While reading Allain de Botton’s novels one gets to wondering about what ever happened to the need for readability. The repeated reflections as the story proceeds could be distracting. In his first novel (“Essays in Love” published in 1993) de Botton admits for instance that few things are as antithetical to sex as thought – he makes observations while he is engaged in bed …. The book under review is a sequel and, it appears, his proclivity to ruminate even as he emotes has not abated. But more of that later.
Around 60 years earlier, Jose Ortega y Gasset, Spanish philosopher, published “Studies on Love”, the central attempt of which was to remove the common misconceptions about “love” and to arrive at a proper understanding of the term. Ortega referred to the views on love expressed by Stendhal (On Love – 1822) and St. Thomas Aquinas, (Summa Contra Gentiles and Summa Theologiae). De Botton refers to the Marxist notion that desire can only thrive on the impossibility of mutuality; the troubadour poetry which was based on coital delay; and Montaigne, Anatole France, and Albert Camus.
Daphne du Maurier (The House on The Strand) would keep the mystery alive: “it is in the fate of every man, at some time or other, to glimpse a face in a crowd and not forget it,” as does Tennyson: ‘Tis better to have loved and lost …. And Pearl Buck would add divinity to the mystery: [Love] comes out of Heaven, unasked and unsought. However, Ortega and Morgan Scott-Peck (The Road Less Travelled – 1978) seem to agree on one aspect: ‘love’ is Nature’s way of ensuring the survival of the species. Which should probably kill all theories of romanticism.
Love is so universally found, felt, suffered that everybody has an opinion about it. Some like Allain de Botton try to dig deeper. These attempts at digging into quicksand though are worth examining. For after all, most of us like Shakespeare’s “lover, / Sighing like furnace” would cling to any plausible explanation behind this “magical torture”. But at the same time, one needs to heed Scott-Peck’s warning that in attempting to examine love we toy with mystery; examine the unexaminable to know the unknowable. Would this be another area where angels fear to tread? That is the paradox of love: No one understands what it is but everybody knows what it is!
Then comes the question of the staying-power of love. What is its sustenance? De Botton rightly points out in his Essays that most people tend to ask a couple about how they met – perhaps in a silent bid to re-create their own “first rendezvous filled with trembling and fumbling” so effectively brought out by Leon Uris in Armageddon. The question, asserts de Botton, never converts to “How is life since you met?” In other words, what is love after the honeymoon is over, after the falling in love has converted itself to day-to-day living in love: brought out in all its charm by Thomas Hardy in Far From The Madding Crowd. The Course of Love explores this facet of love.
There are two central characters, Rabih and Kirsten – their backgrounds as different as they could be: he has seen the horrors of Beirut, she has grown up in Inverness, Scotland, where the only violence associated was at the hands of Macbeth; he is an architect who has moved from bustling London to Edinburgh, she represents a client of the quiet suburbs. They fall in love, get married, have two children, he has a brief incident of infidelity – the guilt of which he carries alone. They go through therapy and then joke about the therapy. The marriage is saved, sustained.
In the previous novel de Botton had remarked that thinking during sex, for instance, is ludicrous. Thankfully, the asides in this novel are handled more deftly. And there is a distinct maturity in dealing with married life and its inevitable humdrum-ness. As an indication of what is to follow, he remarks quite early in the story that we know far too much about how love starts, and recklessly little about how it might continue. We don’t need to be constantly reasonable in order to have good relationships, he says half-way through the story; all we need to have mastered is the occasional capacity to acknowledge with good grace that we may, in one or two areas, be somewhat insane.
In a sort of Transactional Analysis mode, both Rabih and Kirsten will have learned towards the end, how to reassure the anxious child selves concealed within their adult partners. But they have in the process also unknowingly inherited a little of that dangerous, unfair, beautifully naïve trust which little children place in their parents. Rabih particularly ruminates over his own behaviour and concludes that we cannot be really happy blaming others for their inability to intuit our needs, or through fitful moves from one relationship to another. We need to reach a semblance of mature detachment, realising that the only release from our longing may be to stop demanding a perfect love and, instead, start to give love away with oblivious abandon without jealously calculating the chances of it ever returning. A level of maturity that few of us may achieve.
In this new Romantic order, he says further, spouses could justify a parting of ways over a deadening marital routine, children getting on their nerves, uninteresting sex or some unhappiness. Rabih and Kirsten feel proud therefore, that they have kept at it, repeatedly trying to understand each other’s lunacies, hammering out one peace accord after another. And on the slopes of a Scottish mountain, in the late-afternoon sun – and every now and then thereafter – Rabih feels that he might, with Kirsten by his side, be strong enough for whatever life demands of him.
The book comes at a unique time in history – when the institution of marriage and the family as a basic unit of society are threatened. Even Pope Francis has felt the need to write a letter to all his followers on the subject of love in the family. The letter (Amoris Laetitia) particularly deals with aspects of The Experiences and Challenges of Families, Love in Marriage and The Spirituality of Marriage and The Family.
Finally a question that affects all lovers: with all this awareness and wisdom, can one get wiser on the tortuous path of love?
[alert type=”e.g. warning, danger, success, info” title=””]We label as ‘sweet’ children’s open displays of hope, trust, spontaneity, wonder and simplicity – qualities which are under severe threat, but are deeply longed for in the ordinary run of grown-up lice. The sweetness of children reminds us of how much we have had to sacrifice on the path to maturity; the sweet is a vital part of ourselves – in exile.[/alert]
Review by
Stanley Coutinho
Retired Dy. Director-General,
Ministry of Defence.
Now Consultant in Management and Legal Matters.
