Essays In Love

by Alain De Botton

  12. The restaurant could not have been more romantic. All around us in the Lao Tzu, couples much like ourselves (though our subjective sense of uniqueness did not allow us to think so) were holding hands, drinking wine, and fumbling with chopsticks (a neighbour’s cashew nut came at one point to rest on Chloe’s lap).

  ‘God, I feel better, I must have been starving. I’ve been so depressed all day,’ said Chloe.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because I have this thing about birthdays, they always remind me of death and forced jollity. But actually, I think this one’s turning out to be not so bad in the end. In fact, it’s pretty all right, thanks to a little help from my friend.’

  She looked up at me and smiled.

  ‘You know where I was this time last year?’ she asked.

  ‘No, where?’

  ‘Being taken out for dinner by my horrible aunt. It was awful, I kept having to go to the bathroom to cry, I was so upset that it was my birthday and the only person who’d invited me out was my aunt with this irritating stutter who couldn’t stop telling me she didn’t understand how a nice girl like me didn’t have a man in her life. So it’s probably no bad thing I ran into you . . .’

  13. She really was adorable (thought the lover, a most unreliable witness in such matters). But how could I tell her so in a way that would suggest the distinctive nature of my attraction? Words like love or devotion or infatuation were exhausted by the weight of successive love stories, by the layers imposed on them through the uses of others. At the moment when I most wanted language to be original, personal, and completely private, I came up against the irrevocably public nature of emotional communication.

  14. The restaurant was of no help, for its romantic setting made love too conspicuous, hence insincere. There was a recording of Chopin’s Nocturnes over the loudspeakers and a heart-shaped candle on the table. We overheard a man at the next table (perhaps a Darwinist) joking it should have been a penis. There seemed to be no way to transport love in the word L-O-V-E without at the same time throwing the most banal associations into the basket. The word was too rich in foreign history: everything from the Troubadours to Casablanca had cashed in on the letters. Was it not my duty to be the author of my own feelings? Would I not have to fashion a declaration with a uniqueness to match Chloe’s? I felt disconcertingly aware of the mundanity of our situation: a man and a woman, lovers, celebrating a birthday in a Chinese restaurant, one night in the Western world, somewhere towards the end of the twentieth century. No, my meaning could never make the journey in L-O-V-E. It would have to seek alternative transportation.

  15. Then I noticed a small plate of complimentary marshmallows near Chloe’s elbow and it suddenly seemed clear that I didn’t love Chloe so much as marshmallow her. What it was about a marshmallow that should suddenly have accorded so perfectly with my feelings towards her I will never know, but the word seemed to capture the essence of my amorous state with an accuracy that the word love, weary with overuse, simply could not aspire to. Even more inexplicably, when I took Chloe’s hand and told her that I had something very important to tell her, that I marshmallowed her, she seemed to understand perfectly, answering it was the sweetest thing anyone had ever told her.

  16. From then on, love was, for Chloe and me at least, no longer simply love, it was a sugary, puffy object a few millimetres in diameter that melts deliciously in the mouth.

  11

  What Do You See in Her?

  1. Summer flew in with the first week of June, making a Mediterranean city of London, drawing people from their homes and offices into the parks and squares. The heat coincided with the arrival of a new colleague at work, an American architect, who had been hired to spend six months working with us on an office complex near Waterloo.

  2. ‘They told me it rained every day in London – and look at this!’ remarked Will as we sat one lunchtime in a restaurant in Covent Garden. ‘Incredible, and I brought only pullovers.’

  ‘Don’t worry, Will, they have T-shirts here too.’

  I had met William Knott five years before, when we had both spent a year together on scholarships at Yale. He was immensely tall, with the perpetual tan, intrepid smile, and rugged face of an explorer but the hands of a pianist. Since finishing his studies at Berkeley, he had developed a successful career on the West Coast, where he was considered one of the most thoughtful practitioners of his generation. The Architects’ Journal had described him, with little concern for biological reality, as ‘the illegitimate love-child of Mies van der Rohe and Geoffrey Bawa’ and even the normally reserved Architectural Review had commended him on his use of concrete.

