4/10/24

As should be obvious by now, there’s only so much talk about love that I can take before getting extremely frustrated with the topic. I remember well a long, pointless weekend car ride my family took in New Jersey when I was eight, sitting in the back seat, hearing the 20th straight sappy love song come on the radio, and I recall blaring out “why does every song they sing have to be about love?” To which my father laughed and said, what do you want, songs about baseball?

Well, mock me if you must, but one song out of 20 about baseball would be fine with me. I have a whole world of interests, I’d be happy to hear about any of them. Or just mix things up with an instrumental, that would suit me as well. But all-love-all-the-time is sickening and I feel comfortable now with my complaint.

But given this life-long stance on the subject, why am I now focused on a book on this subject — especially considering my conscientious objector status to the mating/dating game as it exists today? I’ve reached a point in my personal life where I feel like I’m on top of just about everything. I’m a content human being. I feel like I have direction and handle my responsibilities well.

The one part of my life that has never gone well is romantic relationships. They’ve all been, in their own unique form, a disaster. And I apply this judgment not only to the romantic and sexual relationships I’ve had, but also the ones I’ve simply desired. They brought, on balance, mostly anguish to my life.

So I can understand Stendhal’s laments, but there’s a part of me that keeps wondering — why put yourself through such misery? There’s always the possibility of opting out. Maybe Stendhal is really at war with himself and feels obliged, by social convention, to keep at something he really wants no part of. It’s certainly one way to interpret “The Red and the Black” — that it’s protagonist in the end willfully chose death over his endless romantic misery..

Onto Stendhal’s 13th chapter. It’s actually not a bad section, it has some interesting insights about how society helps bring couples together through parties. This for example:

A whirling waltz in a drawing-room lit by a thousand candles will set young hearts afire, banish shyness, bring a new awareness of strength, and in the end give the courage to love. Because in order to fall in love it is not enough just to see a lovely person; on the contrary, extreme loveliness deters the sensitive. You have to see her, if not in love with you, at least stripped of her dignity.

That’s actually a really interesting thought, because when you watch a period film or tv show, you are observing these balls as highly choreographed, with every character perfectly dressed and dancing in synchrony. Stendhal is saying here that the actual value of such events isn’t this image of perfect beauty, but the awkward moments — the dress that isn’t quite right, the dance missteps, and the conversations shouted over too much activity and at times misunderstood. In these moments, you see people stripped of their dignity and doing their best to fit in despite it all.

This leads Stendhal to surmise that it is boredom and solitude that make love possible. He takes issue with the standard romance trope that life difficulties make love grow stronger:

When love’s troubles are mixed with others (those of vanity: when your mistress offends your proper pride, your sense of honour or of personal dignity; those of health, money, or political persecution, etc…) it is only superficially that love is increased by the difficulties. Since they engage the imagination elsewhere, they prevent the crystallizations of hopeful love and the growth of little doubts in requited love. The sweetness and the madness of love return when these difficulties are removed.

I honestly have no idea if Stendhal is right about this, but at least his point of view is novel. He’s all-in on this crystallization theory and his attachment to it makes “The Red and the Black” far more readable than your standard period love story.