Read Online All About Love: Anatomy of an Unruly Emotion by Lisa Appignanesi - Free Book Online
Authors: Lisa Appignanesi
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fragmented world. But love can, and the all-embracing love that poets and pop lyricists sing does, echoing the ancient notion that lover and beloved are one soul in two bodies.
That Romantic Feeling
Romance may be only one imaginative elaboration of physical cravings, but it has been with us as long as stories have been told. And far from being the women-only terrain contemporary gender discourses assign it to, it has long also been male: from Sir Galahad to The Great Gatsby , men have wooed and pined, made over their lives, tempted death, to win a Guinevere or a radiant Daisy, designated as the missing half that will make them whole. What we think of as the self is goaded into being by love, which also promises the self’s realization.
One day during the Great War a young woman who has happened on a job as a librarian in Carstairs, a small Canadian town, receives a letter from a man she doesn’t know, but who identifies himself as Jack Agnew. He is a soldier at the Front. He tells her what books he read in her library, what a change for the better her arrival made to the place and how grateful he was to her. She can’t put a face to him, but she answers his letter. She is lonely.
In his next letter, he remembers how one day, having been caught in the rain, she took the pins out of her hair and brushed it out. She hadn’t seen him there, but when she did, they exchanged a smile.
The correspondence continues. She sends him a photograph of herself. Her interest in the war and her surroundings mounts. The world takes on a new depth. He asks her if she has a sweetheart. She hasn’t. He tells her he doesn’t think they will ever meet again, but he loves her. He thinks of her up on a stool in the library reaching to put a book away and he comes to lift her down. She turns in his arms, and it is as if they have agreed on everything.
There is no further letter. When the war ends, she scans the papers daily to see if he appears on a list of the dead, and finally sees his name on a list of those coming home. In a frenzy and despite the raging flu of 1918, she keeps the library open, she searches for him, is ill herself and still waits. Then one day, she reads a wedding announcement in the paper. Jack has indeed come back, but he has married someone else, a girl he was engaged to before he went overseas. She learns this from a scrappy note he leaves for her in the library. She has still never seen him. She gives herself to a passing salesman.
Time passes. Jack is sensationally mown down, decapitated, like some latter-day John the Baptist, in an industrial accident in the town’s main factory. Arthur, its owner, who has had to deal with the head, the blood and the human fall-out, brings Jack’s surreptitiously borrowed books back to the library. He takes to coming to the library. He sits there, a site of respite. When one autumn evening, as rain clouds gather and burst, the librarian with controlled, but visible, excitement asks him more about Jack’s accident and tells him the way he dealt with it was remarkable, to his own surprise the factory owner, a restrained man of dark-suited dignity, finds himself proposing to her. The feelings love stirs can be contagious.
More time passes, together with another war. Arthur, with whom the librarian has led a good life, is dead and she now has a son at university. She has come to a distant town to see a heart specialist. She hasn’t been well, but the doctor makes light of her ills. She wanders through town and comes across a rally in honour of the Tolpuddle Martyrs: at the doctor’s an announcement, bearing the words ‘local martyrs honoured’, had already sent her pulse racing. Now sitting in the park, waiting for the ceremony in which a certain Jack Agnew is to speak, she feels a sickening agitation. She leaves. She wanders in a disoriented way searching for the station where a bus will take her home. She is hot, disturbed. She finds refuge in a squalid café,
That Romantic Feeling
Romance may be only one imaginative elaboration of physical cravings, but it has been with us as long as stories have been told. And far from being the women-only terrain contemporary gender discourses assign it to, it has long also been male: from Sir Galahad to The Great Gatsby , men have wooed and pined, made over their lives, tempted death, to win a Guinevere or a radiant Daisy, designated as the missing half that will make them whole. What we think of as the self is goaded into being by love, which also promises the self’s realization.
One day during the Great War a young woman who has happened on a job as a librarian in Carstairs, a small Canadian town, receives a letter from a man she doesn’t know, but who identifies himself as Jack Agnew. He is a soldier at the Front. He tells her what books he read in her library, what a change for the better her arrival made to the place and how grateful he was to her. She can’t put a face to him, but she answers his letter. She is lonely.
In his next letter, he remembers how one day, having been caught in the rain, she took the pins out of her hair and brushed it out. She hadn’t seen him there, but when she did, they exchanged a smile.
The correspondence continues. She sends him a photograph of herself. Her interest in the war and her surroundings mounts. The world takes on a new depth. He asks her if she has a sweetheart. She hasn’t. He tells her he doesn’t think they will ever meet again, but he loves her. He thinks of her up on a stool in the library reaching to put a book away and he comes to lift her down. She turns in his arms, and it is as if they have agreed on everything.
There is no further letter. When the war ends, she scans the papers daily to see if he appears on a list of the dead, and finally sees his name on a list of those coming home. In a frenzy and despite the raging flu of 1918, she keeps the library open, she searches for him, is ill herself and still waits. Then one day, she reads a wedding announcement in the paper. Jack has indeed come back, but he has married someone else, a girl he was engaged to before he went overseas. She learns this from a scrappy note he leaves for her in the library. She has still never seen him. She gives herself to a passing salesman.
Time passes. Jack is sensationally mown down, decapitated, like some latter-day John the Baptist, in an industrial accident in the town’s main factory. Arthur, its owner, who has had to deal with the head, the blood and the human fall-out, brings Jack’s surreptitiously borrowed books back to the library. He takes to coming to the library. He sits there, a site of respite. When one autumn evening, as rain clouds gather and burst, the librarian with controlled, but visible, excitement asks him more about Jack’s accident and tells him the way he dealt with it was remarkable, to his own surprise the factory owner, a restrained man of dark-suited dignity, finds himself proposing to her. The feelings love stirs can be contagious.
More time passes, together with another war. Arthur, with whom the librarian has led a good life, is dead and she now has a son at university. She has come to a distant town to see a heart specialist. She hasn’t been well, but the doctor makes light of her ills. She wanders through town and comes across a rally in honour of the Tolpuddle Martyrs: at the doctor’s an announcement, bearing the words ‘local martyrs honoured’, had already sent her pulse racing. Now sitting in the park, waiting for the ceremony in which a certain Jack Agnew is to speak, she feels a sickening agitation. She leaves. She wanders in a disoriented way searching for the station where a bus will take her home. She is hot, disturbed. She finds refuge in a squalid café,
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