Book notes #17 — Essays in Love

A continuation of concise book reviews, with original context here.

Edit: Nov 29, 2020 — after a few years of doing this, I’ve updated my formatting to this Google Spreadsheet where I’ll log new books plus short reviews and the occasional highlights.

Essays in Love — by Alain de Botton

Essays in Love

Stream of consciousness review:

I discovered Essays in Love after hearing Alain de Botton on the On Being podcast. His appearance was shortly after his NY Times Opinion Piece “Why You Will Marry the Wrong Person” went semi-viral.

I loved this book. Shitty pun intended.

The way he describes love with philosophy resonates with me — somewhere between realism and optimism, but rooted in the wisdom of philosophers. There’s a simplicity around his word choice that I envy.

I was impressed to hear that this — one of his most acclaimed (and his first) works, Essays in Love — came while he was just 24. The level of respect garnered for this book on a topic as complex as love speaks to the strength of the work.

What I loved about this book is that de Botton seamlessly intertwines the teachings of famous philosophers into the story line of two lovers who met on an airplane. A story line that we have all grown familiar with, but in this case not the fairy tale version. It was an eerily realistic depiction of love, both the immature and the mature variants.

His storytelling enthralls at just the right moments and though there are a handful of slow moments, they almost feel welcomed. At different points, I identified with both halves of the couple: Chloe and the narrator (presumably, Alain)— enough to capture the reader like any novel love story would, leaving you wanting more, almost forgetting that this is after all, a book on love and philosophy. Until you get to the chapter on Marxism.

Even better yet is how at each stage of the relationship — from first meet to first kiss to moving in together to bickering to argument to reconciliation and more — de Botton hones in on the psychological motivations behind each of the very familiar behaviors we’ve ourselves displayed in similar moments.

In the end, de Botton demonstrates beautifully how like life, love too is cyclical. In ways, it reminded me of the approach to a love story that Master of None took, but rooted much more deeply in the psychological motivations than the modern societal.

I’ll admit my biases as someone who tends to prescribe closely to a similar philosophy on love as de Botton’s. If anyone reads and has a different experience, I’d love to get your take on what to me has become one of my newly favorite books.

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No raw highlights this time (thanks, Audible), but here are a few of my favorite tidbits paraphrased from my Snippets:

