For Saint Valentine’s Day, I wanted to interview classic authors about what love is and how it makes us feel. But as you can guess, it doesn’t seem possible, as most of them are long dead and were dispersed on different continents when they were alive. Am I crazy to stick to such fanciful ideas? Or is there somewhere a wonderful tool, a kind of time and space machine, waiting to be discovered? While roaming the virtual world of this website, I finally found what I was looking for! This time and space machine is hidden in plain sight. It often evades us, and we overlook its wonder. Yet, the answer is obvious: this is the library!
I came in, and by the magic of reading, the best authors and some of their characters floated out of their shelves in a hazy form, materialising little by little, and sat down around me to participate in the conversation. Imagine a beautiful place, part library, part drawing room, with couches, armchairs and a round coffee table. For the occasion, I displayed candles, boxes of chocolates, cupcakes and very aromatic teas and coffees.
I explained why I summoned them, and here is the transcript of our encounter.
Ophelia, sadly
« To-morrow is Saint Valentine’s day »
Ernest Hemingway
« If my Valentine you won’t be, I’ll hang myself on your Christmas tree. »
It got Edgar Allan Poe’s attention, who was brooding in a corner.
Edgar, prophetically
« The death then of a beautiful woman is unquestionably the most poetical topic in the world, and equally is it beyond doubt that the lips best suited for such topic are those of a bereaved lover. »
Lord Alfred Tennyson
« Tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all. »
Me
Perhaps we should refocus on what is love…
Victor Hugo
«What Is Love? I have met in the streets a very poor young man who was in love. His hat was old, his coat worn, the water passed through his shoes and the stars through his soul.»
E. E. Cummings
That’s what I wrote about her: « You are my sun, my moon, and all my stars. »
Nathaniel Hawthorne agreed
« Love, whether newly born or aroused from a deathlike slumber, must always create sunshine, filling the heart so full of radiance, that it overflows upon the outward world. »
William Shakespeare, as a joke
« Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day? »
Me
William… I am sure you have some interesting ideas to share about love.
William Shakespeare
« Love is not love Which alters when it alteration finds, […] O no, it is an ever-fixèd mark That looks on tempests and is never shaken »
Charles Dickens agreed
« I loved her against reason, against promise, against peace, against hope, against happiness, against all discouragement that could be. »
Pearl S. Buck was more nuanced
« Love cannot be forced, love cannot be coaxed and teased. It comes out of heaven, unasked and unsought. »
Khalil Gibran
«When you love you should not think you can direct the course of love, for love, if it finds you worthy, directs your course.»
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
« Love does not consist in gazing at each other, but in looking outward together in the same direction. »
Me
So you mean that love gives us meaning and happiness?
Victor Hugo
« The greatest happiness of life is the conviction that we are loved; loved for ourselves, or rather, loved in spite of ourselves. »
Jane Austen
« Perhaps it is our imperfections that make us so perfect for one another. »
William Shakespeare, shaking his head
« Is love a tender thing? It is too rough, too rude, too boisterous, and it pricks like thorn. »
Paulo Coelho agreed
« Love is an untamed force. When we try to control it, it destroys us. When we try to imprison it, it enslaves us. When we try to understand it, it leaves us feeling lost and confused. »
William Shakespeare
« My love is like a fever, longing still For that which longer nurseth the disease. »
Edgar Allan Poe in aparte
« And so, being young and dipt in folly, I fell in love with melancholy. »
Plato, feeling concerned
« Love is a serious mental disease. »
Marcel Proust with simpler words
« Love is a striking example of how little reality means to us. »
Dorian Gray as an example
« She is all the great heroines of the world in one. She is more than an individual. I love her, and I must make her love me. I want to make Romeo jealous. I want the dead lovers of the world to hear our laughter, and grow sad. I want a breath of our passion to stir dust into consciousness, to wake their ashes into pain. »
John Steinbeck, smiling at him
« I am happy to report that in the war between reality and romance, reality is not the stronger. »
Ambrose Bierce to conclude on this idea
« Love, n. A temporary insanity curable by marriage. »
Oscar Wilde, taking the idea on its head
« One should always be in love. That’s the reason one should never marry. »
Emma Bovary had sneaked to the romance shelves and was browsing books all along. And « Emma repeated to herself, ‘Good Heavens! Why did I marry?’ »
Jane Austen, who can’t help herself
« It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife. »
Oscar Wilde, blasé
« Men marry because they are tired, women, because they are curious: both are disappointed. »
Agatha Christie disagreed
« An archaeologist is the best husband a woman can have. The older she gets, the more interested he is in her. »
Socrates to Oscar
« By all means marry; if you get a good wife, you’ll become happy; if you get a bad one, you’ll become a philosopher. »
Sylvia Plath, dreamily
« I feel good with my husband: I like his warmth », and « I love his good smell and his body that fits with mine. »
William Shakespeare wanted to drop a sheath-and-sword joke, but was interrupted by Honoré de Balzac,
Balzac, in a more romantic mood
« Love is the poetry of the senses. »
D. H. Lawrence, to be poetic
« Love is the flower of life, and blossoms unexpectedly and without law, and must be plucked where it is found, and enjoyed for the brief hour of its duration. »
W. Somerset Maugham agreed
« One can be very much in love with a woman without wishing to spend the rest of one’s life with her. »
Don Juan and Casanova, in the thrill of their new bromance, were giggling together. They did agree, of course…
Me
But how does love make you feel?
