Welcome one and all to the ninety fourth volume of the Areopagus. Given last week’s celebrations it is only right, I think, that today’s volume is dedicated wholly to Love.
But, first, a technical matter. Some of you have been receiving emails that are “clipped” — that means the newsletter is not fully displayed in your inbox, and that you may have missed parts of them, particularly The Seventh Plinth and Question of the Week. A message like this may appear, interrupting the newsletter mid-sentence:
This can be fixed either by reading the Areopagus in the Substack app (or online) or by clicking “show full email” or “view entire message” when reading it in your inbox. That should open the whole newsletter and ensure you don’t miss a thing.
All that being said, all administrative queries quelled — time for us to wander the mysterious and miraculous paths of romance. Another Areopagus begins…
I - Classical Music
Si dolce e'l tormento
Claudio Monteverdi (1624)
Performed by Philippe Jaroussky and L'Arpeggiata Ensemble
Claudio Monteverdi (1567-1643) is a titan of musical history. His life and career are usually given as the watershed between Renaissance and Baroque music. Alongside that era-defining accolade (already monumental!) Monteverdi is also credited as the first truly great pioneer of opera.
This song was first published in 1624 — a full 401 years ago — and yet it hardly seems to have aged a day. That is partly because (of course) modern classical music, and music more generally, is built on the very foundations laid by composers like Monteverdi, and is thus familiar to us. But that is not everything. Is music, or all art, a mere matter of what we are accustomed to? I don’t think so. No doubt that theory represents part of the truth, but not its entirety. There do seem to be universal qualities of music and art, from across the epochs and around the world, that speak beyond their time and to people even unaccustomed to their forms and styles. This song’s name translates to “How sweet is the torment”, and its lyrics (written by the poet and composer Carlo Milanuzzi) describe in some depth the afflictions of unrequited love. For example:
From fire and ice
I have no respite
but at heaven’s gates
I will find peace…
Hence I have paired this piece with an 1876 painting by Friedrich Preller the Younger of Sappho, the Ancient Greek poetess, who legend says was consumed by unrequited love for the ferryman Phaon and threw herself from the cliffs of Lesbos in despair.
But, even if we cannot speak Italian and do not understand these lyrics, are we surprised to learn that this is a song of lover’s lament? No. And so the simple but unavoidable truth taught us by Monteverdi’s Si dolce e'l tormento is that, even if times and technologies change, and although machines may come or go, heartbreak remains. Even the disinterestedest review of what people in centuries gone by have written seems to force the conclusion that technology and circumstance are but foils to human nature. We are precisely who we were then, even if the way we live and our habits have changed.
II - Historical Figure
Saint Valentine
Valentine’s Day is, though we often forget the fact, a feast day. These are days defined not by feasts in the usual sense (of a jolly meal) but in the older sense of a celebration. Celebrations of what? Of the lives of saints. The tradition emerged in the early ages of Christianity, when martyrs (those who had died for the faith) were commemorated each year on the anniversary of their death. But there are lots of martyrs and lots of saints, of course, and so a liturgical calendar has been created (varying between denominations) whereby every single day of the year is the feast day of one or more saints.
So, 14th February is the feast day of Saint Valentine. Who was he? One hagiography (the technical term for the story of a saint’s life) says that he lived during the 3rd century AD, a time when Christians were being persecuted by the Roman Empire. Valentine served as a priest (possibly in the Italian city of Terni) and, after secretly performing weddings for Christians, was imprisoned in Rome. There, having been sentenced to death and awaiting execution, he cured the blindness of his jailor’s daughter — thus becoming the patron saint of people with epilepsy. Valentine was executed on 14th February 269 AD; it was two centuries later, in 496 AD, that Pope Gelasius I officially established his feast day.
Whether or not this story represents the merged hagiographies of different people (there may have been three Valentines active around the same time; it was a common name) or the branched hagiographies of a single man, we do not and perhaps shall never know. In any case, such is the concised story of Saint Valentine.
But how did the feast day of this martyr become a celebration of love? That his hagiography involves marriages admits of some romantic association, but this was only a minor part of his veneration. Alas, there is no consensus here — history, as ever, does not provide a clear answer to the ever-thronging question of why. We know that Valentine’s Day was firmly established as a festival of love by the Late Middle Ages; how this came to pass is where the mystery lies.
