So, I took the plunge and went to a
book group.
Wow. Socialising. With real live people-persons who had real
people personalities. That's not happened in a while. The book we
were talking about was Wuthering Heights.
I enjoyed the discussion; lots of interesting
stuff raised, tangents and ideas about, not only the book in
question, but about the nature of people-persons, and the way that said people-persons interact with books. It was
good. Naturally, I did my usual seminar
dear-God-no-wonder-you-had-no-friends-at-University routine, but
that's a story for another day.
It also raised something that's been
brewing in my head for quite a long time – something about the way
our current society thinks about love. It may surprise none of you to
learn that I agree with Angela Carter.
“Well,” my obliging hypothetical
audience supply, “what do you agree with Angela Carter about, aside from
'practically-everything-with-the-notable-exception-of-clitoral-orgasm'?”
For a start, I agree with her about Wuthering Heights. And about love. There is a significant overlap between the
two1.
Obviously, the whole 'love' thing came up at the book group –
notably the conception that Wuthering Heights is
some kind of a romance novel2.
We were asked, more
as an opener to discussion than anything else, whether we thought Wuthering
Heights was a love story. There was derisory
laughter, slightly incredulous glances, and there was me, too much of
a fucking coward to offer disagreement.
Which is this:
We
have a real problem with love in this country (or this society, or
the English speaking bits of the world. Whatever.) We have a problem
with it. So often, in the discussion, words came up to describe what
Cathy and Heathcliff felt: obsession, infatuation. We are not, as a
society, willing to believe that what those two experience is love. Ask people what love
is, and there is a fair chance they will start quoting Corinthians
13:4 at you3.
Patient?
Kind? Right... Are we even talking about the same thing, here?
No.
We're not. That's one of the problems we face, just to have this
discussion: there are a dearth of words in the English language to
describe love. Of course, some kinds of love are patient, and kind,
and they are valid, important types of love. They, however, are not what I am talking about. The Greeks have
it slightly better, they have agápe,
éros, philía,
and storgē, but even
they do not quite answer my purposes. These are different types of
love used, exclusively or in combination, in different kinds of
relationships. Most often, the distinction is used to separate basic
human compassion from emotional love from lust. But I am not talking
about physical love as opposed to emotional love, and whatever list
of those one needs to build a happy relationship. I'm not, if I'm
honest, talking about relationships. A relationship is an ongoing
negotiation between two or more people; a relationship answers to
sense, to reason, to common, human kindness.
No.
I'm not talking about relationships.
There
is, though, a distinction in the English language, a distinction that
tells us more about ourselves than many of us would care to admit. We talk about loving
and we talk about being in love.
