The first cruise I went on was about fifteen years ago. I had a crush on a girl and she found an amazing deal for a cruise, just $199 plus tax, for five days in the Caribbean. It could have been twice that expensive and not gone anywhere, and I would have signed up. I just wanted an excuse to spend time with her.
We went on our cruise and I fell in love… with cruising.
Tynan, Forever Nomad: The Ultimate Guide to World Travel, From a Weekend to a Lifetime, 2018, p. 163
Experience often repeated, truly bitter experience, had taught him long ago that with decent people, especially Moscow people—always slow to move and irresolute—every intimacy, which at first so agreeably diversifies life and appears a light and charming adventure, inevitably grows into a regular problem of extreme intricacy, and in the long run the situation becomes unbearable. But at every fresh meeting with an interesting woman this experience seemed to slip out of his memory, and he was eager for life, and everything seemed simple and amusing.
Anton Chekhov, ‘The Lady with the Dog’, 1899, part 1
As long as one poor cockroach feels the pangs of unrequited love, this world is not a moral world.
William James, quoted in Hutchins Hapgood, A Victorian in the Modern World, New York, 1939, p. 67
There isn’t anyone you couldn’t learn to love once you’ve heard their story.
Fred Rogers
Mêmê en matière d’amour et de séduction, il faut observer, tester, experimenter.
Nicolas Guéguen, Psychologie de la séduction: pour mieux comprendre nos comportements amoureux, Paris, 2009, p. 227
Have you ever experienced a pain so sharp in your heart that it’s all you can do to take a breath? It’s a pain you wouldn’t wish on your worst enemy; you wouldn’t want to pass it on to anyone else for fear he or she might not be able to bear it. It’s the pain of being betrayed by the person with whom you’ve fallen in love. It’s not as serious as death, but it feels a whole like it, and as I’ve come to learn, pain is pain any way you slice it.
Chelsea Handler, My Horizontal Life: A Collection of One-Night Stands, New York, 2005, p. 46
‘Hold on,’ he said, gripping my wrist. ‘Sure I loved her. But it wasn’t that I wanted to touch her.’ And he added, without smiling: ‘Not that I don’t think about that side of things. Even at my age, and I’ll be sixty-seven January ten. It’s a peculiar fact0—but, the older I grow, that side of things seems to be on my mind more and more. I don’t remember thinking about it so much even when I was a youngster and it’s every other minute.
Truman Capote, Breakfast at Tiffany’s, New York, 1958, pp. 14-15
Love is felt so intensely, it seems inconceivable that it will not always produce a response. Love is antiphonal. The words ‘I love you’ contain an implicit demand. They are incomplete without the answer: ‘I love you too.’ Implicit faith in romantic idealism makes us confident that if we proclaim our love loud enough, we will get an answer. As when calling across a valley, we assume that an echo will acknowledge our effort. But love does not obey physical laws. Sometimes we proclaim our love and there is no reply. Our words are killed by the dead acoustic of a cold heart and the ensuing silence is terrible.
Frank Tallis, Love Sick: Love as a Mental Illness, London, 2004, p. 244
I ask for life – for life Divine
Where man’s true self may move
In one harmonious cord to twine
The threads of Knowledge and of Love.
Henry Sidgwick, quoted in Bart Schultz, Henry Sidgwick, Eye of the Universe: An Intellectual Biography, Cambridge, 2004, p. vi
Puedo escribir los versos más tristes esta noche.
Escribir, por ejemplo: “La noche está estrellada,
y tiritan, azules, los astros, a lo lejos.”El viento de la noche gira en el cielo y canta.
Puedo escribir los versos más tristes esta noche.
Yo la quise, y a veces ella también me quiso.En las noches como ésta la tuve entre mis brazos.
La besé tantas veces bajo el cielo infinito.Ella me quiso, a veces yo también la quería.
Cómo no haber amado sus grandes ojos fijos.Puedo escribir los versos más tristes esta noche.
Pensar que no la tengo. Sentir que la he perdido.Oír la noche inmensa, más inmensa sin ella.
Y el verso cae al alma como al pasto el rocío.Qué importa que mi amor no pudiera guardarla.