  3. ‘So tell me, are you seeing anyone?’ asked Will as we began our coffee. ‘You’re not still with what’s her name, that . . . ?’

  ‘No, no, that finished long ago. I’m involved in something serious now.’

  ‘Great, tell me about it.’

  ‘Well, you must come over for dinner and meet her.’

  ‘I’d love to. Tell me more.’

  ‘She’s called Chloe, she’s twenty-four, she’s a graphic designer. She’s intelligent, beautiful, very funny . . .’

  ‘It sounds terrific.’

  ‘How about you?’

  ‘Nothing to say really, I was dating this girl from UCLA, but you know, we were getting in each other’s head-space, so we sort of both pulled the rip-cord. We weren’t ready to ride the big one together, so . . . But tell me more about this Chloe, what is it you see in her?’

  4. What did I see in her? The question came back to me later that evening in the middle of Safeway, watching Chloe at the till, enraptured by the way she went about packing the groceries into a plastic bag. The charm I detected in these trivial gestures revealed a readiness to accept almost anything as incontestable proof that she was perfect. What did I see in her? Almost everything.

  5. For a moment, I fantasized I might transform myself into a carton of yogurt so as to undergo the same process of being gently and thoughtfully accommodated by her into a shopping bag between a tin of tuna and a bottle of olive oil. It was only the incongruously unsentimental atmosphere of the supermarket (‘Liver Promotion Week’) that alerted me to how far I might have been sliding into romantic pathology.

  6. On the way back to the car, I complimented Chloe on the adorable way she had gone about the business of doing the grocery shopping.

  ‘Don’t be so silly,’ she replied. ‘Can you open the boot, the keys are in my bag.’

  7. It is easy enough to find charm in a pair of eyes or the contours of a well-shaped mouth. How much harder to detect it in the movements of a woman’s hand across a supermarket checkout. Chloe’s gestures were like the tips of an iceberg, an indication of what lay submerged. Did it not require a lover to discern their true value, a value that would naturally seem meaningless to someone less curious, less in love?

  8. Yet I remained pensive on the drive home through the evening rush hour. My love began to question itself. What did it mean if things I considered charming about Chloe, she considered incidental or irrelevant to her true self? Was I reading things into Chloe that simply did not belong to her? I looked at the slope of her shoulders and the way that a strand of her hair was trapped in the car headrest. She turned towards me and smiled, so for an instant I saw the gap in between her two front teeth. How much of my sensitive, soulful lover lay in my fellow passenger?

  9. Love reveals its insanity by its refusal to acknowledge the inherent normality of the loved one. Hence the boredom of lovers for those standing on the sidelines. What do they see in the beloved save simply another human being? I had often tried to share my enthusiasm for Chloe with friends, with whom in the past I had found much common ground over films, books, and politics, but who now looked at me with the secular puzzlement of atheists faced with messianic fervour. After the tenth time of telling friends these stories of Chloe at the dry cleaner or Chloe and me at the cinema, or Chloe and me buying a takeaway, these stories with no plot and
less action, just the central character standing in the centre of an almost motionless tale, I was forced to acknowledge that love was a lonely pursuit.

  10. There was of course nothing inherently lovable about Chloe’s way of packing the groceries, love was merely something I had decided to ascribe to her gesture, a gesture that might have been interpreted very differently by others in line with us at Safeway. A person is never good or bad per se, which means that loving or hating them necessarily has at its basis a subjective, and perhaps illusionistic, element. I was reminded of the way that Will’s question had made the distinction between qualities that belonged to a person and those ascribed to them by their lover. He had carefully asked me not who Chloe was, but more accurately, what I saw in her.

