woman’s seven husbands shall own her after death. That kind of marriage no longer exists in heaven, but possibly some other kind of union does.
The Church of the Middle Ages, after it became clear that the end of the world was not going to happen next Tuesday, compromised and made marriage a sacrament, but denigrated the disgusting act that was at the heart of it. This led to some curious legalistic double binds. Augustine said that sexual desire was not inherently sinful when occurring during the process of married procreation, but was nevertheless a corrupted product of the Fall. The human race had originally been intended to reproduce by will rather than desire, whatever that means. The Book of Revelation spiritualizes, which in this context means kidnaps, the imagery of bride and bridegroom: the human race collectively is the Bride and Christ is the Bridegroom. This retreat by commentators into disembodied abstraction became revisionist, so that, as Frye explains, “when they approach the Song of Songs they tend to treat it as a sublimated vision of the love of God for his people, where the meaning of every image is allegorical and never really refers to (ugh) sex. Bernard of Clairvaux, a very high-ranking medieval saint, preached eighty-six sermons on the Song of Songs to make this point: an impressive barrage, but not wholly successful in its aim, as the poem demurely continues to say what it has always said” (174).
Rather than merely repudiate earthly love, a more liberal tendency in Christianity saw it as a means to a more spiritual end. Plato’s Symposium was such an influence on this way of thinking that we still speak of “Platonic love.” Love begins with physical attraction, Socrates says in the dialogue, but climbs what is often called the Platonic ladder towards a higher love that exists on a purely Ideal level. Dante’s Divine Comedy transvalues the romantic love of the Courtly Love tradition in such a Neoplatonic way. His La Vita Nuova tells the story of his falling in love with Beatrice in Courtly Love fashion. In the hands of someone like Dante, such love was already highly sublimated and “Platonic,” an adoration largely from afar. But in the Divine Comedy, Dante goes further, making Beatrice the agent of his salvation, leading him from the earthly to, first, the paradisal, as they meet again after her death in the Garden of Eden, and, ultimately, the eternal. When Beatrice relinquishes her role as Dante’s guide and returns to her place in the heavenly hierarchy, her place is taken by, significantly, Bernard of Clairvaux, who offers a prayer to the Virgin Mary, of whom Bernard was a celebrated devotee, for making Dante’s pilgrimage possible. A married woman who not only conceived without sex but who, according to the Catholic doctrine of the Immaculate Conception, was born without original sin, the sin of the Fall that corrupted human sexuality for all time, Mary represents about as far as marriage can go in minimizing its relationship to sex and the body.
From the standpoint of a post-Freudian liberalism, all this may seem neurotic enough. But the liberal stance depends upon a view of sexuality as benign that is by no means unchallenged in history. Nor is it unchallenged in contemporary scholarship. In Eros: The Myth of Ancient Greek Sexuality (1997), Bruce S. Thornton asserts that the modern view is absolutely at odds with the entire ancient world’s:
Our sexual idealism tells us that such intense sexual passion is a good, perhaps the Good, in comparison to which all other goods become insignificant, and for the attainment of which any sacrifice is justified. For the ultimate fulfillment of the individual can happen only when he loses himself in a sexual relationship whose intensity signifies the depth and meaning of the essence of a person, his spirit or soul or “true self,” a self defined in opposition to society and its rules and institutions. (11)
However, he goes on to say,
The Greeks knew better. They saw sex and violence as two sides of the same irrational coin, each interpenetrating and intensifying the other, creating a violent sex and sexual violence that exploded into profound destruction and disorder, a double chaotic energy threatening the foundations of human culture and identity. (23)
Bruce Thornton is a research fellow at the conservative Hoover Institution, and publishes in conservative organs such as The New Criterion and the National Review. That is not by any means to dismiss him, because his book, whatever one thinks of it, is not right-wing propaganda but genuine scholarship, a detailed examination of dozens of Classical texts. It is, however, informed by a common conservative view that human nature is essentially evil, the strict external rule of law and internal discipline of reason being necessary to control natural selfishness.
