4/9/24
I’m going to pick up Stendhal now where I left him on this site. I continued the project for a bit on Medium, but felt it hit a dead end — I was starting to dislike the book intensely and started to take it out on him. This led me to put the project aside, which was probably the right thing to do. I’m going to try again with some of these essays and see if I can start to make something useful of them.
I think my dislike was driven by this feeling that Stendhal’s very unpleasant reactions to his romantic feelings masked some self loathing. He felt the need to document what he was going through, but what came out wasn‘t rational, and given the novels Stendhal produced, that had to bother him.
In this chapter, Stendhal admits that there’s a madness in the kind of love he experiences. But it begins with more rhapsodies, even if they are becoming harder to believe.
He writes about how the discovery of new beauties leads to complete fulfillment of desires, many of whom he was unaware he possessed. This leads to a new description of love:
This is the reason why, on the moral plane, love is the strongest of the passions. In all the others, desires have to adapt themselves to cold reality, but in love realities obligingly rearrange themselves to conform with desire. There is therefore more scope for the indulgence of violent desires in love than in any other passion.
In a sense, this is similar to what Jung is describing in the anima, because these new “beauties” are internal states, not something being noticed in the physical world. Stendhal is saying that these strong feelings reshape the world we live in, leading him to call them “violent desires.” It’s an interesting phrase. I think he means something more like destructive desires, an impulse to destroy the life you have to enact the one you feel.
These types of desires invoke drives so strong that Stendhal feels helpless to them, attacked in a way. The lover enters a dream state where the beloved becomes property, someone who demonstrates your worth in the world, and someone who gives you the most possible pleasure in life. But all of this is based on hope and extrapolation, not anything that is knowable in that moment.
What makes Stendhal worth reading is that he allows his mind to drift to these places, but he’s still firmly rooted in reality:
In the midst of activities so frustrating to the desire for happiness, people lose their heads. From the moment he falls in love even the wisest man no longer sees anything as it really is.
So while Stendhal has been discussing crystallization so far mostly in positive terms, he now feels comfortable looking at the core problem it creates. While these feelings touch off visions of utopia, they also distort thinking. Carl Jung would see this as a wonderful thing, because the anima projection has just shown you what you truly desire in life and these feelings and expectations are internal states, not something to be acquired from another. But Stendhal doesn‘t see it this way and finds madness instead:
An alarming indication that you are losing your head is that you observe some hardly distinguishable object as white, and interpret this as favourable to your love. A moment later you realize that the object is really black, and you now regard this as a good omen for your love.
Jung would argue that Stendhal‘s attempts to understand his beloved and fit her into his vision are hopeless, that it would be far more fruitful to apply his penetrating analysis to himself. That way, crystallization becomes a beautiful part of life, an opening up of your desires. But instead — and this is not at all specific to Stendhal, it’s what most of us end up doing — we focus on the flesh and blood human who set off these feelings and wish for that magic creature to conjure up what’s missing in life.
It’s hard not to feel for Stendhal in this circumstance. In some ways you can bookend his journey with that of Kafuku in “Drive My Car.” In the film, he’s lamenting a lost love, but someone who came to personify his quest to understand his own complexity and unique desires. In this book, Stendhal is mentally chasing someone who he hopes takes up a similar role. First, be careful what you wish for. And second, as someone who lives too much in my head, I believe that all of us are probably more in love with difficulty and complexity than we are with anyone in particular.