Areopagus Volume CVIII
Seven short lessons every someday.
Welcome one and all to the hundred-and-eighth volume of the Areopagus — and with magnificent news to get us started.
I’ve been working on something recently which I can now, at long and joyous last, announce… The Cultural Tutor’s Grand Tour: The Story of Europe in Six Cities.
It’s an original audio series I’ve made with Audible, a travel show with a slightly different angle on what it means to travel.
The whole history of a city can be discovered from its smallest details, details concealing stories that are unexpected, tragic, beautiful, and bizarre. And so it is these stories I’ve tried to gather, the ones you can discover just by wandering around a city’s streets and paying attention to the things we usually overlook. Clocks, football, architecture, love letters, lamp posts, coffee — these are also history, are also culture!
What will we encounter on The Cultural Tutor’s Grand Tour?
A cemetery built in the year 5845 (not a typo), the (surprisingly) thrilling history of the cappuccino, Istanbul’s most peculiar graffiti, the mystery of why there are ten days missing in your phone’s calendar, and the Dutch origins of the famous French tricolour. We’ll hear first-hand accounts of the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD and the Viking siege of Paris in 885 AD — both brought to life by the miracles of modern sound engineering — and we’ll meet the likes of Jo van Gogh (Vincent’s sister-in-law), Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent, and Erik Satie.
The stories are endless: FC Barcelona’s world-famous jersey was taken straight from a boys’ school in England; Naples had foreign exchange students coming all the way from China in the 18th century; our word ‘tomato’ comes straight from the Aztec word tomatl, because tomatoes came to Europe from the Americas — along with pineapples, chillis, and even potatoes!
If you’d like to listen, here’s the link; I do hope you enjoy it.
And now back to this week’s Areopagus, which comes to you as the second instalment of our Valentine’s Special: an essay on why we write about love, why we read about love, and whether it’s any good for us. There is also a ‘musical prelude’ to set the tone, both literally and figuratively.
I have tried something slightly different here. The approach, subject, and purpose are all atypical for the Areopagus. Whereas I normally try to prioritise clarity above all else, I have given this essay a more impressionistic and wide-ranging style. For example, as a rule I never mention anything in the Areopagus — a writer, an art movement, a technical term — without explaining its full context. With this essay, however, I have let myself make certain references without explaining them fully. But I have only done this because, so far as I could tell (and I hope I’m not wrong) it suited the subject better to write this way.
With all that being said, and without further ado, I present Books versus Love.
Prelude: Classical Music
Piano Concerto No. 5, II: Adagio un poco mosso
Ludwig van Beethoven (1811)
Performed by Friedrich Gulda and the Berlin Philharmoniker
Flower Clouds by Gustave Moreau (1903)
For a musical prelude I had no choice but to select the second movement of Ludwig van Beethoven’s Fifth Piano Concerto. Its name is simply the tempo at which the piece is supposed to be played: Adagio un poco mosso means “Slowly, but with a little bit of movement.” The first movement is Allegro, meaning “Quickly”, and the third movement is Allegro ma non troppo, meaning “Quickly, but not too much”.
A concerto is any piece where you have a single soloist accompanied by an orchestra; the soloist could be playing a cello, violin, or (as in this case) piano. Whereas the other movements of Beethoven’s Fifth Piano Concerto feature more prominent strings and winds, the second movement uses them very subtly and gently, almost minimalistically, to enhance the piano rather than battle with it. And so, although standalone it is sumptuous, heard in the context of the full concerto — between the far more dramatic and energetic first and third movements — Adagio un poco mosso is even more beautiful, like a lovely flower blossoming impossibly among the rocks of a wild mountainscape.
Beethoven was a master of ‘absolute music’, which is music without any externally attached meaning or context. The alternative is ‘programme music’, where a piece is given a title or even accompanying text to explain its themes and ideas. Think of Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture, which is inspired by the Napoleonic Wars.
But that doesn’t mean ‘absolute music’ isn’t about anything, of course. Because, even if individual notes don’t have any intrinsic meaning, they nonetheless make us feel a certain way. Adagio un poco mosso is not “about” love any more than clouds at sunset are “about” love; and yet the music is, just like those clouds, charged with the most meltingly romantic atmosphere we could imagine. And so, liberated from any particular meaning imposed on it by a specific title or theme, we are free to let this heavenly music guide our imaginations and hearts without the burden of context.