La noche está estrellada y ella no está conmigo.Eso es todo. A lo lejos alguien canta. A lo lejos.
Mi alma no se contenta con haberla perdido.Como para acercarla mi mirada la busca.
Mi corazón la busca, y ella no está conmigo.La misma noche que hace blanquear los mismos árboles.
Nosotros, los de entonces, ya no somos los mismos.Ya no la quiero, es cierto, pero cuánto la quise.
Mi voz buscaba el viento para tocar su oído.De otro. Será de otro. Como antes de mis besos.
Su voz, su cuerpo claro. Sus ojos infinitos.Ya no la quiero, es cierto, pero tal vez la quiero.
Es tan corto el amor, y es tan largo el olvido.Porque en noches como ésta la tuve entre mis brazos,
Mi alma no se contenta con haberla perdido.Aunque éste sea el ultimo dolor que ella me causa,
Y éstos sean los últimos versos que yo le escribo.
Pablo Neruda, ‘Poema XX’, in Veinte poemas de amor y una canción desesperada, Santiago, 1924
I get along without you very well,
Of course I do,
Except when soft rains fall
And drip from leaves, then I recall
The thrill of being sheltered in your arms.
Of course, I do.
But I get along without you very well.I’ve forgotten you just like I should,
Of course I have,
Except to hear your name,
Or someone’s laugh that is the same,
But I’ve forgotten you just like I should.What a guy, what a fool am I.
To think my breaking heart could kid the moon.
What’s in store? Should I phone once more?
No, it’s best that I stick to my tune.I get along without you very well,
Of course I do.
Except perhaps in spring.
But I should never think of spring,
For that would surely break my heart in two.
Jane Brown Thompson, ‘I Get Along Without You Very Well (Except Sometimes)’
I know all this sounds like playing games. But love is a game, nature’s only game. Just about every creature on this planet plays it—unconsciously scheming to pass their DNA into tomorrow. By counting children, nature keeps her score.
Helen Fisher, Why We Love: The Nature and Chemistry of Romantic Love, New York, 2004, p. 202
Una vez, en un diálogo público que mantuvimos en una Feria del Libro, [Bioy Casares] nos explicó a mí y a la concurrencia que había tres clases de amores: “El fugaz, que dura el tiempo necesario para satisfacer el deseo y luego se olvida o se desecha sin pesar; el intermedio, que suele ser muy divertido pero al cual en un momento determinado lo alcanza el tedio y, entonces, se deja caer sin casi darse uno cuenta y, por último, los grandes amores que persisten en el recuerdo y a los cuales uno puede volver con renovado placer y esperanza. Éstos son los mejores.”
María Esther Vázquez, La memoria de los días: mis amigos, los escritores, Buenos Aires, 2004, pp. 142-143
These may be the last days. We are taking them one at a time. My latest paralysis was the result of some bleeding inside the brain. My concern is that after my departure something remains of me, not papers, not final philosophical declarations, but love. I hope that that will remain and will not be too much affected by the manner of my final departure, which I would like to be peaceful, like a coma, without a death struggle, leaving bad memories behind. Whatever happens now, our small family can live forever—Grazina, me, and our love. That is what I would like to happen, not an intellectual survival but the survival of love.
Paul Feyerabend, Killing Time: The Autobiography of Paul Feyerabend, Chicago, 1995, p. 181
Through the long years
I sought peace
I found ecstasy, I found anguish,
I found madness,
I found loneliness,
I found the solitary pain
that gnaws the heart,
But peace I did not find.Now, old & near my end,
I have known you,
And, knowing you,
I have found both ecstasy & peace
I know rest
After so many lonely years.
I know what life & love may be.
Now, if I sleep
I shall sleep fulfilled.
Bertrand Russell, The Autobiography of Bertrand Russell: 1872-1914, London, 1967, dedication [‘To Edith’]
Three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong, have governed my life: the longing for love, the search for knowledge, and unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind. These passions, like great winds, have blown me hither and thither, in a wayward course, over a deep ocean of anguish, reaching to the very verge of despair.
Bertrand Russell, The Autobiography of Bertrand Russell: 1872-1914, London, 1967, p. 13