A burnt child loves the fire.
.
.
.
.
.
“Decay fascinates me more.”
“What of Art?” she asked.
“It is a malady.”
“Love?”
“An illusion.”
~The Picture of Dorian Gray,
Oscar Wilde
Today I took a quiz and one of the questions was, “If you could have one superpower, what would it be?” One of the choices was the ability to read minds. I considered choosing it, but....in retrospect, I wouldn’t want that ability.
The way I see it, if one has the ability to read minds, it would be impossible to love anyone.
The beauty of getting to know a person is that you only know what they tell you. All other aspects of their life and personality remain ideas exclusive to them.
The beauty of letting someone get to know you is that they only know what you tell them, what you want them to know. It’s brilliant, really. You can pick and choose what parts of your own humanity are exposed. Or, if necessary, fashion a slightly altered humanity from your own. Or maybe even create a totally new humanity if you have none yourself.
When the time comes for one to fall in love, that’s what we normally do. We create a person, usually not very different from ourselves, and yet often completely different, in the hopes that we might seem more....appealing to the object of our desire.
No matter how good a person is, there is always something, be it something from their past or just an aspect of their personality, that just makes one...hate them. And the genius of the human condition is our ignorance to anything that we are not told firsthand. Yet, at the same time, it’s our downfall.
We are ignorant to anything about a person that we might hate, unless they tell us themselves. And let’s be serious, if you want someone to like you, are you really gonna tell them anything they won’t like?
So really, we never fall in love with anyone at all. We fall in love with what we know about them. And if we knew everything about them...
So here comes the slightly embarrassing part: The aforementioned quiz was a, “Which Twilight character are you?” quiz. And it’s quite obvious to anyone who has read Twilight that option mentioning reading minds is referring to none other than Edward Cullen.
Now, for those of you who haven’t read Twilight, Edward Cullen is a vampire (duh) who happens to have the ability to hear other people’s thoughts, except that of Isabella Swan (AKA Bella). And, of course, he’s absolutely, irrevocably in love with her.
This illustrates my point exactly. Edward can hear everyone’s thoughts, including Rosalie, who was intended to be Edward’s mate, and yet he’s in love with Bella, whose thoughts he cannot hear. Which, in turn, means that he doesn’t know everything about her, as much as we all love to think so because, “OMG Edward is SO HAWT and he loves Bella SO MUCH OMG I wanna marry him!”
Right.
So I guess it comes down to this:
If Edward could hear Bella’s thoughts, would he still be as in love with her as we have read him to be?
I myself highly doubt it.
But that’s just me.
With regards to the little snippet from Oscar Wilde’s The PIcture of Dorian Gray, it’s only there to provide a thesis statement for this rant, if that’s what you wish to call it.
I’m not saying love is an illusion. Quite the contrary, I happen to be a firm believer in love. There’s a little lady out there that I’m very much in love with, who happens to be in love with me as well, as impossible as that may seem.
I’m simply saying that, unless you have special mind reading/thought hearing abilities like that of Edward Cullen, it’s impossible to fully and completely know a person, and, in turn, be in love with them. And if one could completely know a person in such a way, they probably would be impossible to love anyway.
In conclusion, it’s impossible to love someone; one can only love what they know about that someone.
Do I realize that some people will completely disagree with me? Of course I do.
Am I really insinuating that there’s a possibility that I wouldn’t love Katie if I knew everything about her? Sadly, yes, there’s always that possibility.
But to be fair, if she knew everything about me, she probably wouldn’t love me either.
XoxO
Maggie
.
.
.
.
“Decay fascinates me more.”
“What of Art?” she asked.
“It is a malady.”
“Love?”
“An illusion.”
~The Picture of Dorian Gray,
Oscar Wilde
Today I took a quiz and one of the questions was, “If you could have one superpower, what would it be?” One of the choices was the ability to read minds. I considered choosing it, but....in retrospect, I wouldn’t want that ability.
The way I see it, if one has the ability to read minds, it would be impossible to love anyone.
The beauty of getting to know a person is that you only know what they tell you. All other aspects of their life and personality remain ideas exclusive to them.
The beauty of letting someone get to know you is that they only know what you tell them, what you want them to know. It’s brilliant, really. You can pick and choose what parts of your own humanity are exposed. Or, if necessary, fashion a slightly altered humanity from your own. Or maybe even create a totally new humanity if you have none yourself.
When the time comes for one to fall in love, that’s what we normally do. We create a person, usually not very different from ourselves, and yet often completely different, in the hopes that we might seem more....appealing to the object of our desire.
No matter how good a person is, there is always something, be it something from their past or just an aspect of their personality, that just makes one...hate them. And the genius of the human condition is our ignorance to anything that we are not told firsthand. Yet, at the same time, it’s our downfall.
We are ignorant to anything about a person that we might hate, unless they tell us themselves. And let’s be serious, if you want someone to like you, are you really gonna tell them anything they won’t like?
So really, we never fall in love with anyone at all. We fall in love with what we know about them. And if we knew everything about them...
So here comes the slightly embarrassing part: The aforementioned quiz was a, “Which Twilight character are you?” quiz. And it’s quite obvious to anyone who has read Twilight that option mentioning reading minds is referring to none other than Edward Cullen.
Now, for those of you who haven’t read Twilight, Edward Cullen is a vampire (duh) who happens to have the ability to hear other people’s thoughts, except that of Isabella Swan (AKA Bella). And, of course, he’s absolutely, irrevocably in love with her.
This illustrates my point exactly. Edward can hear everyone’s thoughts, including Rosalie, who was intended to be Edward’s mate, and yet he’s in love with Bella, whose thoughts he cannot hear. Which, in turn, means that he doesn’t know everything about her, as much as we all love to think so because, “OMG Edward is SO HAWT and he loves Bella SO MUCH OMG I wanna marry him!”
Right.
So I guess it comes down to this:
If Edward could hear Bella’s thoughts, would he still be as in love with her as we have read him to be?
I myself highly doubt it.
But that’s just me.
With regards to the little snippet from Oscar Wilde’s The PIcture of Dorian Gray, it’s only there to provide a thesis statement for this rant, if that’s what you wish to call it.
I’m not saying love is an illusion. Quite the contrary, I happen to be a firm believer in love. There’s a little lady out there that I’m very much in love with, who happens to be in love with me as well, as impossible as that may seem.
I’m simply saying that, unless you have special mind reading/thought hearing abilities like that of Edward Cullen, it’s impossible to fully and completely know a person, and, in turn, be in love with them. And if one could completely know a person in such a way, they probably would be impossible to love anyway.
In conclusion, it’s impossible to love someone; one can only love what they know about that someone.
Do I realize that some people will completely disagree with me? Of course I do.
Am I really insinuating that there’s a possibility that I wouldn’t love Katie if I knew everything about her? Sadly, yes, there’s always that possibility.
But to be fair, if she knew everything about me, she probably wouldn’t love me either.
XoxO
Maggie