Eros is Everywhere

Romance was among the most frequent themes recorded in a recent statistical analysis of those collected in my commonplace book. From a much larger number, I have selected the following to post on this auspicious day.

Eros is everywhere. It is what binds. John Updike

Love feels more and more like the only subject. Salman Rushdie

Talking about love is like dancing about architecture. From Playing By Heart (film)

There was always an inbalance in love—the one who loved and the one who was loved. Most of her life she had denied it, desiring above all a total equality in love. But nothing in her real experience proved her theory—her wish—correct. Frederick Tuten, The Green Hour.

In the ten years since the car crash took her from him, he had cherished her more than while she was alive. Julius sometimes heaved with despair when he thought of how his lush contentment with Miriam, the true idyllic soaring moments of life, had come and gone with his fully grasping them….He knew also that no other woman would ever really matter to him. Irving Yalom, The Schopenhauer Cure.

She loved him unconditionally, and there is nothing more sustaining than that. Eliot Perlman, Seven Types of Ambiguity

Love never dies, he said. James Salter, Last Night (A short story)

Love…like food or air, is necessary but insufficient; it can’t do for us what we must do for ourselves. Certainly, it can no longer act as an organizing principle. Romantic love now seems a yearning to dive down into feeling and come up magically changed, when what is required for the making of a self is the deliberate pursuit of consciousness. Vivian Gornick The End of the Novel of Love

Everything else passes away; that which you love remains. She had to believe this, even if she wasn’t sure it was true. Brian Morton Starting Out in the Evening

I have sought love, first, because it brings ecstasy, ecstasy so great that I would often have sacrificed all the rest of my life for a few hours of this joy. I have sought it next, because it relieves loneliness, the terrible loneliness in which one shivering consciousness looks over the rim of the world into the cold unfathomable lifeless abyss… Bertrand Russell What I Have Lived For

…he found her again, like something he never knew was missing, like a song he had memorized in his youth and had then forgotten. Suddenly, clearly, he could see her, the way he had been able to see her at twenty, not her physical self at twenty, because in every sense she was more beautiful to him now, but he felt that old sensation, the leaving in his heart, the reckless flush of desire…Without these particular circumstances, this specific and horrible place, he might never have realized that the only true love of his life was his wife. Ann Patchett Bell Canto

Our culture, Prose asserts, has too narrowly defined the parameters of what we call love and drastically foreshortened the continuum along which each individual passionate affair or painfully repressed romance…is located… Christina Nehring Eros Unseated, The American Scholar, #71, 2002

Falling in love is the nearest most of us come to glimpsing utopia in our lifetimes. Rebecca Mead on Laura Kipnis’s, Against Love, The New Yorker, August 11, 2003

Loving is so much truer when sympathy and not desire makes the match; for it leaves no wounds. Lawrence Durrell Justine

Is it possible for a person to love without wanting love back? Is anything so pure? Or is love, by its nature, a reciprocity, like oceans and clouds, an evaporating of seawater and a replenishing by rain. Alan Lightman Reunion

It was typical of his life with Elise, when he’d had a life with Elise, that he would like her one minute and dislike her the next, that he would find her heartbreaking and lovable and then turn around moments later and find her repellent. Frederick Barthelme Two Against One

…and he looked at her for the last and final time with yes more luminous, more grief-stricken, more grateful than she had ever seen them in a half century of shared life, and he managed to say to her with his last breath: “Only God knows how much I loved you.” Gabriel Garcia Marquez Pentecost Sunday (A short story)

May-December Romance

Lost in Translation is far and away my favorite May-December romance written for the screen. None of the countless others come close. There is no lust in Lost in Translation. There is none of the awkwardness that usually characterizes most depictions of a couple like this. She is young, about twenty; he is almost three decades older in his fifties. In spite of this difference, they find themselves at loose ends and similar mind at the swanking Park Hyatt in Tokyo. They never talk about their age difference, although early on she says he must be going through a “mid-life crisis.” I thought it was the only false moment in the film.

The fact that these two people, at opposite ends of their lives are drawn to one another is the heart of the film. They banter, they jest, or simply gaze at one another. There is never any hint that he can’t keep up with her or that he is uncomfortable playing around with her friends. He is as young as they are. Sofia Coppola, the film’s author and director, put it this way: “But I think that, you know, that early 20s kind of 'what am I going to do with my life?' crisis I felt was similar to the guy having a mid-life crisis. I just related to his character and allowed them to both be kind of going through similar things, but from other ends of the spectrum.”

Yet I didn’t think it was necessarily a younger woman older man crisis. It is a crisis that any two individuals can have at any time in their lives. The connection between Bob and Charlotte is startling. I kept wondering what could they ever do? What kind of a relationship could they possible have? I wanted them to have a future. And yet I knew that was impossible. At the end Bob says he doesn’t want to leave. Charlotte replies, well don’t. We’ll start a jazz band. Age is so irrelevant. And yet it colors everything. She is newly married and unhappily so. He has been married 25 years and finds it is growing tedious. The emotional torpor of their separate lives is the springboard of their relationship.

I often find myself puzzled why the characters depicted in contemporary films act the way they do. They may be indecisive or ambivalent or violent or they may feel strongly about another person. But it isn’t clear why. And so they are less compelling than they might be. None of this is the case for Lost in Translation. I knew why Charlotte and Bob were there, why they were at loose ends. I understood them and thought about them for days. One night they entered my dreams.

Charlotte is luminous, totally unadorned. There is nothing racy or pretentious about her. She is quiet, inquisitive, reflective. He learns she was a philosophy major at Yale and so there is a reason for her doubts and curiosity. There is also a sweetness about her, a sweet and melancholy wistfulness. She is thoroughly irresistible. She speaks softly. She is quiet. While she doesn’t say much, when she does, it is smart, clear, and to the point. She seems years older than her age. The rhythm and tone of her words is lovely.

Bob is detached, bemused, and full of hilarious wit and innocuous nonsense. She approaches him in the bar and asks him what he’s up to. He says he is planning a prison break and asks if she is in or out. When she tells him she studied philosophy, he tells her there must be a “good buck in that racket.”

What is it that he sees in her? Is it her youth? The good times they have together? The escape from his sleeplessness and boredom? Or a trifling fling far away from home? The depth of their apparent feeling argues against those possibilities. Yet, I wonder if they would have been drawn to one another had they not been geographically removed from their spouses.

The ending is wrenching. They depart from the Park Hyatt rather clumsily. On the drive to the airport Bob sees Charlotte walking down a crowded street. He tells the driver to stop and races after her. They embrace and with tears in her eyes and maybe his too, they finally kiss for a heartbreaking moment. He whispers something to her. And then, as they must, they go their separate ways.