One theory links it to the Lupercalia, an Ancient Roman spring festival, celebrated in February, that involved the pairing of spouses and fertility rites. Appealing — but the first actual association of Valentine’s Day itself with love didn’t come until the 14th century. In which case it may have been wholly invented (or at least popularised from obscurer origins) by a single man: the great Medieval poet Geoffrey Chaucer, whose Canterbury Tales, written in the 14th century, are the sure foundation of all English literature since. It was in another poem he wrote, called The Parliament of Fowls, that Chaucer seems to have solidified the romantic mythos of Valentine’s Day.
It describes a man who falls asleep while reading and has a strange dream involving (after a journey through the Temple of Venus, the goddess of love) a huge assembly of different kinds of birds, overseen by the personification of Nature. The birds have gathered because, Chaucer tells us, 14th February is the day when they choose a mate:
For this was on Seynt Valentynes day,
Whan every foul cometh there to choose his mate,
Of every kinde, that men thynke may…
Hereafter follows a tale involving three male eagles vying for a female eagle. She rejects all three, postponing her decision until next year, and Nature accedes. The dream ends, the narrator reawakes, and he returns to his books.
It may well have been this very poem that established (or at least furthered a pre-existing tradition of) the 14th February as a celebration of romance in Late Medieval England… or not! All we can say is that something did emerge in those misty Middle Ages, linking love with Saint Valentine — and that hundreds of years and millions of kisses later we find our supermarkets filled with pink cards and heart-shaped chocolates.
III - Art
Kisses
Rather than giving you a single painting this week, I think it might be more interesting and useful to consider (as we sometimes do) several. For it is in differences that a thing’s nature is most clearly revealed; comparison teaches colossally quicker than explanation. So here, in chronological order, are six paintings of kisses.
We begin with the Italian painter Giotto, whose work marks the boundary between Late Gothic and Early Renaissance art. Below is a scene from the Scrovegni Chapel, whose walls he painted in the early 1300s. It shows Joachim and Anne, the parents of Saint Mary, embracing at the Golden Gate of Jerusalem. What to make of it? One feels that Giotto could not have added anything more to this painting, and coequally that we could take nothing away without seriously defacing his composition.
Clarity of narrative was Giotto’s priority. Hence the size of the humans is intentionally disproportionate to the architecture of Jerusalem. These walls and towers are there to tell us that this is Jerusalem, not to give us a vision of how it might actually have looked. There is more we might say of Giotto’s style, but for now I think this point suffices: it is the very thing that gives his art such a blissful and pure serenity.
We travel four hundred years forward in time: to the 18th century, and to Jean-Honoré Fragonard’s The Confession of Love. His art is pure Rococo — a melodramatic, theatrical style defined by pastelly tones, hazy brushwork, and a generally fanciful atmosphere, often taking as its subject the gentlemen and ladies of the day, all powder and frills. Fragonard was a master of colour and composition; this is, even abstractly, a sensorial delight. But his love-scene is rather too frivolous, I think, to be taken quite seriously. There is something slyly overwrought about it, something overly theatrical and almost comical that draws us back from finding serious or lasting passion here. Such we tend to find with much Rococo art.
Now we turn to the German painter Caspar David Friedrich. Below is Summer, from 1807. Friedrich, in true Romantic fashion, uses landscape — thus, nature — as the primary vehicle of expression. The lovers take up a tiny fragment of the full canvas; they, embracing in the shade of a flowery grove, reflect in their shared passion the light and joy of summer. This is far from Friedrich’s best landscape; it feels somewhat paint-by-numbers, even generic. Still, it serves as a useful example of how Romantic painters might approach the subject of a lovers’ embrace.
Next we have a painting by the English artist Dante Gabriel Rossetti, from 1864. Rossetti was a Pre-Raphaelite. This was a movement (as the name suggests) which sought to revive the kind of art that was prevalent before Raphael, meaning before the High Renaissance. So: notice how Rossetti returns to the flattened perspective of actual Medieval art, somewhat like that of Giotto. He is unconcerned by creating too scrupulous an illusion of reality andis thus freed to give us fuller pictorial clarity. Extraneous and meticulously painted details do not interfere with the primary subjects of this painting; Rossetti, rather, is able to decorate his scene with gorgeous, elusively painted roses, fabulous costumes, and a sort of patterned gold background. I think this, in comparison with Fragonard’s scene, is almost painfully sincere; it possesses a childlike simplicity that creates a purer, deeper sense of adoration. Such were the Pre-Raphaelites in general — or, at least, at their best.