Shakespeare has a play that wrestles with the validity of this view, and a most uncomfortable play it is. Measure for Measure is one of the “problem plays.” Like his romantic comedies, it features two couples heading towards marriage who have encountered obstacles, but we are here a long way from the lyricism of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Claudio is secretly engaged to Julietta but has not waited for marriage, and now Julietta is pregnant, for which Claudio, by the strict law of Vienna, is sentenced to die. Claudio himself expresses the conservative view: “Our natures do pursue, / Like rats that ravin down their proper bane, / A thirsty evil, and when we drink we die” (1.2.128-30). So: sexual love is rat poison, too good-tasting to resist, yet lethal. The Duke of Vienna says, “We have strict statutes and most biting laws, / The needful bits and curbs to headstrong steeds” (1.3.19-20). The problem with this is that Claudio is not a rat in any sense of the term. He is a nice young man, and he and his girlfriend have simply not waited until the wedding. He does not exemplify "violent sex and sexual violence," but there is a character who does: Angelo, the judge, who becomes so stalker-obsessed that he tries to extort sex from a woman, Isabella, who is about to become a nun. Angelo is the one who insists on applying the strict letter of the law—against other people. Why does Angelo become possessed by a rapist’s desires? Because he is so totally repressed—his urine is ice, one character says. But there is a hot hell inside him. The first production I ever saw of Measure for Measure set it, aptly, in the 19th-century Vienna of Freud. The liberal view is that humanity has been for most of history in the grip of violent sex and sexual violence because societies have been ignorantly repressive. It is not sexuality that produces violence but repression, which turns sexuality violent.
Romantic love, when it emerged in the Courtly Love period, had to distinguish itself from the kind of intense, driven desire to which I will give the name of passion. Passion was well known throughout the ancient and medieval worlds: the value of Thornton’s book is that it provides an exhaustive catalogue of passionate lovers and relationships, all the way back to the passion of Paris and Helen that destroyed Helen’s marriage to Menelaus and led to the Trojan War. Despite the liberal view that passion is simply the inevitable backlash against puritanical repression and denial, it is probably more accurate to say that the repression and denial are a response, often futile, to obsessive desires. In The Productions of Time, however, I suggested that, contrary to the conservative view, the obsessive desires do not imply some sort of innate evil in human nature. The real cause of obsessive desire is epistemological. A subject confronts a reality objective to itself, “out there.” Desire is the yearning to close the gap between subject and object. Desire becomes obsessive because the ego or ordinary “I” is not capable of closing that gap. Only the imagination can do that: the ego can only try to possess the object of desire or destroy it. In modern society, people are thrown back upon the private, alienated, lonely self, so that passion, yearning desire for the Other, becomes almost a quintessential modern emotion. It is what all that poetry that we wrote in high school about unrequited love was about. It is what 90% of pop songs are about: songs of longing for that exciting One, songs of breakup and revenge, songs that say “let’s party” in order to escape for a while from the manic-depressive cycle of yearning, having, losing.
The ancients knew this kind of passion all too well. Sappho wrote often of it in the first person. Her poems are innovative in giving voice to a woman’s experience, and to a lesbian woman’s experience, but the experience of unrequited passion is universal. Both the ecstasy and the heartbreak travel across barriers of gender and sexual identity without translation. Ovid, in the Metamorphoses, turned most of Greek mythology into a typology of erotic passion. In The Productions of Time, I described his standard theme as the chase after the inaccessible object of desire, a failed chase that never ends in union: instead, the pursued or the pursuer or both undergo metamorphosis down the Chain of Being, becoming objects, becoming objectified. Mortals, gods, nature spirits: no one is exempt. Apollo pursues Daphne until she turns into a tree. The satyr Pan pursues Syrinx. Myrrha pursues her own father, and, worse, seduces him in the dark. The king of the gods is a serial womanizer: Jupiter is willing to reduce himself to an animal to capture his victims, a swan to couple with Leda, an eagle to carry off the beautiful boy Ganymede. The tales are narrative, but are subjectivized by the characters’ habit of soliloquizing, analyzing their obsessions at length. Ovid also wrote the Heroides, epistolary poems by famous women to lovers who have mistreated or abandoned them. One is in the voice of Sappho herself, based on an apocryphal legend of her unrequited love for a male lover named Phaon. Two are by “fatal attraction” women, Dido and Medea, who clearly demonstrate Thornton’s pattern of violent sex and sexual violence.