  11. Shortly after her older brother died, Chloe (who had just celebrated her eighth birthday) went through a deeply philosophical stage. ‘I began to question everything,’ she told me, ‘I had to figure out what death was, that’s enough to turn anyone into a philosopher.’ One of her great obsessions, to which allusions were still made in her family, concerned thoughts familiar to readers of Descartes and Berkeley. Chloe would put her hand over her eyes and tell the family her brother was still alive because she could see him in her mind just as well as she could see them. Why did they tell her he was dead if she could see him in her own mind? Then, in a further challenge to reality and because of the way she felt towards them, Chloe would (with the grin of a six-year-old child facing the power of its hostile impulses) tell her parents she could kill them by shutting her eyes and never thinking of them again – a plan which no doubt elicited a profoundly unphilosophical response from the parents.

  12. Yet solipsism has its limits. Were my views of Chloe anywhere near reality, or had I completely lost judgement? Certainly she seemed lovable to me, but was she actually as lovable as I thought? It was the old Cartesian colour problem: a bus may seem red to a viewer, but is this bus actually red in and of its essence? When Will met Chloe a few weeks later, he certainly had his doubts, unexpressed of course, but evident from the way he took little interest in her, boring her instead with a lengthy account of how he had once built a cantilevered roof for a villa in La Jolla, and in the way he told me at work the next day that for a Californian, English women were of course ‘very special’.

  13. To be honest, Chloe gave me the occasional doubt herself. One night, I remember her sitting in my living room reading while we listened to a Bach cantata I had put on. The music sang of heavenly fires, Lord’s blessings, and beloved companions, while Chloe’s face, tired, but happy, bathed by a streak of light crossing the darkened room from the desk lamp, seemed as though it belonged to an angel, an angel who was only elaborately pretending (with trips to Safeway or the post office) that she was an ordinary mortal, but whose mind was in fact filled with delicate and divine thoughts.

  14. Because only the body is open to the eye, the hope of the infatuated lover is that the soul is faithful to its casing, that the body owns an appropriate soul, that what the skin represents turns out to be what it is. I did not love Chloe for her body, I loved her body for the promise of who she was. It was a most inspiring promise.

  15. Yet what if her face was only a trompe l’œil? ‘By forty, everyone has the face they deserve,’ wrote George Orwell, but Chloe was only just twenty-four – and even if she had been older, we are in truth, despite Orwell’s optimistic belief in natural justice, as unlikely to be given the face we deserve as the money or the opportunities.

  16. ‘Can’t you turn off this impossible yodelling,’ said the angel all of a sudden.

  ‘What impossible yodelling?’

  ‘You know, the music.’

  ‘It’s Bach.’

  ‘I know, but it sounds so silly, I can’t concentrate on Cosmo.’

  17. Is it really her I love, I thought to myself as I looked again at Chloe reading on the sofa across the room, or simply an idea that collects itself around her mouth, her eyes, her face? In using her face as a guide to her soul, was I not perhaps guilty of mistaken metonymy, whereby an attribute of an entity is substituted for the entity itself (the crown for the monarchy, the wheel for the car, the White House for the US government, Chloe’s angelic expression for Chloe . . .)?

  18. In the oasis complex, the thirsty man imagines he sees water, palm trees, and shade not because he has evidence for the belief, but because he has a need for it. Desperate needs bring about a hallucination of their solution: thirst hallucinates water, the need for love hallucinates a prince or princess. The oasis complex is never a complete delusion: the man in the desert does see something on the horizon. It is just that the palms have withered, the well is dry, and the place is infected with locusts.

  19. Was I not victim of a similar delusion, alone in a room with a woman who wore the face of someone composing The Divine Comedy while working her way through the Cosmopolitan astrology column?

  12

  Scepticism and Faith

  1. By contrast with the history of love, the history of philosophy shows a relentless concern with the discrepancy between appearance and reality. ‘I think I see a tree outside,’ the philosopher mutters, ‘but is it not possible that this is just an optical illusion behind my own retina?’ ‘I think I see my wife,’ mutters the philosopher, adding hopefully, ‘but is it not possible that she too is just an optical illusion?’