Books versus Love
Or: Bones & Bile contrasted with the Written Word,
and the Right Offices of Science and Art, so-called, Compared
George Orwell once wrote an essay called Books versus Cigarettes. In it he compared the relative cost of both and lamented that his compatriots spent their money on the former when they could have been getting much of the latter for less the price. These days his argument doesn’t quite hold true, but there are many other things to which we might compare books: boozing, football, socialising, soaps, dancing, gardening, daydreaming, sleeping, podcasts, or video games. Most often in the 21st century we compare books with the Internet, or various parts of it, especially social media. By making these comparisons we mean to say that books are a better use of time than, say, doomscrolling Instagram or flicking through a few dozen YouTube reels. Consider the results of this poll, released last year. It caused quite a stir, precisely because our general belief is that people should spend more time reading rather than doing whatever else they happened to be doing instead:
Books are always flattered by such comparisons. That is why we make them; the purpose is to encourage reading. Alas, there is another comparison we must draw, and one that — troublingly — does not flatter books but cautions us against them.
Where to begin? I confess that, at one moment or another of late, I was thinking of nothing other than all the books I could have been — and, felt, should have been — reading. I have barely paid Charles Dickens any attention, for example. When, if not now, will I finally find the time to read him? But what of all the books I have read that demand rereading? Dante is never far from my mind. Do I really understand anything about his Divine Comedy? And how many times, after all, can one read Shakespeare? An infinitude, for he is always far ahead, waiting for us to catch up. And what of reading books in their original tongue? I speak a little Latin and less Greek, as they say — time to correct this fault? It would only take a few months of a few hours’ concerted study each day to do so. But then we also have Italian, Arabic, and Chinese, and so many other languages, dead or living, that I would benefit from learning.
This feeling follows me around and sits on my back. A horrible fogginess that distracts me from wherever I am by thoughts of what else I could be doing. Nothing unusual; we all bear, hour by hour, phantasms of elsewherity. But the curious thing about distraction-by-books is that it usually relates to the very thing we are (or should be) doing at the very moment of our distraction. If books teach us about life, surely there comes a point at which we must live rather than read. Else why read at all?
True, I have tried to read a lot; my friends tell me that I am “well read”. But by any historical standard I am woefully underread. The sheer erudition of somebody like Francis Bacon (for example) is startling: his works, like those of so many others I have quoted in these newsletters, Montaigne or Erasmus or Browne, are patterned with a shockingly broad array of references to and quotations from other writers. What it means to be well-read now (like what it means to be a heavy smoker!) is not what it meant one, two, three, or four centuries ago.
So: these thoughts and more besides (again, mainly drawing up mental lists of all the books I haven’t read) were running through my mind. Bad enough in any case; worst of all because I was having these book-thoughts while in the company of somebody I love, and who loves me, and to whom I should have been giving all my attention.
What was the point of all these books I had read if, in the midst of life itself, I was unable to live it?
In The Eagle’s Nest — a book I find myself returning to, again and again, almost against my will, as one of the broadest and wisest little things ever written — John Ruskin points out that we would rather meet Theseus himself (the mythical founder of Athens) than see his famous statue, carved by Phidias and placed on the Parthenon, though now in the British Museum. His argument was about the relationship between art and life; Ruskin argued that art must always, by definition, be secondary and inferior to life itself, saying:
You shall never love art unless you learn to love the thing it represents better.
Of all possible authorities on this matter he gives William Shakespeare, speaking through the character of Theseus (hence his comparison) in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Theseus’ bride has commented on the shoddiness of a play performed in celebration of their marriage; he responds:
The best, in this kind, are but shadows.
The best of art is only ever a shadow of life, is always in reference to life — and can therefore only be understood inasmuch as we know life, or can only be of value inasmuch as it teaches us about life, or helps us to see it more clearly.
I wonder why Ruskin didn’t also use the example of Hermione in The Winter’s Tale. At its culmination (read no further to avoid a spoiler) King Leontes is shown a statue of his long-dead wife, Hermione. All present remark on its supremest quality; Leontes most:
Still, methinks,
There is an air comes from her: what fine chisel
Could ever yet cut breath? Let no man mock me,
For I will kiss her.
This statue is Hermione herself, thought dead but actually living. The obvious, necessary question: would Leontes rather have a perfectly lifelike statue of his wife, or his living wife? We may take her statue, in asking this question, as a symbol of all art, while the real Hermione is a symbol of that which art refers to, life itself. There is surely only one answer: the real Hermione. To give any other answer is a repudiation of living. And so, this being the case — that life is always preferable — why read at all?
