All About Love: Anatomy of an Unruly Emotion Read Online Free PDF

public arena. In these pages I have not ventured into the love of God, that ultimate absent presence. That would take another book–though this doesn’t mean that the impact of the Abrahamic religions on the way we love hasn’t informed my thinking.
    Nor have I dealt with the love of those significant others that pets can be, the love of nation and patriotism, the love of art or place, or that mainstay for many, the love of work–though all of these can evoke our energetic passions. I hope that neither the constraint I have had to practise, nor my choices, are too delimiting.
    Working on this book, I was often enough aware that writing about love was not unlike writing about life. My little four-letter word simply carried too many meanings and went charging off, like Cupid himself, or Freud’s libido, into a host of unruly directions. Living does really seem to be ‘all about love’, which carries the best and the worst of us.
    But onwards, to the starting point on our journey–the tumultuous seas of our first passions. What is it that constitutes them and drives their intensities, so that even if they don’t last for ever they mark us ineradicably, making us the beings we are? What is this thing called rapturous love?

PART TWO
     

Configurations of Passion: First Love, Young Love
     
    There are few things we should keenly desire if we really knew what we wanted.
     
La Rochefoucauld
     
    It is yearning that makes the heart deep.
     
Saint Augustine
     
    I had no first love. I began with the second.
     
Turgenev
     

 

 
     
    Falling…
     
    They were thirteen or thereabouts. He was a moody, beetle-browed boy; she, a radiant creature with honey-coloured skin, slender limbs, brown bobbed hair and a big bright mouth. His mother had died when he was three: her elder sister stepped in with a ‘fatal rigidity’ to look after him and his philandering, straight-talking, adored Dad. The girl’s parents were conventional and as strict as the boy’s aunt.
    He lived on the French Riviera. Her family had rented a villa for the summer nearby. Clean sand, sea vistas, bright sun or clusters of pale stars attended their meetings. Already at the first, they had everything in common: tennis, a preoccupation with their own minds, infinity. Their thoughts floated into one another. The same dreams, they discovered, had long permeated their sleep. They were both moved by the softness and delicacy of baby animals.
    And suddenly they were madly, frenziedly in love. Their agonizing desire for each other could only be assuaged by taking each other in, body and soul, assimilating every particle of the other. Prevented by youthful clumsiness and the perpetual presence of vigilant elders, they managed only half-hidden touches, a grazing of fingers, knees, salty lips. Then one night, they stole away to a mimosa grove to slake their passion with deeper kisses and more ardent caresses, no less ecstatic for being broken off by the interruption of parental voices. There was only one other tryst before she was taken away. Four months later, she was dead. He never forgot her.
     
     
    Falling in love, as everyone knows, is intoxicating. It catches you unawares. It’s magic. It’s the light or the place. It’s chemistry or the brush of an angel’s wings. It’s beyond reason. It’s instinctual. It’s unwitting.
    And when you fall, you plunge into an ungovernable ocean. The first time in, the intensity is at its greatest.
    Anything, large or small, can ignite the attraction. The toss or turn of a lock of hair, the arc of a nose, the quick stride, the lolloping run, the sudden upturned glance, the tickle of a laugh, the bashful smile, the pallor or glow of a cheekbone, the lulling timbre of a voice, the scent caught in the air, a thought solemnly declared, a shy or earnest aside, the brush of fingers on skin… The subject may be a passer-by, a face in a crowded room, an acquaintance, or someone you’ve long known. The ‘who’ of them is