Recently I did some work on my Stendhal project, pulled all the pieces together and wrote a front-piece connecting essay. I liked how that all turned out and mused elsewhere on this site that maybe I could go back to Stendhal and complete a book project on “On Love.”

After taking another look at the book this evening, I can definitively respond “no way” to that. “On Love” is a bad book that would have been thrown in the scrap heap if it came from anyone but an already famous novelist.

There’s an adage that if you can explain why you love someone, then you aren’t really in love. I think what this means is that love is all about intangibles, such as the faults that you find endearing. But even more important, there’s a physicality to love. It’s buried in our nervous system and whenever we try to explain it, we are doing so after the fact. Those reasons we cite are rational guesses trying to describe what comes down to feelings.

So, that’s the first problem I have with a book — it took something purely subjective, that not even most individuals can describe well in particular circumstances, and tried to make it universal. Such attempts always annoy me, whether it’s someone trying to extrapolate their personal experiences into a political worldview or a rich person lecturing us on how their unique intelligence and work ethic is fully responsible for their success.

In a similar manner, Stendhal wants to catalog sensations. But even if you buy his categories — and for the most part I do not — you’re left thinking — so what? Yes, some may feel this way when they begin to love someone … but ultimately, what does it matter which Stendhal category you fall under, or what stage of crystallization is taking hold?

But my bigger issue with the book is this — there is a problematic element in love, a type of false love that can afflict us. It exists mostly in the head, lacking a physical element. So when you apply the filter about a love that cannot be explained, this type of love might seem to fit. But that’s a thinking error — and false love results from mixing up the inexplicable with the confounding.

To say something is inexplicable isn’t to say it boggles the mind. Rather, the mind is irrelevant. You love someone, you feel it, it’s obvious whenever that person walks into a room. You can’t put into words why it is true.

The confounding type of love is driven by the mind’s endless churning, by someone who lives rent free in your head. In this case, there is an epic string of arguments and counterarguments about the other person’s feelings and how they match with your own. Stendhal dramatized this back-and-forth beautifully in “The Red and the Black.” But here he’s stripping away the drama and there’s no scaffolding to support the argument that remains.

Confounding love, which in modern parlance is often described as limerence (coined by Dorothy Tenant, a fan of Stendhal’s book) always includes a self defeating rabbit hole of examination. On Love is a description of Stendhal’s rabbit hole, bereft of personal details that might have made it interesting and coherent.

The most difficult love situation is one that combines the inexplicable with the confounding. Because in this case — which I think is very well described in the film “Drive My Car” — if you are stuck in a confounding type of love that forces you into a long exercise of untying the knot of your mind, you can actually clear up the riddle, untie that final knot, but still end up with the reality that you love this person, inexplicably and hopelessly, especially in Kafuku’s case when Oto is no longer there to love.

This is why the film’s ending is so beautiful. It does not end with Kafuku finding a new love — he doesn’t even get the final scene, that goes to Watari. It is her resolution and triumph. We should assume at the end of “Drive My Car” that Kafuku, having rid himself of the great riddles of his late wife Oto, can now properly mourn her death and, in time, love someone else. But he still has some hard days ahead of him.

Stendhal seems to enjoy the confounding aspects of love because, while he continually describes himself as sensitive in the book, he’s actually closed off, more interesting in winning a romantic contests than experiencing something that could transform him.

So, having killed off Stendhal once and for all, perhaps I should turn my attention to Tolstoy instead.