Life Beyond Measure

by Sidney Poitier

  As the father of six daughters and a veteran of many complicated relationships over the years, I come honestly to the following observations of love’s many dimensions, and pass them now on to you, your peers, and those of other generations for whom the subject of love is never outdated or ahead of its time.

  We all have a capacity for love, for kindness, for passion. We also have a capacity for the opposite, but love is infinitely more effective in the world than hate, although they exist as equal opposites. So I reject hate and choose to explore the nature of love, both emotionally and philosophically.

  There is love of self, there is love of family, there is romantic love for another individual to whom we are not related, and there is love for a friend. Then there is love of things that are cultural in nature: music, art, and literature; love of animals; love of adventure.

  The first and foremost of these is a mother’s love for her child. It is all embracing, all forgiving—even though it may not seem so at those times when she is administering the discipline that is necessary for a child’s growth and understanding. But it is a love of such fierce magnitude that any unwelcome intrusion is likely to meet with disaster. The powerful connectedness of mother and child is evident throughout the animal kingdom, where death is often the penalty for trespassing.

  Although we talk of love as residing in the heart, it is actually a function of the brain. That fact, however, doesn’t diminish what love is, and it doesn’t change the fact that you feel it inside you. Emotionally, love is a conscious state driven from within.

  If it is romantic love, it is no mere cliché to say that in its presence your heart seems to beat fast, and your whole body has a quivering over it. You see another human being—nowadays, we know that for some it’s not necessarily of the opposite sex—and something about the visual impact of that individual triggers something inside us. And it might not necessarily be the triggering of love at first sight, but it is something in the configuration of the face, how the lips and the nose and the eyes form the forward aspects of the face. Then the smile complements all of that, and the sound of the voice contributes to the overall impact. And of course, the eyes, when they glitter and sparkle, sparkle like you would expect those eyes to sparkle. Bodily contours also often come into play.

  All this, then, prompts in us an interest. Not necessarily love, although I’m sure falling in love at first sight is probably a valid description in some cases. But when we see such a person, the longer we look at that face, the more we like it. We’re not talking about love yet, but a kind of visual compatibility that affects you internally.

  Given opportunity, you carry this to its logical conclusion. That is, you meet, have an intellectual exchange, and you find that the person is quite intelligent, has a nice sense of humor, and is very easy to engage. There is no sign of anything negative, and the conversation works out very nicely. So you have a date, if they’re not married or attached to someone else, and if you can arrange one, because you’re interested in knowing other things about them. And if, over lunch or dinner, or perhaps on an outing, the discovery lends itself to further exploring, you may permit yourself to be invited to the person’s house. Afterward you go back home and say, “Wow, what a terrific person.”

  You get together with them a few more times, and before you know it, you are forced to say, “You know, I’m having a problem. I think I’m falling in love with you.” And if the feeling is reciprocal, the other person says, “Oh my God, I thought I was the only one.” And there you go.

  That’s one kind of love, where the emotional, physical, and psychological elements all come into play.

  Then there is another kind of love—for humankind or for concerns—that can be roused in a person enough to make a choice to leave home, father and mother, brothers and sisters, and go to work in Asia or Africa with agencies like Doctors Without Borders, as one example. This love is derived from the compassion that is in the person’s being, either inherited from forefathers or seeming to have appeared on its own. Such people may join the Peace Corps and go into places like Darfur, often putting their lives on the line. During the civil rights movement, there were white kids who went down South and stayed for weeks and months, and some of them were killed because they believed in the brotherhood of mankind.

  There is love of God and love for the values of one’s faith, of course. In many people there is a strong love of country, and it motivates them even to go to war to defend their homeland. In many people there is similarly a love of and quest for peace that is motivated by a willingness to take a stand for its pursuit.

  There are people who love children, who love family, and those who love other human beings, other living creatures, and nature itself. In my daily comings and goings, I hear of those in my community of Los Angeles who volunteer at animal shelters, who work on violence prevention, who spend time downtown in some of the most marginalized neighborhoods helping fight homelessness—all with no reward for their actions other than self-satisfaction. There are many examples articulating that kind of love.

  There are several philanthropists I know who not only have the ample means to give to important causes but genuinely love knowing that they can be instrumental in benefiting others. One of the women in our family’s circle of friends who has made a history of being true to her charitable instincts is now focused on contributing funds to stem-cell research, which promises to produce findings that will help millions who are suffering around the world. Those motivations are likewise from love.

  There are people who actually love the pop culture, and see themselves as part of it. They have idol representation: individuals in the pop culture, either in films or television or music, for whom they feel love. Then there is a love of self-improvement, which people indulge in to develop themselves to be better human beings. They simply love their efforts in that regard.

  Oddly enough, there are also people who love turmoil. Their temperament is best articulated by chaos. In my years of forming a variety of personal and professional relationships, I encountered more than a few of those, as you may well also in your explorations of the different facets of life.

