Essays In Love

by Alain De Botton

  8. Then the luggage arrived, hers only a few cases behind mine, we loaded it onto the trolleys and walked out through the green channel.

  9. What is so frightening is the extent to which we may idealize others when we have such trouble tolerating ourselves – because we have such trouble . . . I must have realized that Chloe was only human, with all the implications carried by the word, but could I not be forgiven for my desire to suspend such a thought? Every fall into love involves the triumph of hope over self-knowledge. We fall in love hoping we won’t find in another what we know is in ourselves, all the cowardice, weakness, laziness, dishonesty, compromise, and stupidity. We throw a cordon of love around the chosen one and decide that everything within it will somehow be free of our faults. We locate inside another a perfection that eludes us within ourselves, and through our union with the beloved, hope to maintain (against the evidence of all self-knowledge) a precarious faith in our species.

  10. Why did this awareness not prevent my fall into love? Because the illogicality and childishness of my desire did not outweigh my need to believe. I knew the void that romantic intoxication could fill, I knew the exhilaration that comes from identifying someone, anyone, as admirable. Long before I had even laid eyes on Chloe, I must have needed to find in the face of another an integrity I had never caught sight of within myself.

  11. ‘May I check your bags sir?’ asked the customs man. ‘Do you have anything to declare, any alcohol, cigarettes, firearms . . . ?’

  Like Oscar Wilde with his genius, I wanted to say, ‘Only my love,’ but my love was not a crime, not yet at least.

  ‘Shall I wait with you?’ asked Chloe.

  ‘Are you together with madam?’ enquired the customs officer.

  Afraid of presumption, I answered no, but asked Chloe if she’d wait for me on the other side of the border.

  12. Love reinvents our needs with unique speed. My impatience with the customs ritual indicated that Chloe, who I had not known existed a few hours ago, had already acquired the status of a craving. I felt I would die if I missed her outside – die for the sake of someone who had only entered my life at eleven thirty that morning.

  13. Chloe had waited, but we could spend only a moment together. She had parked her car nearby. I had to take a taxi to my office. Both parties hesitated whether or not to continue with the story.

  ‘I’ll give you a call some time,’ I said casually, ‘we could go and buy some luggage together.’

  ‘That’s a good idea,’ said Chloe, ‘have you got my number?’

  ‘I’m afraid I already memorized it, it was written on your baggage tag.’

  ‘You’d make a good detective, I hope your memory is up to it. Well, it was nice meeting you,’ said Chloe extending a hand.

  ‘Good luck with the cacti,’ I called after her as I watched her head for the lifts, her trolley still veering insanely to the right.

  14. In the taxi on the way into town, I felt a curious sense of loss. Could this really be love? To speak of love after we had barely spent a morning together was to encounter charges of romantic delusion and semantic folly. Yet we can perhaps only ever fall in love without knowing quite who we have fallen in love with. The initial convulsion is necessarily founded on ignorance. Love or simple obsession? Who, if not time (which lies in its own way), could possibly begin to tell?

  3

  The Subtext of Seduction

  1. For those in love with certainty, seduction is no territory in which to stray. Every smile and word lead to a dozen if not twelve thousand possibilities. Remarks that in normal life (that is, life without love) can be taken at face value now exhaust dictionaries with their possible meanings. And for the seducer, the doubts reduce themselves to a central question, faced with the trepidation of a criminal awaiting sentence: Does s/he, or does s/he not, desire me?

  2. The thought of Chloe did not stop haunting me in the days that followed our encounter. Though under pressure to complete plans for an office building near King’s Cross, my mind drifted irresponsibly but irresistibly back to her. I felt the need to circle around the object of my adoration, she kept breaking into consciousness with the urgency of a matter that had to be addressed, though my thoughts had no point to them, they were (objectively speaking) utterly devoid of interest. Some of these Chloe-dreams ran like this, ‘Oh, how sweet she is, how nice it would be to . . .’

