If All the Seas Were Ink by Ilana Kurshan

Author:Ilana Kurshan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Press

KIDUSHIN

Toward a Theory of Romantic Love

Whereas Gittin is about how to get rid of a wife, Kidushin is about how to acquire one. A man acquires a woman, and never the other way around, as the Talmud tells us, “because it is the nature of a man to pursue a woman, and not the nature of a woman to pursue a man” (2b). The Talmud illustrates this principle by means of a parable. “It is like a man who has lost something. Who looks for whom? The owner looks for his lost item.” That is, Adam lost his rib when God removed it to create woman; thus every Adam spends his life looking for his missing Eve. We women are like the wedges in Shel Silverstein’s children’s book The Missing Piece, waiting for the right circle to roll by and trying not to let our edges soften too much in the interim.

As a teenager, though, I resolved that I would not spend my life waiting around. I grew up quoting Anne of Green Gables (“Oh Gil, I don’t want diamond sunbursts and marble halls. I just want you!”) and Catherine Earnshaw (“My love for Heathcliff resembles the eternal rocks beneath—a source of little visible delight, but necessary”). Somewhat embarrassingly, my earliest ideas about romance were forged in the fiery furnace of Colleen McCullough’s The Thorn Birds; I can still picture the bright orange cover of the mass-market paperback I placed within the open math textbook on my lap, my knees tilted up toward my chest so I could sneak a few pages of reading during class. One junior high school summer, a few weeks after I had finished the novel, my mother and I stayed up past midnight watching the eight-hour TV miniseries adaptation. I was enchanted by the grand panoramic views of the Australian outback, the soft silk Ashes of Roses gown against Meggie’s flaming red hair, and the sublime melancholy of the music that would run through my head all summer long. That was the summer of my first boyfriend, and though I did not take the book with me to camp, I had already memorized the first paragraph:

There is a legend about a bird which sings just once in its life, more sweetly than any other creature on the face of the earth. From the moment it leaves the nest it searches for a thorn tree, and does not rest until it has found one. Then, singing among the savage branches, it impales itself upon the longest, sharpest spine. And, dying, it rises above its own agony to out-carol the lark and the nightingale. One superlative song, existence the price. But the whole world stills to listen, and God in His heaven smiles. For the best is only bought at the price of great pain … or so says the legend.1

This passage was my credo of romantic love, a statement of everything I believed about the human heart. I was determined that I would love just once, but that it would be a grand and majestic love that would demand every fiber of my being.

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