Beyond Sceptic Moths and Cynic Rusts

 February 13, 1990

Beyond Sceptic Moths and Cynic Rusts

Tomorrow is the Feast of St. valentine. It is the day of the year traditionally set aside for lovers, of which there are too few, or fools, of which there are too many. When, depending on your station in life, a diamond geegaw, a bouquet of flowers, a date in a fancy restaurant or a motel, or just a card is made to cover for 364 days of oblivion or infidelity, lassitude or indifference.

For not a few it will be a day of frantic waxing to forestall the inevitable waning of that most rare and precious commodity – love. The feast’s red symbols remind of fragility as much as they proclaim intensity: roses that bloom so gloriously but wilt too fast, hearts that throb so vigorously and then break into pieces of their own accord and at the slightest touch.

Love is not a permanent state. It is a fleeting moment. Learn that and make the best of life’s most gratuitous gift. Forget it and resign yourself to a limbo of pining and regretting. What did e.e. cummings write? “Be of love a little more careful than anything else.” In the end only those who love carefully – warily – understand that it is life, rather than death, which has no limits.

Show me a Hallmark card that says all that and I’ll celebrate this feast. Otherwise, I’m taking the advice of a girlfriend in New York who has made it a habit to report sick on Valentine’s and curl up in bed, alone. I have a mind to do exactly that this year and every February 14 hereafter.

I might because the very idea of compressing all my affective faculties into one day of frenzy repels me no end. And I might to damn the notion that the only way to love is to be busy and dizzy about it, for my own limited experience of such matters proves the contrary.

Love is not anticipation or manipulation; it is surprise. And I have found (as well as lost) it in the most unlikely places, at the least expected of times:

In dead of winter, keeping holy silence with a friend by a fountain in the Tuileries; alone in my garden, contemplating a scraggy pine my father planted the morning he died;; on a deserted beach in Bohol, breaking out into a hymn to the God who made sky, stars, and sea with a soulmate. But mostly, as the autumn of life impends, on rereading letters from those who have loved me in words I know for certain will last longer than I shall.

Sex? Yes, that too, in the sudden rushing of the blood to my head, the little deaths that coupling brings, now alas but too rarely. The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak. Now it is no longer the rage of the sharing and the abandon of the melding, but the perfect comprehension the smallest, tenderest gestures bring – a look, a caress, a sigh speak just as eloquently of desire, evoking past and promising future pleasures too ineffable, too profound.

To love is to be weak, not strong. It is to recognize in this, the apex of my life, that I am vulnerable and porous, still pervious to pain, still capable of wonder: that to be whole, I must be incomplete, and not anything I myself am and do can fill the vacuum. To love is to accept why there must be space within and distance without, because both are necessary for the savouring, the forgetting as much as the remembering.

To love, finally, is to understand as well as I am understood. It is to submit to a love always stronger and deeper than my own, and to be thankful that even in my innermost recesses, where not words nor gestures nor even pain or wonder will touch me, I am, because He is. To quote Chesterton:

In a time of sceptic moths and cynic rusts,

And fatted lives that of their weakness tire,

In a world of flying loves and fading lusts

It is something to be sure of a desire.

To love is to will one thing only. It is to be pure of heart.