• Until one is actually dead, it is difficult to consider anyone as “the love of one’s life”, but shortly after meeting her, it seemed in no way out of place to think of Chloe in such terms.
• What lies behind the tendency to read things as part of destiny? Perhaps only its opposite: the anxiety of contingency. The fear that the little sense that there is in our lives is only created by ourselves. That there is no preordained fate waiting. And what happens to us, is only what we choose to attribute to it.
• My mistake was to confuse the destiny to love with the destiny to love a given person. It was my thinking that Chloe, rather than love itself, was inevitable.
• Chloe, who I had not known a few hours ago, had already achieved a status of craving.
• To speak of love, after we had only spent a morning together, was to encounter charades of romantic delusion. But we can only ever fall in love without knowing who we are falling in love with. It is only founded in ignorance.
• A telephone becomes an instrument of torture in the hands of the beloved who does not call.
• As soon as one begins looking for signs of mutual attraction, then everything the beloved does can be seen as a sign.
• I think most people would throw away all of their cynicism if they could, the majority just don’t get the chance.
• Chloe had been my only thought for too long. Silence was a damning indictment. Silence with an unattractive person means they are the boring one; a silence with an attractive one means it is you who is impossibly dull.
• Lying in order to be loved carries with it the more perverse assumption that if I do not lie, I cannot be loved.
• Sex is the product of the body. It is unreflective and immediate. An ecstatic resolution of physical desire. Next to it, thought appears nothing short of a sickness. A pathological urge to oppose order. A symbol of the mind’s melancholy ability to surrender to the flux.
• The thinker and the lover lie at opposite ends of the spectrum. The thinker thinks of love; the lovers simply loves.
• Because thought implies judgement, it is always suspect in the bedroom, where nakedness lays us open to every vulnerability.
• Marxism — when we look at someone we love, we are prone to overlook one danger: how soon their attraction might pale if they love us back… How can they be as wonderful as we had hoped when they had the back taste to approve of something like us?
• She took a certain pride in mocking the romantic, yet at heart, she was the complete opposite.
• Few things can be at once so exhilirating and terrifying than to recognize that one is the object of another’s love.
• Unrequited love may be painful, but it is safely painful because it does not inflict damage on anyone but oneself. But as soon as love is reciprocated, one must also prepare for the responsibility of perpetrating hurt, as well.
• “If he does actually ring at 9, I’ll refuse to take the call. The only guy I like is the one to keep me waiting. By 9:30, I’d do anything for the call.”
• The Marxist cry is a paradoxical: “defy me and I will love you, don’t call me on time and I will kiss you, don’t sleep with me, and I will adore you.”
• It’s not that Chloe’s eyes were nicer than the next person’s, what makes the grass greener and desirable is that it is not our’s. That it belongs to the neighbor. That it is not tainted with “I” infection.
• Be not so vulnerable as to danger my independence, but not so independent as to deny my vulnerability.
• “How much do you love me today? On a scale of 1–10.”
• One does not fall at first sight. Falling comes only when one knows how deep the water is to plunge. Only after much exchange of history should two people decide they are ready to love each other.
• It was a reminder that getting to know someone is not the delightful process that it is made out to be. For as you find similarities, you also find differences.
• In fantasy, a person is endlessly and lovably malleable.
• People in love at first sight are as wonderful as a symphony composed in one’s head. But as soon as the fantasy is played out in a concert hall, we begin to notice the mishaps. The violin coming in a bit late.
• Infecting us not just with love, but also with its flipside, abuse. We participated not simply in our own superego conflicts, but also in each other’s.
• Though I might have disliked them, they were not inherently dislikable.
• Did she make me happy because she was beautiful? Or was she beautiful because she made me happy?
• In other cultures, love exists but is given particular forms. Christianity prescribed the body and eroticised the soul.
• Love is today kept alive by modern capitalism only to motivate society and keep the existing systems of nuclear families in place.
• Love reveals its insanity by its refusal to acknowledge its inherent normality of the loved one.
• Love was a lonely pursuit that could at best be understood by only one other person.
• Doubt is easy when it is not a matter of survival. We are as skeptical as we can afford to be. It is easy to doubt the existence of a table, it is hell to doubt the legitimacy of one’s love.
• Pascale had talked of a choice facing every Christian: in a world unevenly divided between the horror of a universe without god or the blissful but infinitely more remote alternative that god did exist. Even though the odds were in favor of god not existing, Pascal argued that our faith could be justified because the joys of our slimmer probability so far outweighed the horrors of the larger one. And so it should be with love.
• One should never ask a lover “does this love-stuffed person actually exist or are you simply imagining them?”
• Though one may be living under a delusion, if one finds a complimentary delusion, then all may be well.
• It is because I cannot talk to you about this feature or trait because it will hurt you too much, that I will gossip or talk about it behind your back with someone else.
• Who am I without others to hint at an answer. Who was I without Chloe to hint at the right answer.
• If someone thinks I’m shy, I’ll probably end up shy. If someone thinks I’m funny, I’ll probably continue to crack jokes. The process is circular.
• Like Narcissus, we’re doomed to a certain disappointment when gazing into the eyes of another.
