Love and Lies by Clancy Martin

Author:Clancy Martin
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781429945943
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

FIRST LIARS

In first love the first lover does not expect the truth from his beloved; he wants to disclose himself to her, but he does not expect her to disclose herself to him. Woldemar sees what an incorrigible liar Zinaida is; Werther does not want Lotte to tell the truth; indeed, he fears that she may do so.

This is not to say that if the first lover were lied to, and the lie had been exposed, he would not feel betrayed. Expecting the truth and expecting not to be lied to are two very different things. It’s hard to determine how Woldemar feels when he realizes that Zinaida has loved his father all along. He does not appear to be angry with her. He pities her; after all, he knows how she feels.

The first lover hopes, but probably does not expect to get, what he wants; he knows it’s out of reach, and that may well be part of the appeal. This is also precisely why Joyce’s lover in “Araby” is so angry. He realizes that he’s been lying to himself. “Love itself is a lie!” he seems to conclude, in the brokenhearted state of first love defeated. But that of course is the self-consoling lie that first love tells itself in its attempt to recover from its self-deception.

I know many people—including my present wife, in the early days of our romance—who, because of the feeling of self-betrayal suffered by the first lover, insist for a long time that romantic love is a kind of collective fiction we’ve all invented. On this line the open secret is that there is no such thing, really, as love. It’s sexual desire plus a lie.

They, the first lovers who have been hurt and become skeptics, are right in their way. Erotic love is a kind of tailoring of invisible clothes for the emperor. We will experience only so much as we are willing to believe in what is not “really” there. But love for a child, love for a parent, love for a book—the same is true for all our values if we look at them more closely—none of that is “really” there. We think we live in a world of facts, but all our decisions are based on our values. We can’t grab hold of values any more or any less than we can grab hold of love. “Subjectivity is meaning”: what matters to us is what we ourselves project out into a world that, absent of us, is a collection of indifferent facts.

Perhaps love informs us about truth better than truth informs us about love. Maybe we’ve been getting a lot of things backward. Or as Nietzsche thought, we get things right in the way that we actually practice them—we actually do embrace deception, fantasy, imagination, creativity, illusion, falsehood when we practice the activity of loving—but we get things wrong once we start thinking about them, about arranging in our heads how we value them because we are trained from a very early age to suppose that “the truth” is something objective and independent of us.

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