  The point here is that love is never elusive. In all its permutations, love surrounds us in the world, whether we are accepting of it or not. There are people who reject it; they become antisocial, reclusive. But I believe it is the nature of people to seek love—no matter what they later become—as babies right out of the womb. And it ultimately, to a great degree, shapes who we are in terms of how we develop as individuals and how our lives evolve. After all, it is by love that we are often joined to another individual. That joining, in a way, determines who we are as we develop.

  Now comes the challenge. Since love is universally available, and also universally sought after, how do we—realizing that love is nevertheless still a minefield that we have to chart our way through—engage it successfully and safely, or if not successfully, at least with the least amount of damage?

  It seems to me that we have to be accepting of the idea of love in order to find it and to have our lives shaped by it—even though we know the minefield is there. We have to be willing to take chances. We have to be willing to expose ourselves to some degree.

  So far I’ve written to you of the dimensions of love in the abstract, hoping you’ll be able to relate different situations in your life to some of those points. Now I have some real-life stories to include in the discussion, as I was there once in learning that love, possibly the most glorious way that we can experience life, can be a many-splintered thing.

  I was shy and couldn’t get a date for the longest time. On Cat Island, my friend Fritz and I plotted daily about methods to attract attention from the opposite sex, even resorting to voodoo practices that involved catching frogs and burying them in boxes until the appropriate waxing of the moon, at which point their bones could be retrieved and combined with the hair of our love interest—with no luck whatsoever! There was one girl, lovely Lurlene, whose name
and alluring face I could never forget, having once inspired a love letter from me, written in my boyish hand, and who I was certain would be susceptible to my charms and the voodoo magic that I’d practiced so diligently to attract her. But she turned out not to be interested. When I saw her years later as a grown woman and reminded her, she said, “Yeah, I remember that time.” And she still didn’t recall it all that fondly.

  My progress with females wasn’t much better after we moved to Nassau. There was one girl at school, when I was about eleven and a half, who was my dream girl. Her name was Vernice Cooper. Never spoke to her. Just smiled a lot. Vernice would give me a little bit of a smile in return, or she would turn her head just before I caught her eye. But my handmade clothes, sewn by my mother from flour-sack cloth, were a signal that I was from the wrong side of the tracks, while Vernice was from a family that was substantial in every way: strong educational background, middle class. In fact, she wound up as an executive for a telephone company. And in our grown-up years, we wound up with a warm friendship that has flourished.

  Then there was Emmy Gibbs, another girl at school, who was kind of rough-and-tumble and tomboyish, but very pretty. I liked her a lot as well, but that was the extent of it.

  None of these fleeting attractions came close to the ardor inspired in me by the compelling and sweet Dorothy—with whom I could actually converse, albeit in my shy, unworldly way. Dorothy—who I was surprised to learn was the half-sister of my racist friend Carl, from the other side of the island—lived close to the ocean. Because I lived over the hill at quite a distance, in order to see her I either went the long walk on foot or rode on the front handlebars of my friend Harry’s bike—whenever I could talk him into taking me. The effort notwithstanding, it was worth it just to see her and exchange even a few words.

  But over the course of our shy courtship, I could never figure out how to move past friendship with Dorothy to a more serious romantic relationship. With so little experience and exposure to the opposite sex, how could I? Throughout these adolescent years, I never had any physical contact with any of these girls, or bought them so much as a piece of candy or a trinket; I didn’t have any money to do that. Totally unaware of how lacking I was in sophistication and gracious behavior, not savvy at all in matters of the heart, I had never held the hand of or exchanged more than three or four words with any girl, except for Dorothy.

  So by the time I left Nassau, it was with the intention of returning worthy of her affections and of marrying her one day. By the time I was in a position to do so, she had married someone else. And after he passed away and she was available, I had gone on to other relationships. Years later, I did stop in to say hello to her at the British Colonial Hotel in Nassau, where she was then working as a waitress. In a flash, I was fourteen years old again, amazed at how great she still looked, and at how easy it was to talk to her. But we both realized that the time had long ago come and gone for any possibility of getting together.

  In the meantime, back when I first arrived in Florida, there were lots of pretty girls there. But my native shyness—as well as now having reached the age of fifteen without any dating experience—left me clueless. If there had been openings with any of the girls, I probably wouldn’t have recognized them. Besides, I had no female friends, and hardly any male friends except my brother’s children who were around my age. They were the ones who knew the girls, and I was just a young cousin who wasn’t really up on anything in terms of how young people behaved and got along.

  When I made it to New York, I was as virgin as they come, and by then I was sixteen years old. At long last, as I began to acclimate to city life, I ran into a couple of girls who took a bit of a notice. However, I didn’t know how to follow through. Each of them invited me to meet their parents, and I did. The parents were fine with me because I seemed like a decent person. But nothing came of those two friendships.