Giggling
Me
In your mind! Love as a feeling …
F. Scott Fitzgerald
« I love her, and that’s the beginning and end of everything. »
Sophocles
« One word frees us of all the weight and pain in life. That word is love. »
Lao Tzu
« Being deeply loved by someone gives you strength, while loving someone deeply gives you courage. »
Plato
« Every heart sings a song, incomplete, until another heart whispers back. »
Katherine Mansfield
« What I feel for you can’t be conveyed in phrasal combinations; It either screams out loud or stays painfully silent but I promise — it beats words. It beats worlds. »
Virginia Woolf agreed
« I begin to long for some little language such as lovers use, broken words, inarticulate words, like the shuffling of feet on pavement. »
After a long silence, with only the sound of sipping tea or coffee, and the whispers of shuffling feet on the carpet
Me
What causes love? How does it begin? What are the signs?
Antoine De Saint-Exupery
« True love begins when nothing is looked for in return. »
Giacomo Casanova
« Love is three quarters curiosity. »
Iris Murdoch
« Love is the difficult realization that something other than oneself is real. »
Michel de Montaigne
« If you press me to say why I loved him, I can say no more than because he was he, and I was I. »
Leo Tolstoy
It began when « He felt now that he was not simply close to her, but that he did not know where he ended and she began. »
Aristotle, more extreme
« Love is composed of a single soul inhabiting two bodies. »
Emily Brontë agreed
« He’s more myself than I am. Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same. »
Charlotte Brontë, shocked by this idea
« I am no bird; and no net ensnares me: I am a free human being with an independent will. »
Ernest Hemingway, taking Charlotte’s side
« The most painful thing is losing yourself in the process of loving someone too much, and forgetting that you are special too. »
F. Scott Fitzgerald, philosophically
« And in the end, we were all just humans…drunk on the idea that love, only love, could heal our brokenness. »
Rumi
« Be drunk in love, since love is everything that exists. »
Raymond Chandler to lighten the moods
« Alcohol is like love. The first kiss is magic, the second is intimate, the third is routine. After that you take the girl’s clothes off. »
Lord Byron, winking at him
« Eat, drink and love…the rest is not worth a nickel »
Coco Chanel, walking from the lifestyle shelves
« I only drink Champagne on two occasions: When I am in love, and when I am not. »
Me
Oh, oh, we’ve got the attention of the non-fiction authors…
The Temperance Ladies were marching toward us with a frown on their face
Temperance Lady #1
Margaret Cavendish said, « For pleasure, delight, peace and felicity live in method and temperance. »
Temperance Lady #2, nodding
It was confirmed by Benjamin Haydon when he said, « Temperance in everything is requisite for happiness. »
Lord Byron and Hemingway rolled their eyes
Mark Twain, making fun of the ladies
« Temperate temperance is best; intemperate temperance injures the cause of temperance. »
The Temperance Ladies, angry, swirled back to their place
William Blake, relieved they’re gone, whispered
« Those who restrain desire do so because theirs is weak enough to be restrained. »
Emma Bovary, sitting on the floor by the romance shelves with a book on her knees, agreed: « Love, [she thought,] must come suddenly, with great outbursts and lightnings—a hurricane of the skies, which falls upon life, revolutionises it, roots up the will like a leaf, and sweeps the whole heart into the abyss. »
Me to the group
You have already hinted at the permanence of love. Can you tell us more about it?
Leo Tolstoy
« We are asleep until we fall in Love! »
Emily Dickinson agreed
« Till I loved I never lived. »
Leo Tolstoy again
« Love is life. All, everything that I understand, I understand only because I love. »
Walt Whitman
« […] medicine, law, business, engineering… these are noble pursuits and necessary to sustain life. But poetry, beauty, romance, love… these are what we stay alive for. »
Walter Scott
« Love rules the court, the camp, the grove, And men below, and saints above: For love is heaven, and heaven is love. »
Lord Byron, more seriously now
« There are four questions of value in life,[…]. What is sacred? Of what is the spirit made? What is worth living for and what is worth dying for? The answer to each is the same. Only love. »
Me
Right, you are finally on the same page. Now that everyone agrees, maybe we should conclude. Who has the final word to say?
William Shakespeare, trying to make sense of everything
« Love is heavy and light, bright and dark, hot and cold, sick and healthy, asleep and awake- its everything except what it is! »
F. Scott Fitzgerald, to reconcile everybody
« There are many kinds of love in this world, but never the same love twice. »
Me
And that’s the beauty of it!