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

all that counts.
    Once you’ve fallen, you discover that you’re twinned. You’re permeable, your thoughts ‘float into one another’. You mirror each other. You have everything in common. It’s ecstasy when you’re together, agony when you’re apart. When reality conspires, as it so often does, to put obstacles in your path, to prohibit, to make secrecy a need, passion is fuelled, excitement doubled. All your senses are newly alive. The universe accrues in significance. The smallest signs are meaningful. When your lover is absent, you long, you yearn, you adore the memory of him. When he’s present, you’re blissful, omnipotent.
    Unrequited, spurned, love turns into hate. The very singularity of the desired one metamorphoses into a set of loathsome attributes. Overweening pride, gross indelicacy, cheap taste, meanness… the list is unending. Though once, there was only him or her.
    If death or that death-in-life which is rupture intervenes, it is as if a knife had hacked out bits of yourself. As potent as love is its loss. Love tumbles into searing, enveloping hatred. Or mourning, a sense of utter destitution.
    This arc of love with all its individual variations embosses itself within you, ever ready to mark or underpin subsequent experience.
    These bare phenomena of early love seem to be universal, though not everyone experiences them. Or not the first time round.
     
     
    My initial account of first love between the beetle-browed boy and the radiant girl is culled from the early pages of Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita that ‘Confession of a White, Widowed Male’. Here the ‘demented diarist’, the notorious Humbert Humbert, having died in legal captivity and asked in his will for his memoirs to be published, recounts his adolescent passion for Annabel Leigh, the girl-child who is a precursor to Lolita, his later more outrageously illicit lover. Indeed, as Humbert Humbert underlines, without the time-stopped Annabel and the imprint she left on him, ‘there might have been no Lolita at all’.
    First love, as the poets, songwriters, filmmakers and chroniclers tell us again and again, can be the most intense of life’s passions. The heightened perceptions, the tumultuous sensitivities of adolescence, the wakening sense that anything and everything is possible, play into its power. ‘It is a commonplace,’ Stendhal, the great French Romantic realist wrote in his book On Love , ‘that sixteen is an age which thirsts for love’. The rub is that it’s also an age that ‘is not excessively particular about what beverage chance may provide.’ As yet himself unformed, the teenager’s love object can be equally fluid and shifting–like Proust’s Marcel, enraptured by all the girls ‘in a budding grove’ who race by on their bicycles, conferring glamour as they go, yet seem hardly distinguishable from one another, until one in particular leaps to his attention. Biologically driven, suffused with desire which may have no immediate object, alive to nature and to sensation, filled with expectation and an inwardness through which the lyrics of pop songs, stories or poetry play, the dreamy adolescent is ripe for passion of turbulent proportions.
    The narrator of Turgenev’s novella, First Love , captures the febrile state with precision:
    I knew a great deal of poetry by heart; my blood was in a ferment and my heart ached–so sweetly and absurdly; I was all hope and anticipation, was a little frightened of something, and full of wonder at everything, and was on the tiptoe of expectation; my imagination played continually fluttering rapidly about the same fancies, like martins about a bell-tower at dawn; I dreamed, was sad, even wept… At that time the image of woman, the vision of love, scarcely ever arose in definite shape in my brain; but in all I thought, in all I felt, lay hidden a half-conscious, shamefaced presentiment of something new, unutterably sweet, feminine…
     
    When the slender, flirtatious and