Now for something completely different: a painting by the Norwegian artist Edvard Munch, simply called The Kiss, from 1897. That Edvard Munch’s The Kiss was painted within a few decades of Rossetti’s should tell you how quickly and how radically art was changing in late 19th century Europe. Now, Munch’s kiss should caution us against using the word “realism” with too much confidence. Of course, the real world does not “look” like Munch’s painting. But does a kiss not feel precisely like this? Notice how the lovers’ faces have melded into one, how their bodies and even the world around them have become a vortex of colour and form, a realm of despairing blue and cold grey with an ember of passionate red at its centre. So this is an example of Expressionism, a style that was all about depicting the world not as it looks but as it feels.
Last we have a painting by the Belgian artist René Magritte, simply called The Lovers, from 1928. This is a masterpiece of Surrealism. He did not (like Salvador Dalí) fall back on the obviously grotesque or monstrously dreamlike to discomfort us. Magritte, rather, liked to take the simplest and most familiar details of ordinary life and very slightly alter them. To have made a kiss — one of the ancientest and most primordial of human experiences, far above context or place — into something so peculiar, so unsettling, was Magritte’s aim. Strange to think that this is, in its details, essentially the most “realistic” of the six included here. But the thing we are looking at, however realistically painted, is bizarre — and that is where the crux of Magritte’s Surrealism reveals itself.
So, these six kisses have shown us six different styles: Late Gothic, Rococo, Romantic, Pre-Raphaelite, Expressionist, and Surrealist. But what are styles? No style can paint a picture; only a person can do that. So any capitalised art movement is merely a useful way of grouping together several artists who painted in a broadly similar way, usually at a similar time. This is always worth bearing in mind when we look at a painting; talking of styles is only a helpful framework, a lens by which to help us see art more clearly, but never the key to understanding it fully. One needn’t know anything about “styles” to appreciate a painting, nor to draw meaning from any of these paintings of kisses — only our full humanity, our intellect and experience and heart combined, can do that.
IV - Architecture
A Note on the Taj Mahal
The Taj Mahal is (rightly) one of the world’s dozen or so most famous buildings. But, like all the most well-known things, its real nature is generally unknown. We recognise it without knowing what it is, more as a general symbol of India (like Big Ben of Great Britain, or the Pyramids of Egypt) than an actual building in its own right. In which case, rather than giving you a full analysis of the building’s architecture, it may simply be worth asking: what is the Taj Mahal?
Most often people assume it is a temple or palace, a place either of religious worship or royal habitation. It is, though somewhat religious and somewhat royal, fully neither. The Taj Mahal is, rather, a mausoleum — a vast monument erected to house and preserve two tombs. It was commissioned by Shah Jahan, the fifth of the Mughal Emperors, who ruled vast swathes of northern India between the 16th and 18th centuries. Construction began in 1631 and was completed in 1653. For whom did Shah Jahan build this mausoleum? His beloved wife Mumtaz Mahal. Shah Jahan was also interred in the Taj Mahal when he died in 1658. But, though his tomb and cenotaph are larger, it is the tomb and cenotaph of Mumtaz Mahal (right beside his) that have pride of place — in the very centre of the mausoleum, at the heart of this marble kaleidoscope. Is the Taj Mahal the world’s most magnificent monument to love?
Now, mausoleums have an almost unique importance in Islamic architecture. That is true all around the world, and also in India, where during the age of the Mughals and other Islamic dynasties a series of vast, lavishly decorated, exquisitely imagined mausoleums were built:
Still, in the same way that the Hagia Sophia is a definitive work of Byzantine Architecture, the Parthenon of Greek, the Coliseum of Roman — such is the Taj Mahal of Mughal Architecture. It is a structure from which you can deduce more or less every principle that governed and motif that adorned the great buildings of the Mughal Empire: onion domes, raised chhatris, polychromatic marble inlay, floral decoration, jalis, pishtaqs, calligraphic inscriptions, tessellated tiles, and more.
The Taj Mahal is just as majestic as its reputation suggests and, if anything, even better. But rather than attempting and necessarily failing to provide a full ekphrasis of the Taj Mahal, I hope that simply pointing out its (surprisingly un-well-known) purpose will suffice this Valentine’s Day.
The only comparable monument is perhaps the ancient (and now destroyed) Mausoleum of Halicarnassus, one of the seven wonders of the ancient world. It was built for Mausolus in the 4th century BC. This Mausolus was the King of Caria, a region in the west of modern Turkey, though then a Greek kingdom ruled by the Persian Empire. His wife Artemisia built it for him after his death, and such was its magnificence that our very word mausoleum comes from this monument.