It is often observed that romantic love in the Courtly Love tradition grew up as a reaction to the impersonal and arranged character or aristocratic medieval marriages. That is why, to the consternation of some of my students, Courtly Love was most often a love outside of marriage. The chaplain of Eleanor of Aquitaine, Andreas Capellanus, wrote a handbook of Courtly Love whose contents were conveniently summed up in a list of 31 guidelines. The very first precept is, “Marriage is no excuse for not loving.” By modern standards Courtly Love is a romanticizing of adultery. And yet, surely that is too pat a way of dismissing some of the most famous love stories of Western literature. Lancelot and Guinevere, Tristan and Isolde, the Irish Diarmuid and Gráinne—and, yes, Dante and Beatrice, for Dante was not married to Beatrice but to Gemma Donati, who bore their four children and is never mentioned in any of his writing. What is going on here? Well, love triangles make great soap opera, true. Also “the grass is always greener” and “forbidden fruit,” also true. But there is something more. We said in the previous newsletter that, of all the forms of love, romantic love is most fully the product of the imagination, owing least to both natural behavior patterns and ideological ones. In fact, the impulse driving romantic love is a desire to transcend those patterns in favor of something ideal, a romantic light not seen on land or sea.
Courtly Love poetry employed a standard set of conventions, clearly evident in Dante’s Vita Nuova. The beloved is idealized to the point of becoming a kind of goddess. When the Courtly Love poet said, “I adore you,” he meant it. The imagery, however lightly touched, was of a religion of Eros that was an alternative and a potential challenge to Eros-denying Christianity. The common sense objection, “Isn’t that taking it a bit far?” is irrelevant, first because taking it too far, beyond the common sense boundaries supposed to be “reality,” is the whole point; second, because a love that is magical, miraculous, transformative, far beyond the happy ending of fairy tales, is what some part of us wants. Such a love transforms the rest of life into beauty; if you die having missed it, you have missed your chance. Let us not pretend many if not most people don’t want this. The “adulterous” triangle of romantic love usually consists of one romantic lover and one husband representing the limitations of conventional marriage. He may be nice, even noble, but he is prosaic and loveless, often uncomprehending of what love even means. Such triangles did not die out with the Middle Ages. In one of the great short stories of the 20th century, James Joyce’s “The Dead,” nice guy Gabriel Conroy discovers that his wife Greta had a lover named Michael Furey who literally died of love for her, staying out in inclement weather for her sake and falling fatally ill. Gabriel comes to understand that he and Greta have a “good marriage”—but he will never be to her what Michael Furey was. In 1995, Clint Eastwood made a film called The Bridges of Madison County, about an Italian war bride, played by Meryl Streep, who has a passionate four-day affair with a photojournalist, played by Eastwood, passing through to photograph the bridges of Madison County. Years later, when the woman dies, her children discover that she wants her ashes to be scattered from one of the bridges, from which the ashes of the journalist have been scattered, rather than be buried next to her husband. It may not be James Joyce, but it is poignant and earned Streep an Academy Award nomination for Best Actress.
The poets understood that it was often difficult to distinguish true romantic love from passion, and that people often fool themselves. The defining case is that of Paolo and Francesca in Dante’s Inferno, who are punished in the 2nd circle of hell by being caught up in a gigantic whirlwind, symbolizing the whirlwind of passion by which people feel “swept away.” Paolo and Francesca tell what Dante the poet regards as a self-serving story whose moral is “We couldn’t help ourselves.” What is crucial is that they were reading about Lancelot and Guinevere when they fell into their adulterous affair—in other words, Courtly Love led them into sin and damnation by making adultery seem so, so beautiful and glamorous. But how dare Dante judge them when he has his unmarried love of Beatrice? Yes, Paolo and Francesca fell into bed (where they were discovered and killed by the jealous husband), and Dante probably never even kissed Beatrice. But that is a technicality, especially when Jesus said that he who has lusted after a woman in his heart has committed adultery. The real difference is between a selfish and unselfish attitude. From Dante’s point of view, the love of Paolo and Francesca was based on self-gratification, but true Courtly Love was a self-sacrificing discipline. The lover served the woman, and served Love. Hence the clichés about everything from slaying dragons to putting one’s coat over puddles and holding doors. The truth behind them is that true romantic love transcends the ego and its self-centered concerns.
