Essays In Love

by Alain De Botton

  8. What curse did I labour under? Nothing other than an inability to enjoy happy relationships, possibly the greatest misfortune known to man in modern society. Exiled from the shaded grove of love, I would be compelled to wander the earth till the day of my death, unable to shake off my compulsion to make those I love flee from me. I sought a name for this evil, and one night, in tears, found it contained in a dictionary of psychoanalytic terms under the entry for repetition compulsion:

  . . . an ungovernable process originating in the unconscious. As a result of its actions, the subject deliberately places himself in distressing situations, thereby repeating an old experience, but he does not recall this prototype; on the contrary, he has the strong impression that the situation is fully determined by the circumstances of the moment.6

  9. No philosophy is further from the thought that what happens to us is random than psychoanalysis (even to deny meaning is meaningful). I did not simply love Chloe and then she left me. I loved Chloe in order that she would leave me. Buried deep in my unconscious, a pattern had been forged, in the early months or years. The baby had driven away the mother, or the mother had left the baby, and now the man had recreated the same scenario, different actors but the same plot. It was not for the shape of her smile or the liveliness of her mind that I had chosen Chloe. It was because the unconscious, the perverse casting director of my life, had recognized in her a suitable character to leave the stage after inflicting the requisite amount of suffering.

  10. Unlike the curses of the Greek gods, psychological fatalism at least held out the promise that it could be escaped. Where id was, ego might be. Had I had the strength to rise from my bed, I might have made it to the couch, and there, like Oedipus at Colonnus, begun to build an end to my sufferings. But I was unable to summon the necessary sanity to make it out of the house and seek help. I was unable even to talk, I could not share my grief with others, hence it ravaged me. I lay curled on the bed, the blinds drawn, irritated by the slightest noise or light, unduly upset if the milk in the fridge was stale or a drawer failed to open first time. Watching everything slip out of my grasp, I concluded that the only way to regain at least a measure of control was to kill myself.

  21

  Suicide

  1. The Christmas season arrived, bringing with it carol singers, cards of good will and the first snowfalls. Chloe and I had been due to spend the Christmas weekend at a small hotel in Yorkshire. The brochure sat on my desk: ‘Abbey Cottage welcomes its guests to warm Yorkshire hospitality in exquisite surroundings. Sit by the open fire in the oak-beamed living room, take a walk along the moors, or simply relax and let us take care of you. A holiday at Abbey Cottage is everything you always wanted from a hotel – and more.’

  2. Two days before Christmas and hours before my death, at five o’clock on a sombre Friday evening, I received a call from Will Knott:

  ‘I thought I’d ring to say goodbye, I’m due to fly back to San Francisco on the weekend.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘Tell me, how are things with you?’

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘Is everything all right?’

  ‘All right? Well, yes, you could put it that way.’

  ‘I was sorry to hear about you and Chloe. It’s really too bad.’

  ‘I was happy to hear about you and Chloe.’

  ‘You’ve heard. Yeah, it just worked out. You know how much I always liked her, and she gave me a call and told me you guys had split up, and things moved from there.’

  ‘Well, it’s fantastic, Will.’

  ‘I’m glad to hear you say it. I don’t want this to get between us or anything, because a great friendship is not something I like to throw away. I always hoped you two could patch things up, I think you would have been great together, it’s a real pity, but anyway. What are you doing over Christmas?’

  ‘Staying home, I think.’

  ‘Looks like you’re going to get a real snowfall here, time to bring out the skis, eh?’

  ‘Is Chloe with you now?’

  ‘Is she with me now? Yes, no, I mean, she isn’t actually with me right now. She was here, but she’s just gone off to the store actually, we were talking about Christmas crackers, and she said she loved them, so she’s gone to buy some.’

  ‘That’s great, give her my regards.’

  ‘I’m sure she’d be delighted to hear we spoke. You know she’s coming with me to spend Christmas in California?’

  ‘Is she?’

  Yeah, it’ll be great for her to see it. We’ll spend a couple of days with my parents in Santa Barbara, then maybe go for a few days to the desert or something.’

