As with most holidays, I find Valentine's Day to be painfully commercialistic, such that many of the modes through which we are encouraged to celebrate the spirit of the day are, regrettably, contrived and impersonal, in the form of overpriced, waxy chocolates and cookie-cutter Hallmark cards. However, I am also a defender of holidays insofar as they give us occasion to celebrate where we otherwise might not (and very likely would not). Thus, I thought I might share some snippets of not only one of my most favorite pieces of writing, but also what is inarguably the most involved and philosophically-inclined love letter I've ever written. I hope that you will enjoy it, and that in it you will find something to nourish your own practices of love, today and every day:
It’s often said that family, or a good family, at any rate, is characterized by unconditional love. I’ve never found this definition to be particularly illuminating myself, for reasons with which you will sympathize, I’m sure: “What good is it to explain one esoteric concept in terms of another?” I’ve wondered. “If in order to understand family, I first have to understand love, then surely I’m on a fool’s errand.” However, seeing as I’ve made a career out of a fool’s errand, and coupled with my characteristic stubbornness (the two doubtless go hand-in-hand), I set myself to the task, and I believe it has borne fruit.
The meaning of ‘love’ is something about which I’ve been mulling intently for the past several years. More than that, what has particularly struck my interest is the activity of calling love into question; more than once, I’ve been asked to explain my idea of love. And a fair enough request it is, I should say: to utter these words to someone is to submit oneself to a cliche, the triteness of which, rather than conveying the singular nature of one’s love, can actually afford a person a degree of anonymity behind which to hide. You yourself once made this query, and in that instance, no less than the times before, I floundered, and felt more than a little embarrassed that I could not in a moment of intimacy paint an appropriately entrancing picture. Indeed, I felt acutely afraid, how woefully ill-equipped was I to convey the depths and ferocity of this love that was spilling from me, and with which I was so longing to reach you. Looking back, I find much to ponder in that exchange, and consider it a profound source of insight.
What is my plea, when I profess my love for you? What of my interiority do I hope to reveal by ‘love’ that cannot be given another name, and what do I hope the naming of it will do? The sense that one cannot help being inarticulate in the face of such quandaries, that one is hurling oneself at the bars of the cage, is, I think, the unique terror of the ineffable -- of that which is by nature inexpressible. I believe that love is ineffable, and in this way it seems to me, rather perversely, to be an even greater monstrosity than hatred, for which we’ve typically got words in great excess. One knows love, somehow, only when one finds oneself totally undone by it; like the mariner at sea who sighs, “Water, water everywhere, nor any drop to drink,” love, as well as I know it, cannot be contained by all the lyricism of poetry, nor the most masterful works of artistry. Still, it is a testament to the zealotry with which love grips us that we try relentlessly to create an idol to worship.
Once, I was asked by a dear friend to share my deepest fear, and after several moments of soul-searching, I surprised even myself when I answered, “Love.” Love is, first and foremost, a concrete encounter with the “other,” and is, like all such encounters, fraught with an ambiguity that is made all the more painful for the fact that in love more than any place else, we long for certainty. I think this is why Sartre famously quipped that “Hell is other people.” In his view, romantic love especially has as its ideal a perfect unity between two disparate consciousnesses, and common-sense tells us, of course, that such an ideal is not only an impossible project but a contradictory one; looking into each other’s eyes, Sartre suggests that lovers must inevitably confront the question of alienation: “What do you see when you look at me?” In the absence of another person, one is a devouring consciousness, the sole force which gives meaning to the world and everything in it. In the presence of another, however, one has the sense that one is no longer master of the house; confronted with the unnerving reality that one exists for others in how one appears to them, one becomes self-conscious -- one sees, that is, but one is also seen, and one knows it. In the face of such vulnerability, the principal object of desire becomes, at least in Sartre’s mind, not a seeing eye but a blind one; love devolves, tragically but invariably, into the metaphorical stabbing out of the other’s eyes.
Sartre’s take on love is ultimately a pessimistic one, which, in my opinion, does a good deal to account for its seductiveness. (It's always easier to give up a quest that is damned than one that is difficult but rewarding.) A certain memory gives me pause, however, to consider whether Sartre’s got the proper measure of things. Is love really doomed to fail? Standing in the living room one night, you and I stood looking into one another’s eyes, and you said, “I never know what I’m supposed to be seeing in moments like this.” What I felt for you in that instant was not quite pity but a tenderness so unprecedented that it was revelatory: “That there is someone looking back at you,” I replied. One of my best-liked philosophers, Judith Butler, frames love thusly, not as “a state, a feeling, a disposition, but an exchange, uneven, fraught with history, with ghosts, with longings that are more or less legible to those who try to see one another with their own faulty vision.” The most beautiful thing we can experience in love, I then realized, is not the satisfaction of a desire for perfectly shared meaning but reveling in the richness of its unreality.