  It seemed almost as if I was waiting for lightning to hit me. One day, I felt as though it had when I spotted a particularly striking girl at the top of a set of steps, sitting beyond the balustrade of an apartment building on 116th Street between Seventh and Eighth avenues. She was dressed simply, with a simple manner, an open demeanor, dark brown complexion, bright eyes, and an aura of niceness. The impact was so powerful I can still remember at age eighty how it was as I walked by and saw her sitting there and the somersaults I turned inside as she kind of smiled at me. Without hesitation, I kind of smiled right back. A few paces past her door, I mustered the courage to turn back and walk in her direction, while trying to drum up enough nerve to say, “Hi, how are you,” but I actually walked right past her again! Finally, I turned back and shyly approached, seeing her shyly trying to say hello, too. Magic! As we talked, I couldn’t help noticing that there was a movie theater across the street. It would have been so natural to invite her to the movies, but I didn’t have any money to pay for tickets for the two of us. And soon enough the moment of opportunity passed me by and into the fog of memory.

  Then, during a period when I went to work pushing and loading dress racks in the garment industry, I met Frances, a statuesque knockout with a spellbinding smile, skin color that matched my own, and an earthiness that made me comfortable. At last, I was able to make some headway and the two of us clicked, long enough for us to become a steady couple.

  When she found out that I was trying to be an actor, Frances wasn’t thrilled. “What a waste” was all she said, but the next time I went to call on her at her Harlem residence she seemed to have lost interest. In fact, as she opened the door and asked me to step into the railroad apartment, instead of taking me into the kitchen near the front door where five or six people had congregated and were in a party mood, she led me down the hall all the way to the living room at the far end of the apartment.

  “Make yourself comfortable,” Frances said and then returned to her friends in the kitchen—leaving me by myself for the better part of an hour. Again, given my lack of experience, I didn’t understand that instead of just breaking up with me, she was sending me the message indirectly. In any case, I eventually gathered the cool to walk down the hall and past the kitchen, where I excused myself and left. The bruise to my ego took me a week to shake off. But once I let it go, I was better prepared for the slings and arrows of love that followed.

  Decades later I met someone who happened to be related to Frances, and I took Frances’s phone number. When I called, we had a warm conversation, during which she touched me deeply by saying, those many years later, how much she regretted that last encounter. Even though it was unnecessary for her to say so, as it was very much water under the bridge, I so appreciated how it underscored that for most human beings, even when we briefly touch up against other lives, we leave our marks on each other.

  So, after Frances, I kept working at being an actor and was starting to make some significant progress, and then I met Jackie, a beautiful girl, very smart, at a dance, and we saw each other a few times after that. Then she went to Long Island for a summer and I went to visit her there. When she came back, she invited me to meet her folks. After I learned they were West Indian, probably from Jamaica—and I knew that Jamaicans were a very fastidious people, hardworking and interested in education—I figured they wanted to look me over, so I accepted her invitation. Not only did they live in Striker’s Row, an upscale Harlem neighborhood, but her father was a highly esteemed, prominent lawyer. Afterward, Jackie was as sweet as ever, but she implied that her family was old-fashioned in the West Indian way, and they were not particularly happy with anybody she met. Clearly, she was dropping me, though as nicely as she could.

  For years after, I wondered what it was that got me so dismissed. Then I began to realize that besides the fact that I had no table manners whatsoever, I had tried to sell myself as something that I wasn’t, pretending to be knowledgeable about topics of acceptable conversation when I didn’t know beans about anything. Whenever they asked about my education, for example, I told the truth, but n
evertheless tried to infer that my education was more in-depth or significant than it really was. Eventually, I could almost hear what they were thinking—Oh, this poor thing. He really doesn’t know much, does he?

  Not long after that, just before I left to go to Africa to make my second picture, Cry, the Beloved Country, I fell madly in love with a woman in New York. We had decided that upon my return, once she spoke to her folks about it, we were going to get married. While I was away, we were talking twice a week by long-distance telephone calls, and about the fifth time I called, she dropped it on me: her folks were up in arms. They didn’t want her to marry me, and they wanted her to finish school, where she was studying to be a psychiatric social worker.

  “But what do you want?” I asked

  “Well, my parents…” she began. And each time I asked what she felt, she picked up the same refrain: “My parents…”

  And there I was in South Africa.

  I came back and saw her, and realized there was no chance at reconciliation. After we parted ways, she followed the path that her parents had wanted for her. And they were right to feel that I didn’t have the experience that qualified me to be the husband of a daughter they were sending to Barnard. They were thinking of what was best for her. After we broke things off, they sent her to Jamaica with friends and relatives to look for a husband, and she soon found one. That marriage, however, lasted less than a year. Later, she married a friend of mine, with whom she had children, but the marriage was short-lived as well. And then she married a guy who was several years her senior. She is now eighty-one and in a convalescent home, where I went to visit her not so long ago—and found the same person, very bright and still very attractive for her age.