  Others were more visual:

  (i) Chloe framed by the aircraft window

  (ii) Her watery green eyes

  (iii) Her teeth biting briefly into her lower lip

  (iv) The tilt of her neck when yawning

  (v) The gap between her two front teeth

  3. If only I had summoned such diligence for her phone number, for the digits had altogether evaporated from my memory (a memory that felt its time better spent replaying images of Chloe’s lower lip). Was it (071)

  607 9187

  609 7187

  601 7987

  690 7187

  610 7987

  670 9817

  687 7187 ?

  4. The search began badly. 607 9187 was not the beloved’s abode but a funeral parlour off Upper Street, though the establishment didn’t reveal itself to be one until the end of a trying conversation, in the course of which I learnt that After Life also had an employee called Chloe, who was summoned to the phone and spent agonizing minutes trying to place my name (eventually identifying me as a customer who had made inquiries into urns) before the confusion of names was cleared up and I hung up, red-faced, drenched with sweat, nearer death than life.

  5. When I finally reached my Chloe at work the following day, she too seemed to have relegated me to the next world. ‘Things are crazy around here now. Can you hold for a minute?’ she asked secretarially.

  I held, offended. Whatever intimacy I had imagined, back in office space, we were strangers.

  ‘Listen, I’m sorry,’ she said, coming back on the line, ‘I can’t talk now, we’re rushing to get a supplement off to press tomorrow. Can I call you back? I’ll try to reach you either at home or in the office when things calm down.’

  6. The telephone becomes an instrument of torture in the demonic hands of a beloved who doesn’t ring. When Chloe called a few days later, I had rehearsed my speech too often to deliver it correctly. I was caught unprepared, hanging socks on a rail. I ran to the bedroom to pick up. My voice carried with it a tension and an anger that I might more skilfully have erased from a page. Authorship becomes tempting to those who can’t speak.

  ‘What a surprise to hear from you,’ I said unconvincingly. ‘We must have lunch some time.’

  ‘Lunch. Goodness. I really can’t this week.’

  ‘Well, how about dinner?’

  ‘I’m just looking at my diary, and you’re not going to believe this, but that’s looking difficult too.’

  ‘No problem,’ I said, in a tone that strongly implied its opposite.

  ‘I tell you what, though, can you take this afternoon off by any chance? We could meet at my office and go to the National Gallery or something.’

  7. The questions did not let up. What did Chloe think as we made our way to Trafalgar Square from her office in Bedford Street? On the one hand, she had been happy to take the afternoon off to tour a museum with a man she’d only briefly met on an aeroplane over a week before. But on the other hand, there was nothing in her behaviour to suggest that this was anything but an opportunity for a friendly discussion. Suspended between innocence and collusion, Chloe’s every gesture became imbued with maddening significance. Was I correct to detect traces of flirtation at the ends of her sentences and the corners of her smiles, or was this merely my own desire projected onto the face of innocence?

  8. We began our visit with the early Italians, though my thoughts (I had lost all perspective, they had yet to find theirs) were not with them. Before The Virgin and Child with Saints, Chloe turned to remark that she had always had a thing about Signorelli and, because it seemed appr
opriate, I invented a passion for Antonello’s Christ Crucified. She looked thoughtful, immersed in the canvases, oblivious to the noise and activity in the gallery. I followed a few paces behind her, trying to focus on the paintings, but able only to look at her looking.

  In the second and more crowded Italian room (1500–1600), we stood so close together that my hand suddenly touched hers. She didn’t draw away and for a moment the feel of her skin tingled through me. We faced a painting by Bronzino, An Allegory of Venus and Cupid. Cupid kisses his mother Venus, who surreptitiously removes one of his arrows: beauty blinding love.

  9. Then, brusquely, as though an error had promptly come to light, the hand moved away.

  ‘I love those little figures in the background, the little nymphs and angry gods and stuff,’ said Chloe. ‘Do you understand all the symbolism?’

  ‘Not really, besides it being Venus and Cupid.’

