On Love by Alain de Botton
Author:Alain de Botton
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
Published: 2016-06-27T15:46:00+00:00
âIâ-CONFIRMATION
1. Late one Sunday in the middle of July, we were sitting in a café at the unkempt end of the Portobello Road. It had been a beautiful day, spent largely in Hyde Park, tanning and reading books. But since around five oâclock, I had been sliding into depression. I felt like going home to hide under the bedclothes. Sunday evenings had long saddened meâreminders of death, unfinished business, guilt and loss. We had been sitting in silence, Chloe reading the papers, I gazing through the window at the traffic and people outside. Suddenly she leaned over, gave me a kiss, and whispered, âYouâre wearing your lost-orphan-boy look again.â No one had ever ascribed such an expression to me before, though when Chloe mentioned it, it at once accorded with and alleviated the confused sadness I happened to be feeling at the time. I felt an intense (and perhaps disproportionate) love for her on account of that remark, because of her awareness of what I had been feeling but had been unable to formulate myself, her willingness to enter my world and objectify it for meâa gratefulness for reminding the orphan he is an orphan, and hence returning him home.
2. Perhaps it is true that we do not really exist until there is someone there to see us existing; that we cannot properly speak until there is someone there who can understand what we are saying; that, in essence, we are not wholly alive until we are loved.
3. What does it mean that man is a âsocial animalâ? Only that humans need one another in order to define themselves and achieve self-consciousness, in a way that mollusks or earthworms do not. We cannot come to a proper sense of ourselves if there arenât others around to show us what weâre like. âA man can acquire anything in solitude except a character,â wrote Stendhal, suggesting that character has its genesis in the reactions of others to our words and actions. Our selves are fluid and require the contours provided by our neighbors. To feel whole, we need people in the vicinity who know us as well as, and sometimes better than, we know ourselves.
4. Without love, we lose the ability to possess a proper identity; within love, there is a constant confirmation of our selves. It is no wonder that the concept of a God who can see us has been central to many religions: to be seen is to be assured that we exist, and all the better if one is dealing with a God (or partner) who loves us. Surrounded by people who precisely do not remember who we are, people to whom we often relate our stories and yet who will repeatedly forget how many times we have been married, how many children we have, and whether our name is Brad or Bill, Catrina or Catherine (as we forget much the same about them), is it not comforting to be able to find refuge from the dangers of invisibility in the arms of someone who has our identity firmly in mind?
5.
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