Essays in Love
Title: Essays in Love / a novel
Author: Alain de Botton
Summary: A man meets a woman on the plane and falls in love with her. Along this falling into love, the author makes a commentary on love and speaks from our hearts, articulating the subtleties and minutiae of love truthfully and beautifully.
3.14 We fall into love hoping that we will not find in the other what we know is in ourselves - all the cowardice, weakness, laziness, dishonesty, compromise and brute stupidity. We throw a cordon of love around the chosen one, and decide that everything that lies within it will somehow be free of our faults and hence lovable. We locate inside another a perfection that eludes us within ourselves, and through union with the beloved, hope somehow to maintain (against evidence of all self-knowledge) a precarious faith in the species.
6.23 To be loved by someone is to realize how much they share in the same dependent needs the resolution of which had attracted us to them in the first place. We would not love if there were no lack within us, but paradoxically, we are offended by a similar lack in the other. Expecting to find the answer, we find only the duplicate of our own problem. We realize how much they too need to find an idol, we see that the beloved does not escape our sense of helplessness, and are hence forced to give up on the childish passivity of hiding behind Godlike admiration and worship, in order to take on the responsibility of both carrying and being carried.
I'm only halfway through and already I think it's brilliant. It speaks of what has always been inside my mind, but had no idea it was there.
Author: Alain de Botton
Summary: A man meets a woman on the plane and falls in love with her. Along this falling into love, the author makes a commentary on love and speaks from our hearts, articulating the subtleties and minutiae of love truthfully and beautifully.
3.14 We fall into love hoping that we will not find in the other what we know is in ourselves - all the cowardice, weakness, laziness, dishonesty, compromise and brute stupidity. We throw a cordon of love around the chosen one, and decide that everything that lies within it will somehow be free of our faults and hence lovable. We locate inside another a perfection that eludes us within ourselves, and through union with the beloved, hope somehow to maintain (against evidence of all self-knowledge) a precarious faith in the species.
6.23 To be loved by someone is to realize how much they share in the same dependent needs the resolution of which had attracted us to them in the first place. We would not love if there were no lack within us, but paradoxically, we are offended by a similar lack in the other. Expecting to find the answer, we find only the duplicate of our own problem. We realize how much they too need to find an idol, we see that the beloved does not escape our sense of helplessness, and are hence forced to give up on the childish passivity of hiding behind Godlike admiration and worship, in order to take on the responsibility of both carrying and being carried.
I'm only halfway through and already I think it's brilliant. It speaks of what has always been inside my mind, but had no idea it was there.