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de Botton
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Love and Reading Alain de Botton
Literature and unrequited love have deep affinities; it is when we are experiencing the latter (eating chocolate in bed, feeling lonely at 3am), that we are most drawn to the former. Happiness may be good for the body, but unhappiness is better for the publishing industry - and the survival of literature. A few years ago, I was browsing in a bookshop in Paris when my eye was caught by a quote on the cover of a paperback: "To be psychologically alive means either being in love, or in psychoanalysis, or in the spell of literature." The book was called Tales of Love, it was written by the psychoanalyst Julia Kristeva and because I had always liked her first name (I'd been in love with a little one with glasses at nine), I bought the book. Unfortunately, Julia let me down badly, for in over three hundred pages, she did nothing to elaborate on the fascinating sentence that her publisher had so cunningly placed on the back cover. Still, the thought seemed valuable and stayed with me: of an important connection between love and reading, of a comparable pleasure offered by both. A feeling of connection may be at the root of it. There are books which speak to us, no less eloquently - but more reliably - than our lovers. They prevent the morose suspicion that we do not fully belong to the human species, that we lie beyond comprehension. Our embarrassments, our sulks, our feelings of guilt, these phenomena may be conveyed on a page in a way that affords us with a sense self-recognition. The author has located words to depict a situation we thought ourselves alone in feeling, and for a few moments, we are like two lovers on an early dinner date thrilled to discover how much they share (and so unable to do more than graze at the seafood linguine in front of them), we may place the book down for a second and stare at its spine with a wry smile, as if to say, "How lucky I ran into you." It explains why literature is such a consolation when love has failed. When I first read of Young Werther's plight, I was at university, twenty one and, of course, Werther. Lotte was Claire (she lived down the corridor, studied macrobiology and had shoulder-length chestnut hair in a centre parting) and Albert was played by Robin, a economist who she'd been seeing for three years - testimony, if one needs it, of the miraculous ability of novels to mould themselves around, and illuminate, our own lives. Proust seems to have been saying something like this when, towards the end of his very long book, he wrote, "In reality, each reader reads only what is already within himself. The book is only a sort of optical instrument which the writer offers to the reader to enable the latter to discover what he would not have found but for the aid of the book." Which emphasises a curious tension - the book tells us about ourselves, but it is not in fact a part of us. The value of great books isn't limited to the depiction of emotions and people akin to those in our own life, it stretches to an ability to describe these far better than we would have been able, to put a finger on perceptions that we both recognise as our own, but could not have formulated on our own. The idea that we are not alone in the world is a cosy one. Nevertheless, there is a darker side: we still like to feel special, to feel unique, and this is not something literature suggests we in fact are. Take the following: "Some people would never have fallen in love if they had not heard there was such a thing." I recall reading this gem from La Rochefoucauld on a flight between London and Edinburgh. "For God's sake, that's my idea!" was my immediate response, and I stared crossly out of the window at the cottony Midlands. "He's stolen my thought." But it seemed unlikely given that he was born in the spring of 1613 and I in 1969, so more generously, I reflected, "Maybe I've stolen it from him" - equally impossible, given that I had until then never laid eyes on the maxims. It suggested an answer at once humbling and ennobling: that both La Rochefoucauld and I have lived in the same world, and can hence at times be expected to think roughly the same thoughts, even though he's a genius and I am not (La Rochefoucauld would immediately have picked up on the self-pity in this last comment, and could well have squashed it with a withering: "There are few people more convinced of their own genius than those who complain of how stupid they are.") It is a thought that threatens our sense of identity, which is based in part on an idea of difference. What if exposure to literature reveals too much of what we have in common with others? What can we say - and write - if all of our most private experiences turn out to be the well-trodden thinking grounds of other writers? Part of learning to read - and by implication to write - is accepting that our personalities are not as water-tight as we like to imagine, that many things which we think of as private are in fact not very personal - this is not to say they are impersonal, a word invoking the service one gets in fast-food restaurants, rather that they are common to all human beings. The price of discovering one is not so isolated is a recognition that one is also far from unique. |