  ‘I didn’t even know that, so you’re one up on me. I wish I’d read more about ancient mythology,’ she continued. ‘But actually, I like looking at things and not knowing quite what they mean.’

  She turned to face the painting, her hand once more brushing against mine.

  10. Was the hand a symbol (subtler than Bronzino’s and less well documented) of desire or the innocent, unconscious spasm of a tired arm muscle? What was I to make of the way Chloe straightened her skirt as we crossed into Early Northern Painting or coughed by van Eyck’s The Marriage of Giovanni Arnolfini or handed me the catalogue in order to rest her head on her hand?

  Desire had turned me into a relentless hunter for clues, a romantic paranoiac, reading meaning into everything. But whatever my impatience with the rituals of seduction, I was aware that the enigma lent Chloe a distinctive appeal. The most attractive are not those who allow us to kiss them at once (we soon feel ungrateful) or those who never allow us to kiss them (we soon forget them), but those who know how carefully to administer varied doses of hope and despair.

  11. Venus felt like a drink, so she and Cupid headed for the lifts. In the cafeteria, Chloe took a tray and pushed it down the steel runway.

  ‘Do you want tea?’ she asked.

  ‘Yeah, but I’ll get it.’

  ‘Don’t be silly, I’ll get it.’

  ‘Please let me do it.’

  ‘No, no, I will.’

  The game continued for a few more rounds, its vigour apparently accounted for by a mutual, irrational anxiety about the commitment involved in letting someone else pay for a drink. We sat at a table with a view of Trafalgar Square, the lights of the Christmas tree lending an eerily festive atmosphere to the urban scene. We began talking of art, then moved on to artists, and from artists, we went to get a second cup of tea (she won) and a cake (2–1), then we digressed on to beauty, and from beauty we went to love.

  ‘I don’t understand,’ said Chloe, ‘you do or you don’t think that there’s such a thing as true love?’

  ‘I’m saying it’s very subjective. You can’t suppose that there’s one quality called “love”, people mean such different things by the word. It’s tricky to distinguish between passion and love, infatuation and love—’

  ‘Don’t you find this cake disgusting?’ interrupted Chloe.

  ‘We should never have bought it. I mean, you shouldn’t have bought it for me. God, I’m so rude.’

  ‘I’ll be expecting a written apology.’

  ‘But seriously, if you asked most people whether they believed in love or not, they’d probably say they didn’t. Yet that’s not necessarily what they truly think. It’s just the way they defend themselves against what they want. They believe in it, but pretend they don’t until they’re allowed to. Most people would throw away all their cynicism if they could. The majority just never get the chance.’

  12. Who were these ‘most people’ she talked of? Was I the man who would dispel her cynicism? We talked abstractly of love, ignoring that lying on the table was not the nature of love per se but the burning question of who we were and would be to one another.

  Or was there in fact nothing on the table other than a half-eaten carrot cake and two cups of tea? Was Chloe being as abstract as she wished, meaning precisely what she said, the diametrical opposite of the first rule of flirtation, where what is said is never what is meant?

  13. Our hesitancy was a game, but a serious and useful one, which minimized offending an unwilling partner and eased a willing one more slowly into the prospect of mutual desire. The threat of the great ‘I like you’ could be softened by adding, ‘but not so much that I will let you know it directly . . .’ Chloe and I were politely sparing each other the need to pay the full price for a candid declaration of love.

  14. We helped to define what we wanted by reference to others. Chloe had a friend at work who had a history of relationships with unsuitable types. A courier was the current blunderer.

  ‘I mean, why does she hang out with a burly bloke in leather trousers who smells of exhaust fumes and is using her for sex? And that’s fine if she wanted to use him for sex too, but apparently he can’t even sustain an erection for that long.’

  ‘How terrible,’ I answered, worried by the possible definition of the word ‘long’.

  ‘Or just sad. One has to go into relationships with equal expectations, ready to give as much as the other – not with one person wanting a fling and the other real love. I think that’s where all the agony comes from.’