V - Rhetoric
Sweet Nothings?
William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet is hurt by its fame. Hurt, I say, because we are so familiar with the play that its beats and poetry have become dulled to us. So let us try to see with fresh eyes Shakespeare’s romantic masterpiece — to see, indeed, whether we are right in calling it such!
We take the famous balcony scene: Juliet has returned home from the ball where she met Romeo, there to find him in the orchard beneath her bedroom window. Where to begin? Well, I particularly love the way Juliet interrupts Romeo. She does so twice, cutting in before he ventures on a generic invocation of love, knowing even before he does that he is about to fall back on the tired tropes of romance-talk. Romeo begins:
Lady, by yonder blessed moon I swear
That tips with silver all these fruit-tree tops--
But Juliet steps in, using the very imagery he has chosen to beat him on his own terms:
O, swear not by the moon, the inconstant moon,
That monthly changes in her circled orb,
Lest that thy love prove likewise variable.
So the moon will not do for Juliet. “We’ve heard it all before”, she might well have said. Romeo asks?
What shall I swear by?
And then Juliet gives an answer that begins to reveal the full scale of the devotion that has already grown within her heart and soul:
Do not swear at all;
Or, if thou wilt, swear by thy gracious self,
Which is the god of my idolatry,
And I'll believe thee.
How could anybody respond to such a precise and so profound an invocation? Romeo has no chance. Still, he tries:
If my heart's dear love--
But Juliet has not finished — or, perhaps, knows that Romeo will again misunderstand and thus say the wrong thing. So she interjects once more, leaving the young man far behind in her wake, ever-waiting for him to catch up:
Well, do not swear: although I joy in thee,
I have no joy of this contract to-night:
It is too rash, too unadvised, too sudden;
Too like the lightning, which doth cease to be
Ere one can say 'It lightens.' Sweet, good night!
This bud of love, by summer's ripening breath,
May prove a beauteous flower when next we meet.
Good night, good night! as sweet repose and rest
Come to thy heart as that within my breast!
Notice how Juliet says this bud of love may prove a beauteous flower; she, though filled with love, remains tethered to reality. And so while Romeo, in a state of rapture, goes for hyperbole (who wouldn’t?), the much wiser and profounder Juliet speaks more concretely and with greater clarity — and thus more meaningfully.
Romeo, immature though sincere, goes on:
ROMEO: O, wilt thou leave me so unsatisfied?
JULIET: What satisfaction canst thou have to-night?
ROMEO: The exchange of thy love’s faithful vow for mine.
Juliet again is far ahead of Romeo, speaking with a kind of self-awareness he cannot yet comprehend. She replies, so movingly:
JULIET: I gave thee mine before thou didst request it:
And yet I would it were to give again.
And he, unable to really grasp what she means, suddenly fearing, asks:
ROMEO: Wouldst thou withdraw it? for what purpose, love?
Romeo thinks he has fallen in love, and perhaps he has, but the magnitude of Juliet’s adoration far outstrips his at this point in the play. He does go on to learn from her, and learns quickly; but, for now, he is in far too deep:
JULIET: But to be frank, and give it thee again.
And yet I wish but for the thing I have:
My bounty is as boundless as the sea,
My love as deep; the more I give to thee,
The more I have, for both are infinite.
Whereas the best Romeo could do was fall back on familiar metaphors, however eloquently and passionately stated, Juliet manages to provide a near-perfect description of selfless, all-consuming love. Her potential for love is a colossitude; she knows this, and also knows that Romeo does not yet apprehend it. How to say a thing that cannot quite be said? How to avoid lovers’ nonsense, those tired tropes, and say a thing that seems to escape us at all moments we approach it? Shakespeare, via Juliet, shows that it is possible.
VI - Writing
A Spacious Walk Beset with Thorns
Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy, though already a leviathan of a book, demands a library’s worth of notes to be understood. Published in several vastly expanded editions during the 17th century, it was the only book Robert Burton ever wrote — and to call it “dizzying” is a woeful understatement.