  ‘She loves deserts.’

  ‘That’s right, that’s what she told me. Well, listen, I’d better leave you to it, and wish you a happy holiday. I’ve got to start sorting my stuff out around here. I may be back in Europe next fall, but anyway, I’ll give you a call, and see how you’re doing . . .’

  3. I went into the bathroom and took out every last tablet I had collected, and laid them out on the kitchen table. With a mixture of pills, several glasses of cough syrup, and whisky, I would have enough to end the whole charade. What more sensible reaction than this, to kill oneself after rejection in love? If Chloe really was my whole life, was it not normal that I should end that life to prove it was impossible without her? Was it not dishonest to be continuing to wake up every morning if the person I claimed was the meaning of existence was now buying Christmas crackers for a Californian architect with a house in the foothills of Santa Barbara?

  4. My separation from Chloe had been accompanied by a thousand platitudinous sympathies from friends and acquaintances: it might have been nice, people drift apart, passion can’t last for ever, better to have lived and loved, time will heal everything. Even Will managed to make it sound unexceptional, like an earthquake or a snowfall, something that nature sends to try us, and whose inevitability one should not think of challenging. My death would be a violent denial of normality – it would be a reminder that I would not forget as others had forgotten. I wished to escape the erosion and softening of time, I wished the pain to last for ever only so as to be connected to Chloe via its burnt nerve endings. Only by my death could I assert the importance and immortality of my love, only through self-destruction could I remind a world grown weary of tragedy that love was a deadly serious matter.

  5. It was seven o’clock, and the snow was still falling, starting to form a blanket over the city. It would be my shroud. The one reading this will be alive, but the author will be dead, I reflected as I penned my note. It was the only way I could say I love you, I’m mature enough not to want you to blame yourself for this, you know how I feel about guilt. I hope you will enjoy California, I understand the mountains are very beautiful, I know you could not love me, please understand I could not live without your love . . . The suicide text had gone through many drafts: a pile of scrapped notepaper lay beside me. I sat at the kitchen table, wrapped in a grey coat, with only the shivering of the fridge for company. Abruptly, I reached for a tub of pills and swallowed what I only later realized were twenty effervescent vitamin C tablets.

  6. I imagined Chloe receiving a visit from a policeman shortly after my inert body had been found. I imagined the look of shock on her face, Will Knott emerging from the bedroom with a soiled sheet draped around him, asking, ‘Is there anything wrong, darling?’ and she answering ‘Yes, oh, God, yes!’ before collapsing into tears. The most terrible regret and remorse would follow. She would blame herself for not understanding me, for being so cruel, for being so short-sighted. Had any other man been so devoted to her as to take his own life for her?

  7. A notorious inability to express emotions makes human beings the only animals capable of suicide. An angry dog does not commit suicide, it bites the person or thing that made it angry, but an angry human sulks in its room and later shoots itself leaving a silent note. Man is the symbolic, metaphorical creature: unable to communicate my anger, I would
symbolize it in my own death. I would do injury to myself rather than injure Chloe, enacting by killing myself what I was suggesting she had done to me.

  8. My mouth was frothing now, orange bubbles breeding in its cavity and exploding as they came into contact with the air, spraying a light orange film over the table and the collar of my shirt. As I observed this acidic chemical spectacle silently, I was struck by the incoherence of suicide: I did not wish to choose between being alive or dead. I simply wished to show Chloe that I could not, metaphorically speaking, live without her. The irony was that death would be too literal an act to grant me the chance to see the metaphor read, I would be deprived by the inability of the dead (in a secular framework at least) to look at the living looking at the dead. What was the point of making such a scene if I could not be there to witness others witnessing it? In picturing my death, I imagined myself in the role of audience to my own extinction, something that could never really happen in reality, when I would simply be dead, and hence denied my ultimate wish – namely, to be both dead and alive. Dead so as to be able to show the world in general, and Chloe in particular, how angry I was, and alive, so as to be able to see the effect that I had had on Chloe and hence be released from my anger. It was not a question of being or not being. My answer to Hamlet was to be and not to be.

