Society deemed it necessary we have a day for love—showing, in my opinion, how little the very same society actually knows about love, thinking it can be squeezed into a day, that it can actually encompass it—and thus began an almost rabid furor for Valentine’s Day. The commercial build up is quite epic to witness, with pink and red slowly appearing everywhere you look weeks before the actual day. The day itself is supposed to be one of great business for bakeries and flower shops. But what comes after?
Well, the commercial world doesn’t stick around to witness the broken debris of plans and hearts of the people for whom this day took a wrong turn. While they may choose to desert you in this hour of need amidst flaccid pink balloons and boxed chocolates, remember that books remain, and the stories and words within them. More often than not you can find a cure for anything in there, even a broken heart due to a Valentine gone wrong.
No one understands tragedy better than those long gone before us. It’s not that they had secret knowledge that we don’t, but the timelessness of their words cannot be rivaled. Leo Tolstoy’s “Anna Karenina” is work that we’re all very familiar with, but this tale of doomed love can still enthrall and soothe when picked up again. Revolving around a remarkably unhappy but magnificent woman, this story explores an all-consuming passion between Anna and the man she has an affair with, Vronsky. While they existed in a time when extramarital trysts and liaisons were the fashionable thing to do, isolation is what she finds herself surrounded with in a society where her love and passion is alien. The words of this story not only sear you with their depth of emotions, but probe you into exploring questions about what it really means to have a fulfilled life.
“The End of the Story” by Lydia Davis is an intriguing narrative by someone whose name and identity you never discover. Finding the meaning in everything that happens in life, good or bad, is what brings us peace. It helps us get that much closer to the closure everyone purports is so great for us. Whether or not that holds any semblance of truth, I know that trying to find the meaning within the rioting mess of confusion, pain and questions is what gives us balance. It steadies us a little on feet that are still learning to walk again. Davis’ protagonist therefore attempts to find the meaning in a relationship long lost, while traveling back within the barrage of memories she holds. It’s here she learns the painful lesson of memories perhaps being more fiction than real.
André Aciman’s “Call Me by Your Name” explores finding love, and the resulting fear of losing it and never finding it again that accompanies total and utter intimacy. Although it begins as your traditional run-of-the-mill summer romance, it quickly veers off into in-depth psychological maneuvering and an exploration of human passion. Six weeks worth of romance is wrapped in a litany of currents of obsession, desire, fear and fascination with each other as well as what they’re experiencing. Hailed as a bare-knuckled elegy to passion, this book may leave you longing for what has gone. But it may also reveal to you the beauty of passion that’s worth looking, and fighting, for again.
Commonly recognized as being a largely unrecognized work from the 20th century, “The Price of Salt” by Patricia Highsmith makes you believe both that love can conquer all but you cannot escape or run away from reality either. Never given the literary accolades it deserved because it is a story about “forbidden love,” this has now become a lesbian cult classic. But more than that, it is a story that exemplifies sexual obsession and your soulmate appearing before you as an erotic epiphany. Finding an escape in each other from the monotony of a dead-end job and the suffocation of an unhappy marriage, the two protagonists choose running away from it all rather than staying to fight for their right to be happy, perhaps forgetting briefly that their mere act of running away is what detracts from the worthiness of their love and happiness. Only we can give or take away the worth of something, sometimes by not having the courage to fight for it.
So for all those with temporary bleeding hearts, moments of rejection, booty calls that did not pan out or actual aching souls: it is the courage to continue that counts. In the words of Charles Bukowski, “Find what you love and let it kill you. Let it drain you of your all. Let it cling onto your back and weigh you down into eventual nothingness. Let it kill you and let it devour your remains. For all things will kill you, both slowly and fast, but it’s so much better to be killed by a lover.”