  15. Because it was past six and her office was closing, I asked Chloe whether she might not after all be free to have dinner with me that night. She smiled at the suggestion, stared briefly out of the window at a bus heading past St Martin-in-the-Fields, looked back and said, ‘No, thanks, that would really be impossible.’

  Then, just as I was ready to despair, she blushed.

  16. Faced with ambiguous signals, what better explanation than shyness: the beloved desires, but is too shy to say so. The seducer who wishes to call his victim shy will never be disappointed.

  ‘My God, I’ve just forgotten something terrible,’ said Chloe, offering an alternative explanation for a red face, ‘I was supposed to call the printer this afternoon. I can’t believe I forgot to do that. I’m losing my head.’

  The lover offered sympathy.

  ‘But look, about dinner, we’ll have to do it another time. I’d love that, I really would. It’s just difficult at the moment, but I’ll give my diary another look and call you tomorrow, I promise I will, and maybe we can fix something up for before this weekend.’

  4

  Authenticity

  1. It is one of the ironies of love that it is easiest confidently to seduce those to whom we are least attracted. My feelings for Chloe meant I lost any belief in my own worthiness. Who could I be next to her? Was it not the greatest honour for her to have agreed to this dinner, to have dressed so elegantly (‘Is this all right?’ she’d asked in the car on the way to the restaurant, ‘It had better be, because I’m not changing a sixth time’), let alone that she might be willing to respond kindly to some of the things that might fall (if ever I recovered my tongue) from my unworthy lips?

  2. It was Friday night and Chloe and I were seated at a corner table of Les Liaisons Dangereuses, a French restaurant that had recently opened at the end of the Fulham Road. There could have been no more appropriate setting for Chloe’s beauty. The chandeliers threw soft shadows across her face, the light green walls matched her light green eyes. And yet, as though struck dumb by the angel that faced me across the table, I lost all capacity either to think or speak and could only silently draw invisible patterns on the starched white tablecloth and take unnecessary sips of bubbled water from a large glass goblet.

  3. My sense of inferiority bred a need to take on a personality that was not my own, a seducing self that would respond to every demand and suggestion made by my exalted companion. Love forced me to look at myself as though through Chloe’s imagined eyes. ‘Who could I become to please her?’ I wondered. I did not tell flagrant
lies, I simply attempted to anticipate everything I believed she might want to hear.

  ‘Would you like some wine?’ I asked her.

  ‘I don’t know, would you like wine?’ she asked back.

  ‘I really don’t mind, if you feel like it,’ I replied.

  ‘It’s as you please, whatever you want,’ she continued.

  ‘Either way is fine with me.’

  ‘I agree.’

  ‘So should we have it or not?’

  ‘Well, I don’t think I’ll have any,’ ventured Chloe.

  ‘You’re right, I don’t feel like any either,’ I concurred.

  ‘Let’s not have wine, then,’ she concluded.

  ‘Great, so we’ll just stick with the water.’

  4. The first course arrived, arranged on plates with the symmetry of a formal French garden.

  ‘It looks too beautiful to touch,’ said Chloe (how I knew the feeling), ‘I’ve never eaten grilled scallops like this before.’

  We began to eat. The only sound was that of cutlery against china. There seemed to be nothing to say. Chloe had been my only thought for too long, but the one thought that at this moment I could not share with her.

  Silence was damning. A silence with an unattractive person implies they are the boring one. A silence with an attractive one immediately renders it certain you are the tedious party.

  5. Silence and clumsiness could of course be taken as rather pitiful proof of desire. It being easy enough to seduce someone towards whom one feels indifferent, the clumsiest seducers could generously be deemed the most genuine. Not to find the right words is paradoxically often the best proof that the right words are meant. In that other Liaisons Dangereuses, the Marquise de Merteuil faults the Vicomte de Valmont for writing love letters that are too perfect, too logical to be the words of a true lover, whose thoughts will be disjointed and for whom the fine phrase will always elude. Real desire lacks articulacy – but how willingly I would at that moment have swapped my constipation for the Vicomte’s loquacity.