It is only as something foreign that the other is revealed as an other, and to love is to love that alienness by which they escape us. When we met, I arrived a sojourner, but I fell so deeply for your country that the tribulations of being a stranger in a strange land have frightened me less than the prospect of leaving. “Someone like you,” as Karen Dalton put it, “makes it hard to live without somebody else.” From your language and culture to the history that birthed them, I want the collision of our lifeworlds to reverberate down to my very being so that I might begin to learn the topography of your spirit. My integration is destined to be imperfect: I will never achieve the fluency of the native, slipping now and again into mistranslations sometimes delightfully comical, sometimes enlightening, and sometimes impassable, but I might also, as an outsider within, come to know the place in a way that is different and, on occasion, truer than the native. In order to live among you, if you should let me, I yield to a transformation the full shape and impact of which cannot be known in advance. More than a wager we make, love in earnest is a wager we become.
What, then, of family? If family loves unconditionally, then, in becoming a family, one commits oneself to love under circumstances that cannot be predicated; the future is, after all, unknowable. Were this commitment made just once, then one’s life would belong to the past, and one’s days would be devoted in perpetuity to the safekeeping of a historic monument, like tending to the gravesite of something already dead. If the commitment that defines family is to have any vivacity, then it must be for the living, who commit themselves, time and time again, precisely as circumstances change. You’ve told me you worry that in time, I might become alienated from you, and I understand: I, too, live in fear of becoming someone who you will not want. In loving you, however, I have gotten a taste of home, and with it more resoluteness than I’ve had about anything that I now know what it means to choose you, not just once, here and now, but in all your becomings.
You’ll have to forgive me, bibliophile that I am, for appealing as often as I do to works of literature, but there is a reason why I love books so dearly: when they are well-written, books are excellent frames for thinking, and one such frame, which seems particularly topical, is Thomas Wolfe’s You Can’t Go Home Again. I here take the liberty of assuming that you haven’t read the book, so I will offer you a brief synopsis: the book’s protagonist, a man named George Webber, writes a wildly successful novel about his (fictional) hometown of Libya Hill, North Carolina. Upon returning to that town, however, he is met by the ire of its inhabitants, who feel as though George has aired their dirty laundry for the whole world to see. Outcast, George lives for a time among the American ex-patriots of 1920s Paris, and for a time, too, in Berlin, which grows darker under Hitler’s looming shadow, but in the end he finds himself once more in America, which he rediscovers with a sense of sorrow, finding it in the throes of the Great Depression, but also with optimism and renewed love. “America was still America,” he concludes, “and whatever new thing came of it would be American.”
The title of the book, as you might have guessed, is also its central message: nostalgia arises when one perceives as everlasting what in fact had been changing all along; if you try to return to a place you remember from the past, you will almost certainly find that it is not where you left it, because both you and it have changed in the interim. Life goes on, as they say, and you can’t step in the same river twice, but I think Wolfe’s story is not ultimately a tragedy so much as an admonition: “Perhaps this is our strange and haunting paradox here in America -- that we are fixed and certain only when we are in movement. At any rate, that is how it seemed to young George Webber, who was never so assured of his purpose as when he was going somewhere on a train. And he never had the sense of home so much as when he felt that he was going there. It was only when he got there that his homelessness began.”
Like the people to whom it belongs, home is a vitality, a breathing organism whose unfinishedness ceaselessly calls us into future possibilities. In a stained carpet that bears the indelible marks of long conversations over glasses of red wine, or in a kitchen with walls perfumed by years of cigarettes and morning coffee, home keeps us in conversation with who we were, but it is also the precipice of our becoming, where the touchings are never finishings, and ossified walls mirror the calcification of the spirit that dwells within them. Home is not given for us in the fixity of a place but in the heart’s Sisyphean movement toward some vast unfolding of places, most as of yet unknown, who answer to the same name, and for which we are the adjoining links; it is no accident, I think, that we have a habit of saying “I’m home” rather than “I’m at home” -- to have a home is to abide home in oneself, to bring into being, literally and figuratively, in rituals of boundedness, and if one finds oneself homesick, then I suspect it is only because one has mistaken for an exile what in fact was a calling.
So, there you have it: home really is where the heart is, if you can pardon the cliche, and because this would surely be a failed love letter without an invocation of the Bard, I will finish my meandering with one of Shakespeare’s most famous sonnets:
Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove.
O no! it is an ever-fixed mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wand'ring bark,
Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.
Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle's compass come;
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error and upon me prov'd,
I never writ, nor no man ever lov'd.
I don’t know where I’m going, but with you, I know home is where I’ll be, and if this be error and upon me prov’d, I never writ, nor no man ever lov’d.
Ever yours,
Sofia