It is simultaneously satirical and sincere, maddeningly digressive, at times almost avant-garde, and absurdly erudite; one cannot read a single line without reference to some figment of Classical mythology, moment of real history, or concept of Renaissance philosophy. This online version (for example) contains over 6,800 endnotes, either translating Burton’s liberal Latin quotes or explaining his references. For a glimpse of his style — rolling, unpredictable — and his voice — startlingly direct, self-aware, fraught — consider these lines from the introduction:
I have overshot myself, I have spoken foolishly, rashly, unadvisedly, absurdly, I have anatomised mine own folly. And now methinks upon a sudden I am awaked as it were out of a dream; I have had a raving fit, a fantastical fit, ranged up and down, in and out, I have insulted over the most kind of men, abused some, offended others, wronged myself; and now being recovered, and perceiving mine error, cry with Orlando, Solvite me, pardon (o boni) that which is past, and I will make you amends in that which is to come; I promise you a more sober discourse in my following treatise.
Perhaps it makes sense. Robert Burton was a lonely librarian, an incredibly intelligent but catastrophically sensitive man who passed his life among books. In which case The Anatomy of Melancholy was his life’s work in every sense of those words. So: a full third of The Anatomy of Melancholy is dedicated to what Burton calls “Love-Melancholy”, to the troubles caused by love and ways to abate or solve them. Here is how Burton introduces this part:
“Love’s limits are ample and great, and a spacious walk it hath, beset with thorns,” and for that cause, which Scaliger reprehends in Cardan, “not lightly to be passed over.” Lest I incur the same censure, I will examine all the kinds of love, his nature, beginning, difference, objects, how it is honest or dishonest, a virtue or vice, a natural passion, or a disease, his power and effects, how far it extends: of which, although something has been said in the first partition, in those sections of perturbations “for love and hatred are the first and most common passions, from which all the rest arise, and are attendant,” as Picolomineus holds, or as Nich. Caussinus, the primum mobile of all other affections, which carry them all about them) I will now more copiously dilate, through all his parts and several branches, that so it may better appear what love is, and how it varies with the objects, how in defect, or (which is most ordinary and common) immoderate, and in excess, causeth melancholy.
I could have picked a hundred further quotes, but here is one that (for balance’s sake) gives us something different to the aforequoted Romeo and Juliet. Far from love’s joy and light, Burton gives us its sufferings and darknesses. I have left his Latin untranslated (as Burton wrote the book) to give you some sense of the whiplash one gets while reading his work:
You have heard how this tyrant Love rageth with brute beasts and spirits; now let us consider what passions it causeth amongst men. Improbe amor quid non mortalia pectora cogis? How it tickles the hearts of mortal men, Horresco referens,—I am almost afraid to relate, amazed, and ashamed, it hath wrought such stupendous and prodigious effects, such foul offences. Love indeed (I may not deny) first united provinces, built cities, and by a perpetual generation makes and preserves mankind, propagates the church; but if it rage it is no more love, but burning lust, a disease, frenzy, madness, hell. Est orcus ille, vis est immedicabilis, est rabies insana; 'tis no virtuous habit this, but a vehement perturbation of the mind, a monster of nature, wit, and art, as Alexis in Athenaeus sets it out, viriliter audax, muliebriter timidium, furore praeceps, labore infractum, mel felleum, blanda percussio, &c. It subverts kingdoms, overthrows cities, towns, families, mars, corrupts, and makes a massacre of men; thunder and lightning, wars, fires, plagues, have not done that mischief to mankind, as this burning lust, this brutish passion.
In his condemnation of the evils love has wrought on humankind Burton achieves a furious, hurricane-like, sprawling rhetoric. Much modern writing is brilliant, and brilliant because of its very simplicity. But I think that our general preference for a clear and casual style, one that (at its worst) sinks into a sort of timid ironism, precludes the sort of thundering, kaleidoscopic prose used by Burton.
Otherwise, and in any case, The Anatomy of Melancholy is a book that could perhaps only have been written precisely when it was written, and one of the sort the world no longer does or could produce. So if you want to read something wholly unlike anything else you have ever read, and at the same time to read of love in a way you never have before, Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy will serve. I cannot honestly “recommend” such a strange and exhausting book; drawing it to your attention, however, is the very least demanded by Burton’s genuinely unique (and therefore surely inimitable) masterpiece.
VII - The Seventh Plinth
Romanz
Etymology is almost always gloriously revealing, and at the very least surprising. So let us ask an etymological question and see if we can learn something thereby: where does the word romance come from?
