2/23/24
In his very short chapter 5, Stendhal still doesn’t have all that much to say about love. It seems a little hard to believe that he’s capable of carrying this on for another 55 chapters, but that goes to show how hard he‘s suppressing his most painful thoughts.
To discuss this subject honestly, Stendhal will have to admit that he’s been obsessed with someone for quite some time — subjecting himself to all the embarrassment that comes with unrequited love.
For now, he has only three thoughts. First:
Love is a fever which comes and goes quite independently of the will.
That’s a very sad, hopeless statement, but it comes right after him saying that “Man is not free to avoid doing what gives him greater pleasure than any other action.” But really, is that pleasure? Is being feverish beyond your will in a state of hopeless suspended animation truly pleasurable? The condition he’s describing sounds like long-term torture with occasional moments of relief, relative pleasure at best.
Next Stendhal says:
There is no age limits for love
I’m starting to think that Stendhal is wrong about this, and it has consequences for my own attitudes on this subject, but I’ll come back to it. And third he says:
The embarrassing consequences of grand passion are the only proofs I will admit in evidence of its existence.
This I believe is true. Stendhal uses shyness around someone as evidence of love. My even more embarrassing example is this: one woman I know makes me break out in heavy perspiration whenever I’m around her. I otherwise look and feel completely calm (and fortunately, my head isn’t affected), but sweat just pours out of my armpits when she’s around, like Albert Brooks in “Broadcast News.”
The simple answer here, the one Stendhal is embracing, is that I’m in love, I have the fever. But I think something more complicated is happening.
Go back to what Proust wrote and I quoted in my first essay in this series. He compares the women he thought about constantly to the ones right in front of him and has this response:
When I saw them, when I listened to them, I found nothing in them that might resemble my love or be able to explain it.
So what are these highly charged limerence feelings? I believe they are directly related to the anima. I have conflated this woman into an anima character. The virtual world we inhabit makes this quite easy — people become mere text and talking head images.
I can hold onto the illusion that she is worthy of this worship much of the time, but when I see her in person, that illusion is shattered — it’s obvious that she’s just an ordinary human being. (And this, by the way, is not an insult about her looks or any other characteristic she holds. She could not possibly live up to the image of her that I’ve created, and that’s no fault of hers.) And so I avoid contact. I try to steer clear of her because I don’t want to be proven wrong and to then feel that all of this time and energy has been wasted.
Part of me desperately wants to cling to this anima fantasy while another is screaming — open your eyes, there’s so much less there than you imagine. My embarrassing consequence results from not a feverish love, but an internal conflict, a stubborn refusal to honestly see her.
There is some rational basis for this. My anima projections over the past several years have been beneficial to me. They have been a source of inspiration and motivation. I fear that without an anima dominating my unconscious, I’ll lose all drive and ambition, and to do so at this stage of my life would be tantamount to beginning a glide path toward death,
What would I gain in return? Perhaps a renewed desire to seek out a real relationship. That goal is tempered by my increasing belief that this part of my life might have just passed me by, that I’m simply not attracted to the women who would want me at this stage in life. And so, why not cling to an anima? And if this one loses her goddess powers, why not just find another?
I have no answers to these questions now. This project is all about raising them and seeing them play out in the context of Stendhal’s story. Maybe he has some surprising insights in store for me that will open my eyes to other possibilities.