To unpluck that thorn we must first seek out another: why would anybody ever write about love — the intensest kind of life — in the first place? The truth is plain enough. As Lord Byron says in Don Juan, so perfectly and troublingly:
Think you, if Laura had been Petrarch’s wife,
He would have written sonnets all his life?
He is talking of Petrarch, the poet and scholar of the 14th century whose legendary sonnets (the basic model on which all subsequent, in Italy and elsewhere, would be based) were written in the shadow of Laura. Some have argued was not real, that she was only ever an emblem of love, an imagined object of Petrarch’s affections supposed to hold the same place in his heart and mind as Beatrice did in Dante’s. Perhaps. But even in this imagined circumstance he did not have her. Alternatively, even if we accept that she was real, this is also true. In reality or fiction, Petrarch was never united with his great love.
To me it seems a lack of love is all that has ever driven writers to write of love; a lack, or at least some form disunity, for whomsoever wrote of love perfected? We know why all these love books have been written. The opening sonnet of Sir Edmund Spenser’s Amoretti goes:
One day I wrote her name upon the strand,
But came the waves and washed it away:
Again I wrote it with a second hand,
But came the tide, and made my pains his prey.
“Vain man,” said she, “that dost in vain assay,
A mortal thing so to immortalize;
For I myself shall like to this decay,
And eke my name be wiped out likewise.”
“Not so,” (quod I) “let baser things devise
To die in dust, but you shall live by fame:
My verse your vertues rare shall eternize,
And in the heavens write your glorious name:
Where whenas death shall all the world subdue,
Our love shall live, and later life renew.”
All literature of love is an attempt by the writer to deal with struggle or strife; there is no other possible reason to write of love, because love lived is in itself perfect. Spenser, scared not of his own death but of the death and ultimate erasure of his passion, wants to immortalise it in verse. That is why he has written; we are serving him by rereading his love poetry, giving continued life (as he hoped) to his mortal passion, so long as we pay it precious attention. Would we have been better reading that, then, or better living our own passion, or even striving to preserve our own against time?
Spenser was not alone; Shakespeare in his nineteenth sonnet reveals at last why he has bothered writing them at all:
Devouring Time, blunt thou the lion’s paws,
And make the earth devour her own sweet brood;
Pluck the keen teeth from the fierce tiger’s jaws,
And burn the long-liv’d Phoenix in her blood;
Make glad and sorry seasons as thou fleets,
And do whate’er thou wilt, swift-footed Time,
To the wide world and all her fading sweets;
But I forbid thee one more heinous crime:
O, carve not with thy hours my love’s fair brow,
Nor draw no lines there with thine antique pen!
Him in thy course untainted do allow
For beauty’s pattern to succeeding men.
Yet do thy worst, old Time! Despite thy wrong
My love shall in my verse ever live young.
Time diminishes all things material, even beauty; but against Time humankind has invented a sort of antidote, in pigment, stone, or word, called Art.
Sir Philip Sidney, writing his own sonnet sequence within a decade of Spenser and Shakespeare, explains his purpose, more honest and less grand, in the very first:
Loving in truth, and feign in verse my love to show,
That she, dear She, might take some pleasure of my pain,
Pleasure might cause her read, reading might make her know,
Knowledge might pity win, and pity grace obtain,
I sought fit words to paint the blackest face of woe;
Studying inventions fine, her wits to entertain,
Oft turning others leaves, to see if thence would flow
Some fresh and fruitful showers upon my sun-burned brain.
But words came halting forth, wanting Inventions stay;
Invention, Natures child, fled step-dame Studies blows;
And others feet still seemed but strangers in my way.
Thus, great with child to speak, and helpless in my throws,
Biting my truant pen, beating myself for spite,
Fool, said my Muse to me, look in thy heart, and write.
Sidney differs from Shakespeare and Spenser; he does not yet admit of seeking to immortalise his love in verse, but wishes instead to win his love’s love (in the first place) by writing some.
In every case, thus far, Byron seems to have been right. Each of our poets has written of love because there was something they lacked or at least were forced to reconcile: their lover was dead, or did not love them, or they feared that inevitably onsetting Time threatened to bury their passions forever.
