Essays In Love by Alain de Botton

Author:Alain de Botton [Botton, Alain de]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780330508155
Publisher: Picador

‘What are all the wiggly bits?’ I asked.

‘Oh, that’s because I feel wiggly around you.’

‘What?’

‘Well, you know, you give me space. I feel more complicated than in the office. You’re interested in me and you understand me better, so that’s why I made it wiggly, so that it’s sort of natural.’

‘OK, I see, so what’s this straight side?’

‘Where?’

‘Up in the north-west of the amoeba.’

‘You know I never did much geography. But yeah, I think I see it. Well, you don’t understand everything about me, do you? So I thought I’d better make it more realistic. The straight line is all the sides of me you don’t understand or don’t have time for and stuff.’

‘Oh.’

‘Christ, don’t make that long face, you wouldn’t want to know what could happen if that line went squiggly! And don’t worry, if it was that serious, I wouldn’t be squidged here with you being such a happy amoeba.’

15. What did Chloe mean by her amoebic straight line? Just that I could not wholly understand her, an unsurprising but still sobering reminder of the limits of empathy. What was frustrating my efforts? Perhaps that I was constrained to fathoming her through my existing conceptions of human nature. My knowledge of her was necessarily filtered through my own past. Like a European who orients himself in a Rocky Mountain landscape by saying, ‘This looks just like Switzerland,’ I might only have grasped the source of one of Chloe’s depressed moods by thinking, ‘It’s because she’s feeling x . . . like my sister when . . .’ To comprehend her, I had to rely on an understanding of human nature that had been shaped by my biology, class, and psychological biography.

16. To illustrate how we can only ever pick up on certain elements in our beloveds’ characters, we might compare the way we look at them to a barbecue skewer. For instance, I was able to skewer (or appreciate or relate) to Chloe’s:

— irony — colour of eyes — gap between two front teeth — intellect — talent for baking bread — relationship with her mother — social anxiety — love of Beethoven — hatred of laziness — taste for camomile tea — objection to snobbery — love of woollen clothes — claustrophobia — desire for honesty →

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