4/11/24
I jumped into Stendhal’s “L’Amour” with the assumption that I understood completely where this guy was coming from — but this chapter makes me think that maybe I don’t, and that’s why I’m struggling with it. Maybe my growing distance from him and the world of love stories in general comes from not experiencing romance the way most others do.
This isn’t to say that the way I experience romance is so removed from the world that I can’t relate to anyone’s discussion of it. Some of my favorite movies of all time are love stories. They all just happen to be bittersweet — films like Hiroshima Mon Amour, In The Mood for Love, The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, Annie Hall and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. I guess you can describe my favorite movies as all being “unhappily ever attached” instead of “happily ever after.”
Stendhal returns to some of his rhetoric in the introduction and notes that most people won’t understand or like what he has to say:
Many people will disagree with what I have to say now, but I shall confine myself to addressing those who have been, shall I say, unhappy enough to love passionately for many years, unrequitedly and against hopeless odds.
I know that he’s trying to describe the kinds of intense feelings he has experienced and perhaps provide some emotional cover for others who’ve been through this and might feel misunderstood as a result. But I have to be honest, I have not experienced love this way:
‘The sight of anything extremely beautiful, in Nature or the arts, makes you think instantly of your beloved. This is because, on the principle of the bejewelled bough in the Salzburg mine, everything sublime and beautiful becomes a part of your beloved’s beauty and the unexpected reminder of happiness fills your eyes with tears on the instant. In this way a love of the beautiful, and love itself, inspire each other.
Everything sublime and beautiful in the world is transferred to this one person? I’ve experienced some intense feelings, but nothing as insane as this. Stendhal then goes on to describe how its impossible to remember the happiness created by seeing or speaking to the beloved. That doesn’t ring true to me either.
Maybe I really haven’t experienced Stendhal’s version of love or limerence. I’ve had this question about my experiences before. Often the people who experience limerence barely even know the object of their affections. That would never happen for me. In fact, it takes a great deal of time for feelings to take root in me. I can find someone beautiful without being deeply affected. My feelings are driven far more by seeing the depths of a woman, by understanding her as a flawed (and therefore interesting) human being.
Or, in other words, I’m kind of an anti-crystalist. I don’t want to idealize someone. My romantic mind aims to tear down the illusions and delusions. I don’t know if this makes me any more right than Stendhal, it just makes it harder for me to relate to him.
He applies a similar approach to literature, which I find equally odd. He calls the chief function of a novel to be inducing reverie. To me, that’s the sign of a poor novel, that it does such a weak job of keeping my attention that I’m off in my own daydream and not focusing on the text.
He closes by noting that poets and others with lively artistic imaginations need to stay away from most people because they take them out of their reveries and back into irritating reality. On this, I can see his point.