And why else did Dante write? His whole journey through Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven seems to have been a quasi-blasphemous, visionary apology for his apocalyptic love, redrawing the lines of Christian faith so that his love for Beatrice could fall within them. But, in cases both of Dante and Petrarch, and of Sidney and Spenser and Shakespeare, do you really believe they would have rather written their poetry and not had their loves, or had their Beatrice and Laura and not written at all? It would be a terrible thing, were the first proposition true, and would mean that everything they ever wrote between them was fraudulent.
Another way of asking this is: would you rather watch an adventure unfold on screen, or be part of an adventure? Perhaps life is, must always be, a disappointment, a falling-short. If this is true then love literature — all “Love Art” — ever aims at bridging this gap between what we hope or suspect is possible and what we know to be experientially available. Ah, but we are tempted by it! I can only call it “the Unbridgeable” — that feeling, known to all who have felt it, of a strange inconsolable sense of separation from what was and what is, the tremulous pain of a moment passed and unrecoverable.
Byron also said, incorrectly but revealingly:
In her first passion woman loves her lover,
In all the others all she loves is love.
And I think that explains half the things he ever wrote!
This sense of Not-Having, this Neverhaving — a philosopher or somesuch will have coined a better neologism; for now, not having read them, I settle for my own awkward compound — is the substance of almost all Love Art.
A mere shadow, empty and eternally unsatisfactory, though alluring because of how closely the illusion matches the hoped-for and desired ends. A sort of coward’s way out for those unwilling to risk the catastrophic defeats that real love necessarily entails. Easier to read of Orlando’s fury, and thereby deludedly think we know something of love, though it be but a shadow’s shadow, than let ourselves fall hopelessly and absolutely in love, only to be spurned in the end and find our world crashing down about us. We choose the cheapest of shortcuts, trifling like Faustus with our soul to secure the meagrest of pleasures, for fear that the higher and real delight — from which the shadow is cast — will turn out too far past our grasp.
A perfectly happy person would never write, or even read, anything. Happiness is surely (and by definition) unified and thus stable, indivisible and imperfectible; the act of writing (or reading) is one of creation, of an extending outwards or an absorption, and can therefore only be carried out by a disunited, dividual, perfectible being.
The only possible alternative is what we call “devotional” literature: a type of work usually religious, always overflowing with joy. Perhaps, creatures as we find ourselves, the human uncontrollably spills over into rapture precisely when unity is achieved — when Love is perfected. Of this sort, of Devotional Love Art, I turn to Elizabeth Barrett Browning, the imperturbable rejoinder to Byronism. She had her love, and wrote nonetheless:
We cannot live, except thus mutually
We alternate, aware or unaware,
The reflex act of life: and when we bear
Our virtue onward most impulsively,
Most full of invocation, and to be
Most instantly compellant, certes, there
We live most life, whoever breathes most air
And counts his dying years by sun and sea.
But when a soul, by choice and conscience, doth
Throw out her full force on another soul,
The conscience and the concentration both
Make mere life, Love. For Life in perfect whole
And aim consummated, is Love in sooth,
As nature’s magnet-heat rounds pole with pole.
There is no chord of lament here; she is not ill-at-ease with Time’s erasure, not seeking to woo or court. There is none of Dante, Petrarch, Spenser, Shakespeare, or Sidney.
The final of Sir Philip Sidney’s sonnets is a renouncement of his Love, a kind of Shakespeare-in-Prospero last bow:
Leave, me, O love which reachest but to dust,
And thou, my mind, aspire to higher things.
Grow rich in that which never taketh rust;
Whatever fades, but fading pleasure brings.
Draw in thy beams, and humble all thy might
To that sweet yoke where lasting freedomes be;
Which breakes the clouds, and opens forth the light,
That doth both shine and give us sight to see.
O take fast hold; let that light be thy guide
In this small course which birth draws out to death,
And thinke how evill becommeth him to slide,
Who seeketh heav’n, and comes of heav’nly breath.
Then farewell world; thy uttermost I see:
Eternall Lov, maintaine thy life in me.
Sir Philip switches, after a hundred sonnet’s worth of suffering, from what he elsewhere calls mere “desire” to something he considers higher. It is a leap from the romantic to the devotional — and he promptly ceases to write his love poems!
As Marlowe says in Hero and Leander, another tale itself of people who loved rather than writing about love:
It lies not in our power to love or hate,
For will in us is over-rul’d by fate.
This is true, but it does lie within our power to respond when our will to love or hate has been overruled. Shall we accept this love and plunge into it, or shall we flee, frightened?
