Let those love now who never loved before,
Let those who always loved, now love the more.
The Pervigilium Veneris, or Eve of St. Venus
(Latin 2nd-4th C.) (tr. Thomas Parnell)
Before love comes there may be aching loneliness.
I live all alone, and I am a young girl.
I write long letters and I do not know
anyone to send them to.
Most tender things speak in my heart
And I can only say them to the bamboos in the garden...
"The Garden of Bamboos" a Vietnamese street-song
(tr. Powys Mathers) [Cole]
...sixteen is an age which thirsts for love and is not excessively particular about what beverage chance may provide.
Stendhal (50)
'Passionate Love'
I wish to feel a love
Which might be likened to
Burying a hot cheek
In a soft drift of snow.
Ishikawa Takuboku (Japan 1885-1912)
The world is cold and rough, impossible to trust
Having friends isn't enough, though it helps.
One seeks a lover with whom to
share her innermost feelings
Tired of carrying life's burdens alone
longing for touch-- tension in the skin
you sleep hugging a pillow
The pastimes of the lonely life:
eating alone, playing solitaire
movies, fantasies
No messages on your answering machine
no note tacked to your door
you suffer a sense of vulnerability, unfitness
purgatory
alienation from life
nothing to look forward to, nothing to hope for
unstimulated, at loose ends
an unbonded atom (free radical)
hook without a cloak
cable plugged to nothing, flapping free
maybe faint connections to a hundred others
but not that deepest, most precious one
Time running out, biological clock ticking away
(birthday depressions)
life slipping away
My heart, being hungry, feeds on food
The fat of heart despise.
Beauty where beauty never stood,
And sweet where no sweet lies
I gather to my querulous need,
Having a growing heart to feed.
Edna St. Vincent Millay (USA 1892-1950)
"My Heart, Being Hungry"
Oh, is it not enough to be
Here with this beauty over me?
My throat should ache with praise, and I
Should kneel in joy beneath the sky.
...O beauty, are you not enough?
Why am I crying after love?
Sara Teasdale (USA 1884-1933) "Spring Night" [Cole]
Seeing happy couples, feeling pangs of jealousy
everybody comes to me for understanding and kindness
but nobody comes to me for love
Loneliness can make you seem irritable, selfish
lust, avarice (recall Silas Marner)
clumsiness-- you feel off-center
Never even to have touched
The hot blood
Of a soft body,
Doesn't it make you unhappy
You who preach morality?
Yosano Akiko (Japan 1874-1941)
What a woman was there snatched by puritanism from love!
Stendhal (197) "Concerning What is Called Virtue"
Insomnia, dark circles
poor resistance... disease
...the pretty motto of the ivy: 'with nought to cleave to, I die.'
Stendhal (108)
Depression
slow deep mournful tones
cello, foghorn
sad, tender harmonies
Beethoven ("Fur Elise"), Chopin, Scott Joplin ("Bethena"), Erik Satie
blues
Sometimes I feel like a motherless child
Sometimes I feel like a motherless child
Sometimes I feel like a motherless child
A long way from my home...
???
The face of loneliness
frown, hunger, emptiness
plea
Keeping busy
Whilst I do keep
My harmless sheep
Love hath no power on me:
'Tis idle souls
Which he controls;
The busy man is free.
Thomas Forde (England n.dd.)
"Fond Love, No More" (1660) [Ault2]
The benefits of loneliness, aloneness
be what you want, experiment, please yourself
alone with my books
no resistance from others, no conflict (Krishnamurti)
contentedly pursuing higher goals
latching onto a goal, making an effort
I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude.
Henry David Thoreau (USA 1817-62) "Solitude"
I think that every intensely personal life has always had to isolate a fictitious personality, a kind of dermato-psyche to hold off and distract the hostile curiosity of inferior people, in order to be able, behind that bulwark, to devote itself freely to being what it is.
Ortega y Gasset (143)
When is man strong until he feels alone?
Robert Browning (England 1812-89) "Colombe's Birthday"
Denying oneself, self-mortification
I will humble my Beauty, I will not dress fine,
I will keep from the Ball, & my Eyes shall not shine;
And if any Girl's Lover forsakes her for me,
I'll refuse him my hand and from Envy be free.
William Blake (England 1757-1827) "Mary" (c1800)
Fear of love
Little boy, pretty knave, shoot not at random,
For if you hit me, slave, I'll tell your grandam.