  9. Those who commit a certain kind of suicide perhaps forget the second part of the equation, they look at death as an extension of life (a kind of afterlife in which to watch the effect of their actions). I staggered to the sink and my stomach contracted out the effervescent poison. The pleasure of suicide was to be located not in the gruesome task of killing the organism, but in the reactions of others to my death (Chloe weeping at the grave, Will averting his eyes, both of them scattering earth on my walnut coffin). To have killed myself would have been to forget that I would be too dead to derive any pleasure from the melodrama of my own extinction.

  22

  The Jesus Complex

  1. If there is any benefit to be found in the midst of agony, it may perhaps lie in the ability of certain sufferers to take this misery as evidence (however perverse) that they are special. Why else would they have been chosen to undergo such titanic torment other than to serve as proof that they are different, and hence presumably better, than those who do not suffer?

  2. I could not stand to be alone in my flat over the Christmas period, so I checked into a room in a small hotel off the Bayswater Road. I took with me a small suitcase and a set of books and clothes, but I neither read nor dressed. I spent whole days in a white bathrobe, lying on top of the bed and flicking through the channels of the television, reading room-service menus and listening to stray sounds coming up from the street.

  3. There was at first very little to distinguish that noise from the general moan of the traffic below: car doors were screaming shut, lorries were grinding into first gear, a pneumatic drill was pounding the pavement. And yet above all that, I began to identify a quite different sound, rippling through the thin hotel wall from somewhere near my head, at that time pressed against a copy of Time magazine crushed against a sebaceous headboard. It was becoming undeniable, however much one tried to deny it (and heaven knows one might), that the sound from the next door room was none other than that of the mating ritual of the human species. ‘Fuck,’ I thought, ‘they’re fucking!’

  4. When a man hears others in the midst of such activity, there are certain attitudes one may reasonably expect him to adopt. If he is young and imaginative, he may willingly induce a process of identification with the male through the wall, constructing, with his poet’s mind, an ideal of the fortunate woman – Beatrice, Juliet, Charlotte, Tess – whose screams he flatters himself to have induced. Or, if affronted by this objective recording of libido, he may turn away, think of England and raise the volume of the television.

  5. But my reaction was remarkable only for its passivity – or, rather, I failed to push reaction any way beyond acknowledgement. Since Chloe had left, I had done little but acknowledge. I had become a man who, in every sense of the word, could not be surprised. Surprise is, we are told by psychologists, a reaction to the unexpected, but I had come to expect everything, and could hence be surprised by nothing.

  6. What was passing through my mind? Nothing but a certain song heard once on the radio in Chloe’s car, with the sun setting over the edge of the motorway:

  I’m in love, sweet love,

  Hear me calling out your name, I feel no shame,

  I’m in love, sweet love,

  Don’t you ever go away, it’ll always be this way.

  I had grown intoxicated with my own sadness, I had reached the stratosphere of suffering, the moment where pain gives rise to the Jesus complex. The sound of the copulating couple and the song from happier days coalesced in the giant tears that had begun to flow at the thought of the misfortunes of my existence. But for the first time, these were not angry, scalding tears, rather the bitter-sweet taste of waters grown tinged with the conviction that it was not I, but the people who had made me suffer, who were so blind. I was elated, at the pinnacle where suffering brings one over into the valley of joy, the joy of the martyr, the joy of the Jesus complex. I imagined Chloe and Will travelling through California, I listened to requests of ‘more’ and ‘harder’ from next door and grew drunk on the liquor of grief.

  7. ‘How great can one be if one is understood by everyone?’ I asked myself, contemplating the fate of the Son of God. Could I really continue to blame myself for Chloe’s inability to understand me? Her rejection was more a sign of how myopic she was than of how deficient I might have been. No longer was I necessarily the vermin and she the angel. She had left me for a third-rate Californian Corbusian because she was simply too shallow to understand. I began to reinterpret her character, concentrating on sides I found least pleasant. She was in the end very selfish, her charms only a superficial veneer masking an unattractive nature. If she seduced people into thinking she was adorable, it had more to do with her amusing conversation and kind smile than any genuine grounds for love. Others did not know her the way I did and it was clear (though I had not realized it originally) that she was inherently self-centred, rather caustic, at times inconsiderate, often thoughtless, on occasion ungracious, when she was tired impatient, when she wanted her own way dogmatic, and in her decision to reject me both unreflective and tactless.