That may mean that the romantic ideal, at its greatest intensity, is impossible to fulfill in this world, so that true lovers may have to seek another, higher level of being. Whatever the audience may decide, that is clearly what Romeo and Juliet think of their love. The same is true of Shakespeare’s middle-aged lovers Antony and Cleopatra: Cleopatra’s last words before her death are, “Husband, I come!” Shakespeare also has a strange poem, “The Phoenix and Turtle,” in which two lovebirds, the red, fiery phoenix and the white turtledove, the colors of Eros, have consummated their love in all senses by immolation in the phoenix’s flames. They have left no offspring, and their love is described as “married chastity.” The poem was written for a specific occasion, but we don’t know anything about it. All we know is that the phoenix and turtle have left this world behind and now exist elsewhere. Dylan Thomas, doubtless with Shakespeare’s poem in mind, has a dying man gathered up by a fiery bird in the midst of white snowfall in “A Winter’s Tale.” These are poems of transcendence to a higher level of being through romantic love, in which marriage is transvalued into a death-and-rebirth initiation ritual.
Mythologically, there are two higher levels. One is paradisal, and romantic love always makes a paradise for two, often a secret place like the woodland grotto of Tristan and Isolde. Shelley has a poem called “Epipsychidion” in which he repudiates “the weariest and the longest journey” of conventional marriage and imagines a polyamorous relationship with himself, his wife Mary, and a woman named Emilia Viviani, one that would take place in a paradisal state. Shelley uses Neoplatonic lore to describe what is basically a psychological experience. He seeks the same ideal Beauty in every woman to whom he is attracted—and he has been attracted to a good many. Jung would say that he projects his anima, or inner feminine ideal, on practically every woman he meets. It is easy to condemn Shelley for pathetic and selfish rationalizing, but questing for the anima is not the problem. The problem is treating real-life women as means to an end. It is hard to know when one is being selfish in romantic love. One’s conscience is never quite easy, nor should it be.
There is a level of romantic love, however, beyond the paradisal, in which, at the greatest intensity, two actually become one, a unity of being symbolized by orgasm. Hence the title of Donne’s “The Extasie,” a word that means out of oneself or beyond oneself: the poem takes place in the aftermath of lovemaking, and the fusion of two people has subsided into ordinary duality. Post-coital sadness reflects the letdown when the experience of having overcome the alienation of the subject-object perspective turns out to be temporary once again. But for a moment there was no inaccessible object of desire; for a moment, another human being was not an object or an Other.
That is the true promise of romantic love, to conquer the alienation of the fallen world through a relation to another human being. Can such an essentially apocalyptic impulse be contained within the everyday framework of marriage? It is often said that romantic love has to be at a distance, because it cannot survive the disillusionments of everyday living, and one finds that one’s ideal beloved, one’s near-goddess or god, turns out to be an all-too-real human being. Hence romantic culture becomes divorce culture, starting with Milton’s four divorce tracts in the 17th century. No one believed more fervently in married romantic love than the man who spoke of the unfallen Adam and Eve “imparadis’d in one another’s arms.” The bitterness of the divorce tracts resulted from Milton’s disillusionment with his first wife. He was not looking for a goddess, but he needed an ideal companion or kindred spirit, and did not find it in Mary Powell, a pampered rich girl from a Royalist family. There is a whole modern genre chronicling the kind of bad marriages I witnessed in the 1950’s, their endless fighting fueled by the disillusionments of thwarted passion: Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf (1962, film version 1966), Ingmar Bergman’s Scenes from a Marriage (1973), which influenced some of the later, Bergmanesque films of Woody Allen and which seems to have influenced Noah Baumbach’s recent Marriage Story (2019). These stories are what Frye would call realistically “displaced” versions of the Fall: in Paradise Lost, the first thing Adam and Eve do after they are corrupted by the forbidden fruit is have a rip-roaring marital argument.