• My understanding was only a modification of what I came to expect of others. My knowledge of her was necessarily filtered through my past social interactions.
• That in resolving our need to move, we may not always resolve our need to long.
• I saw her stripped of the preconceptions that time imposed. As if I had laid eyes on her for the first time again. Making her unknown and exotic to me again.
• Had we believed it, we might even have planned to marry. That, most ruthless of legal attempts, to force the heart into love.
• As soon as I reached the bottom of the slope, I’d look back up and declare it such a wonderful run. The skiing holiday and much of my life generally would proceed: Anticipation in the morning, anxiety in the actuality, and pleasant memories in the evening.
• We hated loving one another to the extent we did. I hate you, because I love you. I hate having no choice but to risk loving you like this.
• What should’ve been said to Chloe was shared with a male friend instead.
• Even if we are beautiful and rich, we do not wish to be loved for those things, for they may fail us. I would rather you compliment me on my brain than my face, but if you must, compliment my smile, motor and muscle based rather than my nose, static and tissue based.
• One can think problems into existence. I dared not to think, for fear of what I might find. A freedom to think is the courage to stumble upon our demons, but the frightened mind cannot wander. I stayed tethered to my paranoia.
• Insofar as the lover acts legitimately it is ironic action. Action that smothers love in an attempt to revive it. So at this point, desperate to woo the partner back, the lover turns to romantic terrorism. A gamut of tricks that attempt to force the partner to return the love.
• Certain things are said not because they will be heard, but because it is important to say it.
• “I am angry at you for losing the key” veils the louder “I am angry at you for not loving me”
• Ordinary terrorists have a distinct advantage over romantic terrorists: their demands, no matter how outrageous, don’t include the most outrageous of them all: to be loved.
• “I will force you to love me by making you feel jealous or sulking”, but there comes the paradox of success. If I’ve only forced you to love me, I cannot accept this love.
• I felt stung by Chloe’s dishonesty. How was it morally possible that this was allowed to happen. It is surprising how often love is framed in moral language: right or wrong. As if the right to love or not to love is framed in moral ethics.
• We made moral judgements on the basis of preference, not transcendental values. As Hobbes out it, every man calls that which pleases him good, and that which displeases him evil.
• We look at the past in order to help us explain the present.
• If we look for omens, whether good or bad, we will never have trouble finding them.
• I would never be happy in love because I thought too myself. The mind is as much an instrument of torture as it is a beneficial agent.
• What more sensible a reaction than this — to kill oneself after rejection in love. If Chloe really was my whole life, was it not normal to end that life to prove that it was impossible without her. Was it not dishonest to wake up every morning when the person I claimed to be my existence was no longer there.
• A notorious inability to express emotions makes human beings the only animals capable of suicide. An angry dog bites the person or thing that makes it angry, but an angry human sulks independently and then shoots oneself and leaves a note.
• I did not wish to choose between being alive or dead. I simply wished to show Chloe that I could not, metaphorically be living without her. I would be deprived of the feeling to look at the living looking at the dead.
• Denying my ultimate wish to be both dead and alive. Dead to show the world how angry I was. And alive to see the effect I had on it and hence be released from my anger.
• It was not to be or not to be, my answer to hamlet was to be and not to be.
• I came to be a man who could not be surprised. Surprise is a reaction to the unexpected, but I had come to expect everything, and hence be surprised by nothing.
• I came to remember Chloe for her flaws, the same things that once were attraction.
• None of these bruised lovers could compete with Jesus’ untainted virtue besides those who he tried to love. It was that Jesus was a man who was kind, completely just, and still betrayed by his friends.
• My superiority was revealed primarily on the basis of my isolation and suffering. I suffer, therefore I am special. I am not understood but for precisely that reason I must be worthy of greater understanding.
• The place in the bathroom where Chloe had left her toothbrush had been an unbearable reminder that she had left. The difficulty in forgetting her was how much of the external world we had shared together and within which she was still untwined.
• The world did not reflect my soul, rather an independent entity that would spin on regardless of my mood. Whether I was happy or unhappy. In love or out of love.
• Then, inevitably, I began to forget. I found myself in her neighborhood and noticed that the thought of her had lost the agony it once held.
• Replayed over every thing she and I had shared. In order to reconquer them for the present.
• Time abbreviated itself like an accordion that has lived in extension but remembered only in contraction.
• Mature love resists idealization, free of jealousy and obsession, it is a form of friendship with a sexual dimension. It is pleasant peaceful and reciprocated. Immature love is a story of lurching between idealization and disappointment.
• Must being in love always mean being in pain?
• Lay the desire to disappoint oneself before someone else has the chance to do so. In calling for a monastic existence free of emotional turmoil, Stoicism was simply trying to deny the legitimacy of certain potentially painful yet fundamental human needs.
• However brave, the Stoic was the coward in perhaps the highest moment of reality, the moment of love.
• Such lessons appeared all the more relevant, more heightened, when Rachel accepted my invitation to dinner. And the very thought of her sent tremors through my heart. Tremors that I knew meant only one thing; that I had once more began to fall…

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