It originated in France about one thousand years ago. During the Middle Ages Latin was the language of the clergy, and also of philosophers and poets and scholars. But the common people did not speak Latin — they spoke French, of course (or, to be precise, Old French). This language was regarded as “romanz”, which essentially means something like “Romanish” — a corrupted form of what had once been Latin, the language of the Romans. We still use the word Romance today to describe languages descended from Latin, including modern French, Spanish, Portuguese, and Italian.
In any case, the word romanz came to be used not only to describe common French as a language, but to describe the stories written or spoken in that language. Thus a romanz was simply a story composed in French rather than Latin. And, because of the things that these stories were usually about, romanz came to refer specifically to tales of thrilling quests, courtly love, heroical deeds, and chivalrous knights. This word arrived in England and became romaunce. Hence (for example) Thomas Malory’s stories about Arthurian legend, written in the 15th century, were called romaunces.
So, originally, “a romance” was a story generally defined by fantastical adventure, usually but not primarily involving themes of love. This explains why several of Shakespeare’s plays are described as “romances” (The Tempest, The Winter’s Tale, Pericles, and Cymbeline) because they involve such fantastical tropes — whereas Romeo and Juliet is not among Shakespeare’s romances. Admittedly this was a retrospective classification made by Victorian literary critics, but it more or less holds true to what the word romance meant in Shakespeare’s time.
It wasn’t until the 17th century that a romance came to be squarely associated with love, though even then it did not yet refer to love between people; it remained a genre of fiction. So, finally, we arrive at the late 18th and early 19th centuries, when the capital R Romantic Movement emerged. This was (to speak in broad strokes) an artistic movement that emphasised the emotional side of the human condition over its rational one, often taking for its inspiration tales from the Middle Ages (hence the very use of the word Romantic to describe it!), and inevitably tied up with other ideals about nature and beauty. Think of Wordsworth, Byron, or Shelley in poetry, and composers like Chopin, Wagner, or Tchaikovsky in music.
It seems to have been this Romantic era that gave us the non-capitalised romance and romantic as we understand them today — chiefly relating to love, though not to love alone, but to an incredibly expressive and adventurous kind of passion, thoroughly emotional rather than rational, impulsive and performative, artistic and idealistic.
Still, in its essence, in a millennia-old kernel of meaning buried deep within the word, romance is a sort of critical Medieval term intended to describe and disparage popular fiction. Though, just like the terms Gothic, Baroque, Impressionist (and so many more) what started as a pejorative has long since trascended those narrow boundaries.
Question of the Week
Last time I asked you:
Is romance dead?
And here are some of your answers:
Peter M
Romance is not dead. It is the mystical experience of the young; the manners of its celebration might change but not Romance itself . It dies for most of us with the passing of youth. Larkin put it well in his poem Sad Steps; he says of the moon's stare:
It is a reminder of the strength and pain
Of being young; that it can't come again
But is for others undiminished somewhere.
SG
Romance is not dead. We see it all around us as people court and fall deeply for each other. The expectations of how it takes shape over longer periods has changed and with it our adherence to old lessons has died. The pace of digitally driven existence makes everything more fleeting and less likely to last than the analog past. For over a generation we have stuffed ourselves on excess and convenience, forgetting that romance is to be savoured as it ages. It is not chewing gum where we pop a new stick every 15 minutes to keep the flavour going. Romance that leads anywhere good goes through lulls that make the highs so powerful that a garden of earthly delights is all that exists from the now until the end.
Jill M
Where there are humans, there exists longing in the soul. So exists romance. Whether two souls shall meet to share the sentiment is a question that yet awaits an answer.
Sakshi P
No. As long as there's life on earth, romance will live on.
David R
Today is St Valentine’s Day and I have just read on screen that if I want to send a Valentines card I can simply ask my flavour-of-the-month AI to compose a suitable poem for me to write on the paper of the card.
In imagining a card on paper, I conclude that I am hopelessly old-fashioned, and that, indeed, romance is probably dead, displaced, in the world of today, by what has come to be known as “transactional” thinking.
And for this week’s question, to enrich all our lives with the breadth of your collective knowledge:
What is your favourite love poem?
Email me your answers and I’ll share them in the next Areopagus.
And that’s all
How to conclude a missive such as this? Those final lines of Dante’s Paradiso demand to be read again:
Here force failed my high fantasy; but my
desire and will were moved already—like
a wheel revolving uniformly—bythe Love that moves the sun and the other stars.
These, and nothing more, are needful now. So one & all I wish you well — and bid you good-night.
Yours,
The Cultural Tutor