By Maria Popova (themarginalian.org)
It seems odd, wrong even, that “patience” and “passion” — the twin roots of love — should share a root in pāti, Latin for “to suffer.” But anyone who has lived, who has loved unskillfully or loved the unskilled, knows that the experience can be our sharpest instrument of suffering. We say we “fall” in love precisely because we know we can get bruised, know that the trap door it opens beneath our feet hurls us into depths we are entirely unprepared to fathom.
The interesting question, the transformative question, is what happens after the fall.
“It is a subject in which neither intuition nor the behaviour of others will help the philosopher to the truth,” Robert Louis Stevenson (November 13, 1850–December 3, 1894) writes in his long, passionate, searching essay on falling in love. “There is probably nothing rightly thought or rightly written on this matter of love that is not a piece of the person’s experience.” He is writing out of his own experience: Twenty-seven and struggling to make a name for himself as a writer, he had fallen painfully in love with the radical Fanny Obsourne — ten years his senior, still married to the philandering husband she left, attending art school in Paris with her daughter. They would eventually marry and magnify each other’s lives beyond all imagination. (“Without Fanny’s influence,” Camille Peri writes in her excellent biography of the two, “Louis might now be a forgotten man of letters instead of one of the greatest voices in Scottish literature.”)
Fanny and Robert Louis Stevenson
Love, Stevenson argues, is the only experience that truly astonishes us, jolt us awake from the slumber of preconception and expectation. And when it does, “it is not without something of the nature of dismay” that we look upon our new position — discomposed, disoriented, out of control. He writes:
Falling in love is the one illogical adventure, the one thing of which we are tempted to think as supernatural, in our trite and reasonable world.
That feeling, Stevenson reflects, infuses one’s sense of being with “a very supreme sense of pleasure in all parts of life — in lying down to sleep, in waking, in motion, in breathing, in continuing to be.” And yet at the center of something so concrete, so palpable, is a mystery:
Art from An Almanac of Birds: 100 Divinations for Uncertain Days. (Available as a print and as stationery cards.)
What makes love astonishing is precisely the way it blindsides us, the way it cannot be willed or achieved or won on merit. He writes:
And yet love is not a matter of persuasion. In a sense, the declaration of it becomes superfluous when the fact of it is self-evident and mutual. It is, Stevenson observes, something we must simply show up for, with passion and patience entwined. He outlines the discovery, the deepening, the development of love past “the simple accident of falling in love”:
Art from An Almanac of Birds: Divinations for Uncertain Days. (Available as a print and as stationery cards.)
To remain in love, Stevenson argues in another essay, two people “must bring kindness and goodwill” to life beyond the fall. He considers the single most important element of lasting love, which is also the greatest kindness we can give each other and the most durable gesture of goodwill:
A century later, Adrienne Rich would sharpen this sentiment in her timeless definition of love as “a process, delicate, violent, often terrifying to both persons involved, a process of refining the truths they can tell each other.”
Art from An Almanac of Birds: Divinations for Uncertain Days. (Available as a print and as stationery cards.)
Couple with Stevenson on what makes life worth living, then revisit Roxane Gay on loving vs. being in love, Kahlil Gibran on how to weather the uncertainties of love, and Hannah Arendt on how to live with its central fear of loss.
There is one fable that touches very near the quick of life, — the fable of the monk who passed into the woods, heard a bird break into song, hearkened for a trill or two, and found himself at his return a stranger at his convent gates; for he had been absent fifty years, and of all his comrades there survived but one to recognize him. It is not only in the woods that this enchanter carols, though perhaps he is native there. He sings in the most doleful places. The miser hears him and chuckles, and his days are moments. With no more apparatus than an evil-smelling lantern, I have evoked him on the naked links. All life that is not merely mechanical is spun out of two strands, — seeking for that bird and hearing him. And it is just this that makes life so hard to value, and the delight of each so incommunicable. And it is just a knowledge of this, and a remembrance of those fortunate hours in which the bird has sung to us, that fills us with such wonder when we turn to the pages of the realist. There, to be sure, we find a picture of life in so far as it consists of mud and of old iron, cheap desires and cheap fears, that which we are ashamed to remember and that which we are careless whether we forget; but of the note of that time-devouring nightingale we hear no news.