  2. Philosophers tend to limit epistemological doubt to the existence of tables, chairs, the courtyards of Cambridge colleges, and the occasional unwanted wife. But to extend these questions to things that matter to us, to love, for instance, is to raise the frightening possibility that the loved one is but an inner fantasy, with little connection to any objective reality.

  3. Doubt is easy when it is not a matter of survival: we are as sceptical as we can afford to be, and it is easiest to be sceptical about things that do not fundamentally sustain us. It is easy to doubt the existence of a table, it is hell to doubt the legitimacy of love.

  4. At the start of Western philosophical thinking, the progress from ignorance to knowledge finds itself likened by Plato to a glorious journey from a dark cave into bright sunlight. Men are born unable to perceive reality, Plato tells us, much like cave dwellers who mistake shadows of objects thrown up on the walls for the objects themselves. Only with much effort may illusions be thrown off, and the journey made from the shadowy world into bright sunlight, where things can at last be seen for what they truly are. As with all allegories, this is a tale with a moral: that truth is always superior to illusion.

  5. It takes another twenty-three centuries or so until the Socratic assumption about the benefits of pursuing truth is challenged from a practical rather than simply a moral or epistemological standpoint. Everyone from Aristotle to Kant had criticized Plato on the way to reach the truth, but no one had seriously questioned the value of the undertaking. But in his Beyond Good and Evil (1886), Friedrich Nietzsche finally took the bull by the horns and asked:

  What in us really wants ‘truth’? . . . We ask the value of this . . . Why not rather untruth? and uncertainty? even ignorance? . . . The falseness of a judgement is not necessarily an objection to it . . . the question is to what extent it is life-advancing; and our fundamental tendency is to assert that the falsest judgements . . . are the most indispensable to us . . . that to renounce false judgements would be to renounce life, would be to deny life.2

  6. From a religious point of view, the value of truth had of course been placed into question many centuries before. The philosopher Pascal (1623–62, hunchback Jansenist and author of the Pensées) had talked of a choice facing every Christian in a world unevenly divided between the horror of a universe without God and the blissful – but infinitely more remote – alternative that God did exist. Even though the odds were in favour of God not existing, Pascal argued that religious faith could still be justified because the joys of the slimmer probability so far outweighed the abomination of the larger one. And so it should perhaps be with
love. Lovers cannot remain philosophers for long, they should give way to the religious impulse, which is to believe and have faith, as opposed to the philosophic impulse, which is to doubt and enquire. They should prefer the risk of being wrong and in love to being in doubt and without love.

  7. Such thoughts were running through my mind one evening, sitting on Chloe’s bed playing with her toy elephant Guppy. She’d told me that when she was a child, Guppy had played an enormous role in her life. He was a character as real as members of her family, and a lot more sympathetic. He had his own routines, his favourite foods, his own way of sleeping and talking – and yet, from a more dispassionate position, it was evident that Guppy was entirely her creation and had no existence outside her imagination. But if there was one thing that would have been ruinous to Chloe’s relationship with the elephant, it would have been to ask her whether or not the creature really existed: Does this furry thing actually live independently of you, or did you not simply invent him? And it occurred to me then that perhaps a similar discretion should be applied to lovers and their beloveds, that one should never ask a lover, Does this love-stuffed person actually exist or are you simply imagining them?

  8. Medical history tells us of the case of a man living under the peculiar delusion that he was a fried egg. Quite how or when this idea had entered his head, no one knew, but he now refused to sit down anywhere for fear that he would ‘break himself’ and ‘spill the yolk’. His doctors tried sedatives and other drugs to appease his fears, but nothing seemed to work. Finally, one of them made the effort to enter the mind of the deluded patient and suggested that he should carry a piece of toast with him at all times, which he could place on any chair he wished to sit on, and thereby protect himself from breaking his yolk. From then on, the deluded man was never seen without a piece of toast handy, and was able to continue a more or less normal existence.