BOVARY: Does it? What do I know? I don’t care if it’s all a sickness, all I want is to kiss him again, to feel him holding me in his arms, to smell the perfume of his skin.
NEARLY: YOU have to start to make an effort to look inside yourself, to go over your childhood, then perhaps you will learn that you don’t deserve all this pain. It’s only because you grew up in a dysfunctional family in which your emotional needs were not met that you are stuck in this pattern.
BOVARY: My father was a simple farmer.
NEARLY: Perhaps, but he was also emotionally unreliable, so that you now respond to an unmet need by falling in love with a man who can’t give you what you really want.
BOVARY: It’s Charles that’s the problem, not Rodolphe.
NEARLY: Well, my dear, we’ll have to go on with this next week. It’s coming to the end of your session.
BOVARY: Oh, Dr Nearly, I meant to explain earlier, but I won’t be able to pay you this week.
NEARLY: This is the third time you tell me this sort of thing.
BOVARY: I apologize, but money is such a problem at the moment, I am so unhappy, I find myself spending it all on shopping. Just today, I went and bought three new dresses, a painted thimble, and a china tea set.
13. It is hard to imagine a happy end to Madame Bovary’s therapy, or indeed a much happier end to her life. It takes a fervent romantic positivist to believe that Dr Nearly (if she was ever paid) could have converted Emma into the well-adjusted, uncompulsive, and caring wife that would have turned Flaubert’s book into an optimistic tale of redemption through self-knowledge. Certainly Dr Nearly had an interpretation of Madame Bovary’s problem, but there is a great difference between identifying a problem and solving it, between wisdom and the wise life. We are all more intelligent than we are capable, and awareness of the insanity of love has never saved anyone from the disease. Perhaps the concept of wise or wholly painless love is as much of a contradiction as that of a bloodless battle – Geneva Conventions aside, it simply cannot exist. The confrontation between Madame Bovary and Peggy Nearly is the confrontation between romantic tragedy and romantic positivism. It is the confrontation between wisdom and wisdom’s opposite, which is not the ignorance of wisdom (that is easy to put right), but the inability to act on the knowledge of what one knows is right. Knowing the unreality of our affair had proved to be of no help to Chloe and me, knowing we might be fools had not turned us into sages.
14. Rendered pessimistic by the intractable pains of love, I decided to turn away from it altogether. If romantic positivism could be of no help, then the only valid wisdom was the stoic advice never to fall in love again. I would henceforth retreat from the world, see no one, live frugally, and throw myself into austere study. I read with admiration stories of men and women who had escaped earthly distractions, made vows of chastity, and spent their lives in monasteries and nunneries. There were stories of hermits who had endured life in caves in the desert for forty or fifty years, living only off roots and berries, never talking or seeing other human beings.
15. But sitting at a dinner party one evening, lost in Rachel’s eyes while she outlined the course of her office life for me, I was shocked to realize how easily I might abandon a stoic philosophy in order to repeat all the mistakes I had lived through with Chloe. If I continued to look at Rachel’s hair tied elegantly in a bun, or at the grace with which she used her knife and fork or the richness of her blue eyes, I knew I would not survive the evening intact.
16. The sight of Rachel alerted me to the limits of the stoic approach. Though love might never be painless and was certainly not wise, neither could it be forgotten. It was as inevitable as it was unreasonable – and its unreason was unfortunately no argument against it. Was it not absurd to retreat into the Judaean hills in order to eat roots and shoots? If I wanted to be courageous, were there not greater opportunities for heroism in love? Moreover, for all the sacrifices demanded by the stoic life, was there not something cowardly within it? At the heart of stoicism lay the desire to disappoint oneself before someone else had the chance to do so. Stoicism was a crude defence against the dangers of the affections of others, a danger that it would take more endurance than a life in the desert to be able to face. In calling for a monastic existence free of emotional turmoil, stoicism was simply trying to deny the legitimacy of certain potentially painful yet fundamental human needs. However brave, the stoic was in the end a coward at the point of perhaps the highest reality, at the moment of love.
17. We can always blind ourselves to the complexities of a problem by suggesting solutions that reduce the issue to a lowest common denominator. Both romantic positivism and stoicism were inadequate answers to the problems raised by the agonies of love, because both of them collapsed the question rather than juggling with its contradictions. The stoics had collapsed the pain and irrationality of love into a conclusive argument against it – thereby failing to balance the undoubted trauma of our desires with the intractability of our emotional needs. On the other hand, the romantic positivists were guilty of collapsing a certain easy grasp of psychological wisdom into a belief that love could be rendered painless for all, if only we learnt to love ourselves a little more – thereby failing to juggle a need for wisdom with the inherent difficulties of acting on its precepts, reducing the tragedy of Madame Bovary to an illustration of Dr Nearly’s truistic theories.
18. I realized that a more complex lesson needed to be drawn, one that could play with the incompatibilities of love, juggling the need for wisdom with its likely impotence, juggling the idiocy of infatuation with its inevitability. Love had to be appreciated without flight into dogmatic optimism or pessimism, without constructing a philosophy of one’s fears, or a morality of one’s disappointments. Love taught the analytic mind a certain humility, the lesson that however hard it struggled to reach immobile certainties (numbering its conclusions and embedding them in neat series), analysis could never be anything but flawed – and therefore never stray far from the ironic.
19. Such lessons appeared all the more relevant when Rachel accepted my invitation for dinner the following week, and the very thought of her began sending tremors through the region the poets have called the heart, tremors that I knew could have meant one thing only – that I had once more begun to fall.
Endnotes
1 On Liberty, John Stuart Mill (Cambridge University Press, 1989).
2 Beyond Good and Evil, Friedrich Nietzsche (Penguin, 1990).
3 Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals, Immanuel Kant (Harper Torchbooks, 1964).
4 Elements of Law, Thomas Hobbes (ed. Molesworth, 1839–45).
5 Human, all too Human, Friedrich Nietzsche (University of Nebraska Press, 1986).
6 The Language of Psychoanalysis, J. Laplanche, J. B. Pontalis (Karnac Books, 1988).
7 The Bleeding Heart, Peggy Nearly (Capulet Books, 1987).
ESSAYS IN LOVE
ALAIN DE BOTTON is the author of eight bestselling books including How Proust Can Change Your Life, The Consolations of Philosophy and The Art of Travel. Essays in Love is his first book. He was born in 1969 and lives in London.
For more information, consult:
www.alaindebotton.com
ALSO BY ALAIN DE BOTTON
THE ROMANTIC MOVEMENT
KISS & TELL
HOW PROUST CAN CHANGE YOUR LIFE
THE CONSOLATIONS OF PHILOSOPHY
THE ART OF TRAVEL
STATUS ANXIETY
THE ARCHITECTURE OF HAPPINESS
First published in this revised edition 2006 by Picador
This electronic edition published 2012 by Picador
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Copyright © Alain de Botton 1993, 2006
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