We become twisted around one another so strangely in love, and it terrifies us. You can always tell when somebody has never been in love, has fled with fright from the apparition of the abyss. There is a caution in them, a distance. And of those who have been spurned? Even the purest love can be translated by hope into hatred. The deepest hatred always springs from an inability to reconcile oneself with failure in love.
But there is a part of us that would rather see the statue of Theseus than meet the king himself, a part of Leontes that would prefer to have a lifelike sculpture of Hermione that he might weep over instead of his beloved wife returned. We are frightened that, having the thing so anticipated, it will not meet our expectations. Neverhaving is itself a kind of permanence, defined perhaps by perpetual turmoil, but constantly satisfying to us because we can spend a lifetime struggling with it. This darker element draws us in; we want to be in that state of disharmony represented so exquisitely by Petrarch, Byron, and Spenser’s ilk — it is in some sense comforting, in some way sustaining, to indulge in the acute awareness of not being able to have something. There is, we may say, a certain rapture in falling.
After all, in our most beloved romantic stories we do not find the lovers ever writing of their romance; they are, always, living it. And there is always a struggle, always a Neverhaving. Though many tales of romance do conclude in perfect union, that is where the story ends. For what else is there to say? “And they lived happily ever after” is a sentence; it cannot be a book or play.
To speak something is to kill it, in a way; it is, necessarily, a crystallisation of something fluid and formless, plastic and evoluble, joyous and mysterious in its dreamlike essence, into something hard and real, unsatisfying if improperly cast, and like marble impossible to reshape if flawed, only destructible, capable only of being left behind as a failed vision, an unfulfilled project.
This awful tension I have rarely found more magnificently expressed than in the poetry of Marina Tsvetaeva:
Where does such tenderness come from?
These aren’t the first curls
I’ve wound around my finger—
I’ve kissed lips darker than yours.The sky is washed and dark
(Where does such tenderness come from?)
Other eyes have known
and shifted away from my eyes.But I’ve never heard words like this
in the night
(Where does such tenderness come from?)
with my head on your chest, rest.Where does this tenderness come from?
And what will I do with it? Young
stranger, poet, wandering through town,
you and your eyelashes—longer than anyone’s.
Her composure is startling as she walks a tightrope, glancing upwards, downwards, backwards, forwards, across the landscape of her life and the skyscape of what her life might have been or might yet be. She explores that dark, enchanting dichotomy between Neverhaving and Having to its utmost. I let Tsvetaeva be the last word here.
We have ranged widely, must now collect our thoughts. The question that remains is whether reading (or writing) can ever be an end in itself, as love is an end. Though I adore Montaigne, I wonder what his life was like, and at what points precisely he ever lived. Above all I am bothered by the idea that Montaigne, when at dinner or with his children, or riding about his estate or reluctantly visiting the city, did nothing other than think about how he would describe these experiences. Was he always paying attention to the thoughts provoked in his mind by his surroundings, and pursuing those new lines of thought, rather than actually living in and engaging with those surroundings? Montaigne himself commented on this, I am sure, though I cannot remember in which essay and cannot place my hand on the quote. But, certainly, in one fashion or another, and probably several times, he will have made this observation.
Thomas Browne, Robert Burton, and Arthur Schopenhauer (among numberless others; these are but the ones I recall most vividly) have written of the danger of reading too much. Or, in William Hazlitt’s words:
The description of persons who have the fewest ideas of all others are mere authors and readers. It is better to be able neither to read nor write than to be able to do nothing else. A lounger who is ordinarily seen with a book in his hand is (we may be almost sure) equally without the power or inclination to attend either to what passes around him or in his own mind. Such a one may be said to carry his understanding about with him in his pocket, or to leave it at home on his library shelves. He is afraid of venturing on any train of reasoning, or of striking out any observation that is not mechanically suggested to him by passing his eyes over certain legible characters; shrinks from the fatigue of thought, which, for want of practice, becomes insupportable to him; and sits down contented with an endless, wearisome succession of words and half-formed images, which fill the void of the mind, and continually efface one another. Learning is, in too many cases, but a foil to common sense; a substitute for true knowledge.
Are books a pathway to something higher, then, or a mere escape, or less than that a way of consoling ourselves, or even less than that a substitute for true knowledge?
