About Me

I'm nobody! Who are you?
Are you nobody, too?
Then there's a pair of us — don't tell!
They'd banish us, you know.

How dreary to be somebody!
How public, like a frog
To tell your name the livelong day
To an admiring bog!
                                  —Emily Dickinson

December 26

On Love Stories

Just saw Slumdog Millionaire, a fantastic story about a boy in the slums of India overcoming the most adverse circumstances, but, of course, it was all wrapped up in a Hollywood bow of love story. She, in the end, is why he does everything: why he endures.

Perhaps romantic love really is the most important thing in the world. It’s the one gesture of choice you have, the one conscious choice you can make in the entirely random circumstance of the family you were born into. Making your environment a little more hospitable to you isn’t a bad way to spend your life.

But what was he in love with? He barely knew this woman. They were children together, briefly, and yet the ideal of her remained inside his head his entire life. It couldn’t have been her he loved. Though she was beautiful and seemingly lovely, she was only a slip of a character. His great love for her obviously wasn’t about who she was — she represented his romantic ideal of making whole his childhood loss. It wasn’t about loving her. I’m not sure why women find that romantic.

Or maybe it is better to be loved as a deity, with all the passion that engenders, despite the fact it has nothing to do with who you are. Human love is much more fleeting. Perhaps love only survives in the hothouse of ideals.