Yet I began two weeks ago by saying that I thought there was a kernel of truth in David Brooks’s faith in marriage as a source of happiness. Contrasting with the catalogue of marriages from hell, or marriages that are hell, there is a catalogue of marriages in which the partners seem to have escaped the either-or mentality in which love either traps one in a conventional prison or demands transcendence to an absolute, ideal state. Such marriages are there in literature and in real life if you look for them. The two great novels of D.H. Lawrence, The Rainbow (1915) and Women in Love (1921), hold out a hope (sometimes problematic, sometimes profound) that, by returning to a deep level of “instinct,” the unconscious roots of human energy, couples may achieve a kind of ideal marriage that is neither a leap into otherworldly transcendence nor a desacralized dead end in which the partners are what Yeats, in another context, called weasels fighting in a hole.
Good marriages occur in literature and life, though, because they lack drama, or melodrama, they tend to be eclipsed by the affairs of obsessive passion and idealized romance, beginning with the tenderness and mutual respect of Hector and Andromache in the Iliad and the companionate marriage of Odysseus and Penelope in the Odyssey. There is also the playful banter of Hotspur and Kate in Shakespeare’s I Henry IV; the years of happiness shared by George Eliot and George Henry Lewes; the lifelong partnership of the popular historians Will and Ariel Durant, who died, at the ages of 96 and 83 respectively, within two weeks of each other, after a marriage of 63 years. As I write, Jimmy and Rosalyn Carter, 98 and 96 respectively, are entering their final days after 77 years of marriage. Sometimes the price for the blessing of such a good and immensely long-term marriage is an almost unimaginable grief at the other’s passing. It was years before I could read without tears Northrop Frye’s account in his private notebooks of the death of Helen, his wife of 49 years. Queen Victoria was never the same again after the death of her beloved Prince Albert.
There are those who are bitter at not finding a fulfilling love and marriage. Puzzled by how many people seem to intensely dislike weddings, I asked the reason of my search engine, and one of the commonest answers was that weddings made those who had not found the right relationship feel like losers, made them feel that the bride and groom were gloating over their success. I find this mildly shocking—there are understandable reasons to dislike weddings, but surely it’s not about you. The existence of very happy marriages is also no argument that everyone should be married, and that no fulfilled single life is possible. In the end, in this very un-ideal world, there is only one mandate, that of W.H. Auden’s poem “As I walked out one evening”: “You shall love your crooked neighbor / With your crooked heart.” How you do that is of your own creation. The imagination is the home of human life, and in its house are many mansions. Some of them, sometimes, have been successfully shared.
Full Disclosure: I am engaged and, with my fiancée, planning a wedding. How reliable I am on the present subject is therefore questionable, and up to my readers to judge.
Correction:
I said last week that David Brooks used the wrong word when he told young people to “learn from the masters” and then named two women writers. Except that I promptly did a similar thing, referring to John Donne and his wife Anne as having “sired” 12 children. I’m sure I cribbed the word unthinkingly from my source. But writing in your sleep is no excuse. My apologies. Thanks as usual to my lifelong friend and sharp-eyed reader Dennis McCurdy.
References
Frye, Northrop. Words with Power: Being a Second Study of “The Bible and Literature.” Edited by Michael Dolzani. Volume 26 of The Collected Works of Northrop Frye. University of Toronto Press, 2008.
Thornton, Bruce S. Eros: The Myth of Ancient Greek Sexuality. Westview Press, a division of Harper Collins, 1997.
Note from the IT department: The tardiness of this newsletter is due entirely to the negligence of the technician and not of the newsletter’s author. Many apologies to both the audience and the author.