Humankind has been in a permanent, irreversible, and rapturous state of psychosis — though sometimes faltering, or fragile — ever since we invented (or discovered?!) language. It opened up a whole new way of being, like falling into an abyss, of increasing velocity and perpetually accumulating returns. This explains our constant embracing of carnal pleasures, or even carnal sufferings. Of the lowest order they are food and drugs, then sleep, because these are fundamentally non-linguistic, predating language, not requiring it. Then, most obsessively of all, most pleasurable and tormenting, most addictive and demanding, are violence and (to respect the taboo it perhaps ought to be?) ‘amorous congress’. No words needed here. They are bloody, animalistic, and vital — they are atavistic.
So the question is: whither humankind? We have been mangled permanently by language; such is the pessimistic view. We have been offered enlightenment, liberation, and bliss by language; such is the optimistic view. What is language? It matters not. What does it do? That is the question — because it does not seem to add anything to us. Only, it has allowed us to perceive ourselves more clearly and thoroughly, to look inwards and find what was already there, only invisible, finally revealed.
Of love I am unsure, for love may have emerged when language was invented or discovered. It is not really carnal, though parts of can sometimes be, and is only partly atavistic; dually attached is a higher and profounder grace, an all-consuming fire, in which we can choose to burn up or flee from into the darker, more comforting recesses of mere earthly delight.
In the end, I think, there is some worth in books. John Ruskin also said that the only possible purpose of art (of any good art) is either to give form to truth or grace to utility. Art, giving form to the truths of love, helps us make clearer sense of what we feel but cannot quite understand. It is (like Beatrice to Dante!) a guide, a lantern in the distance to direct us, but never a replacement for life itself, which is the thing to which we are being directed by Art.
Let me put all of that another way. What does science tell us about humankind? Lots. From a skeleton, even from a single bone, we can retell half the story of a whole life: of what they ate, where they lived, what diseases burdened them, what food nourished them. These are the miracles of chemistry, biology, and the other physical sciences. With the brightest minds and most perceptive technologies we can discover multitudes from a grain of human matter.
But what no bone can ever tell us, not even fragmentally, is how the human being who once possessed it felt. We could speculate that a certain person having had a certain disease or grisly wound meant they suffered much, and was thus unhappy. But this is childish. Day to day I find no correlation between a person’s happiness and any of their outward characteristics, be they of health or wealth or anything else. Emotion and circumstance are separated spheres. And least of all a bone tells us about love; science reaches its limits.
What a person wrote, however, can tell us what they believed or felt. So that is the right role of art, then — it is the science of emotion and imagination, which are no less part of our nature than bones and bile, may even be the highest elements. Consider it a spectrum, ranging from the basic facts of chemistry through to one’s belief or lack thereof in god; science, through to literature, are the means by which we measure and understand any given thing about a human being.
Love Art either consoles or guides us; consoles us against Neverhaving, or guides us toward what we know lies within us — that perfect union of having — and urges us bravely to seek it. But there the offices of Love Art stop short; at some point we must Love, or risk Loving, rather than reading or writing about it. Leontes rightly said that no fine chisel could ever cut breath; no Love Art could ever replace Love.
I return to Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and what I think are four (three and a half, really) of the best lines ever written of Love, or ever that could be written:
…when a soul, by choice and conscience, doth
Throw out her full force on another soul,
The conscience and the concentration both
Make mere life, Love.
Browning could not have written those lines had she not loved first and written later. Writing was an aid to her ability to see and understand inwardly the magnitude of her love. Perhaps, having written once or twice, and read more often, she was able to love better. I hope so, but do not know. All we can be certain of is that she had rather felt the love she expressed than expressed it.
And here Browning pushes up against the limits of what can actually be said. We remember that Sidney stopped writing his sonnets when he chose devotion over desire; Browning could not have gone much further. All who have loved, or at least loved truly, are familiar with the event horizon that, once passed, turns all our words into irony.
Giving form to truth is the oldest and only service of Art; some truths, however, must remain forever formless — and, given form, necessarily die. It could not be any other way. For if this feeling — this way of being, really — could be described, then what a pathetic outcome for all our hopes and fears! If love is boundless, is somehow universalising and sublime, then it must necessarily be indescribable.
Reading about love can be good for us, but one day we must be put down our books and be brave enough to love, hoping only that those books will have helped us work up the courage to do it.
And that’s all
If reading about love is difficult to justify, then reading about reading about it hardly stands a chance! Nonetheless I hope you’ll think this has been justified, my Beloved Readers. A more typical Areopagus (featuring its seven short lessons) will be returning to your inboxes within the next fortnight. Until then — exeunt!
Yours,
The Cultural Tutor