  8. Grown infinitely wise through suffering, I could forgive, pity, and patronize her for her lack of judgement – and to do so gave me infinite relief. I could lie in a lilac-and-green hotel room and be filled with a sense of my own virtue and greatness. I pitied Chloe for everything she could not understand, the infinitely wise seer who watches the ways of men and women with a melancholic, knowing grin.

  9. Why was my complex, the perverse psychological trick that turned every defeat and humiliation into its opposite, to be named after Jesus? I might have identified my suffering with that of Young Werther or Madame Bovary or Swann, but none of these bruised lovers could compete with Jesus’s untainted virtue and his unquestionable goodness beside the evil of those he tried to love. It was not just the weepy eyes and sallow face attributed to him by Renaissance artists that made him such an attractive figure, it was that Jesus was a man who was kind, completely just, and betrayed. The pathos of the New Testament, as much as of my own love story, arose out of the sad tale of a virtuous but misrepresented man, who preached the love of everyone for their neighbour, only to see the generosity of his message thrown back in his face.

  10. It is hard to imagine Christianity having achieved such success without a martyr at its head. If Jesus had simply led a quiet life in Galilee making commodes and dining tables and at the end of his life published a slim volume entitled My Philosophy of Life before dying of a heart attack, he would not have acquired the status he did. The agonizing death on the Cross, the corruption and cruelty of the Roman authorities, the betrayal by his friends, all these were indispensable ingredients for proof (mor
e psychological than historical) that the man had God on his side.

  11. Feelings of virtue breed spontaneously in the fertile soil of suffering. The more one suffers, the more virtuous one must be. The Jesus complex was entangled in feelings of superiority, the superiority of the underdog who considers himself above his oppressors, with their tyranny and blindness. Ditched by the woman I loved, I exalted my suffering into a sign of greatness (lying collapsed on a bed at three in the afternoon), and hence protected myself from experiencing my grief as the outcome of what was at best a mundane romantic break-up. Chloe’s departure may have killed me, but it had at least left me in glorious possession of the moral high ground. I was a martyr.

  12. The Jesus complex lay at opposite ends of the spectrum from Marxism. Born out of self-hatred, Marxism prevented me from becoming a member of any club that would have me. The Jesus complex still left me outside the club gates but, because it was the result of ample self-love, declared that I was not accepted into the club only because I was so special. Most clubs, being rather crude affairs, naturally could not appreciate the great, the wise, and the sensitive, who were to be left at the gates or dropped by their girlfriends. My superiority was revealed primarily on the basis of my isolation and suffering: I suffer, therefore I am special. I am not understood, but for precisely that reason, I am worthy of greater understanding.

  13. In so far as it avoids self-hatred, one must have sympathy for the alchemy by which a weakness is turned into virtue – and the evolution of my pain towards a Jesus complex certainly implied a degree of mental good health. It showed that in the delicate internal balance between self-hatred and self-love, self-love was now winning. My initial response to Chloe’s rejection had been a self-hating one, where I had continued to love Chloe while hating myself for failing to make the relationship work. But my Jesus complex had turned the equation on its head, now interpreting rejection as a sign that Chloe was worthy of contempt or at best pity (that paragon of Christian virtues). The Jesus complex was nothing more than a self-defence mechanism, I had not wanted Chloe to leave me, I had loved her more than I had ever loved a woman, but now that she had flown to California, my way of accepting the unbearable loss was to reinvent how valuable she had been in the first place. It was clearly a lie, but honesty is sometimes more than we have strength for when, abandoned and desperate, we spend Christmas alone in a hotel room listening to the sound of orgasmic beatitude from next door.