"Cupid" Anon. in Jones' Songs and Airs (1601) [Ault1]
The majority of men... have little propensity for passionate love; it would disturb their delightful tranquility; I believe they would regard its transports as unhappiness; certainly they would be humiliated by its shyness.
Stendhal (214, "Concerning Fiascos")
Perfectionism keeps you alone
...if somewhere there existed a strong, handsome man with a valorous, passionate and refined nature, a poet's soul in the form of an angel... why was it not possible that she might meet him some day?
Flaubert [Madame Bovary 245]
Hopelessly unattractive, no one will love me
(poor features, poor in spirit)
horny outcast men on the periphery
When the Chinese government in the early 1980's sponsored a campaign to
match up unmarried adults, it failed because there were just not enough
"attractive people" to go around. [newswire, 8-31-84]
Justifications
(are there people too unimaginative to be lonely?)
"Behold, I too am brave; I too will not stop short of the ideal."
Ruth Benedict (USA 1887-1948) (journal, 1912,
describing the attitude of an old maid)
A great man is like an eagle; the higher he goes, the less you see of him, and loneliness is the price he pays for being great.
Stendhal (94)
A charming woman may... treat a man now with extreme coldness, because she is saving herself for a future lover whom she may never even meet. ...It is as if an orange-tree dared not flower for fear of committing a sin (faire un pe'che': producing a peach).
Stendhal (85, "Concerning Modesty")
Prudishness is the worst kind of avarice.
Stendhal (217)
But you're kidding yourself
My room was white with the sun
And Love cried out in me,
"I am strong, I will break your heart
Unless you set me free."
Sara Teasdale "Over the Roofs" [OBAV]
All who joy would win
Must share it-- Happiness was born a twin.
George Gordon, lord Byron (England 1788-1824)
What did I know
thinking myself
able to go
alone all the way.
Robert Creeley (USA b.1926)
"Love Comes Quietly" [Cole]
Handling lonely people
trying to reach them
sympathy
constructive suggestions
matchmaking
An honest farmer was complaining of damage caused in his orchard and I asked him why he did not keep a dog. "My daughters would never marry," was his reply, which I did not understand until he told me that once he had a dog so fierce that none of the boys ever dared to climb through his windows.
Stendhal (200, "Switzerland")
We gotta get you a woman
It's like nothin else to make you
Feel sure you're alive!
Todd Rundgren (USA b.1948)
Maybe you've been lonely for decades
Love's like the measles-- all the worse when it comes late in life.
Douglas Jerrold (xx 1803-57) [BQAO]
Or the love of your life has just been ended by heartless fate
maybe you've been in and out of a dozen relationships in the last few
years
maybe this longing is something new
you're finally becoming a woman, a man
Yesterday evening I heard two delightful little girls of four singing some very lively love-songs as I pushed them in their swing. The chambermaids teach them these songs and their mother tells them that 'love' and 'lover' are meaningless words...
Stendhal (194)
What she felt she could not find words to tell, for she was only a simple girl reared in the fields, and never in her life had ever heard the word: love.
Longus "Daphnis and Chloe"
The prediction of a fortune-teller
twisting the stem of an apple: A, B, C, D, E, F, G...
to find the first initial of your future spouse
Romance as a creation of the culture
the courtly ideal
(the idea of romantic love took hold in America only after 1750)
There are many people who would never have been in love if they had never heard love spoken of.
La Rochefoucauld (France 1747-1827) Maxim 136
In Italy, since passion is not infrequent it is not ridiculous and one hears generalizations about love freely quoted in drawing-rooms.
Stendhal (143)
[Consider] the Benou-Azra, a tribe famous for love throughout all the tribes of Arabia. Their way of loving has become a byword, for God never made other creatures who loved so tenderly.
Stendhal (178, quoting an Arabic source)
For love to assume its full stature in the heart of man, it [is] necessary that the greatest possible equality should be established between the mistress and her lover.
Stendhal (174 "...in our miserable West
there is none of this equality...")
Sexual longing, heat, estrus, horniness
triggered by the weather, by the season
puberty triggered in girls by their percentage of body fat
The heat of the sun on a summer day
Warms a young girl in an amorous way.
(Souvent la chaleur d'un beau jour
Fait re>ver fillette a` l'amour.)
Flaubert [MB 230]
You're just bored
In Rome, where day-to-day events provide so little interest, and where outer existence is so lethargic, sensibility accumulates to the benefit of the passions.
Stendhal (144)
In the unattached heart of a girl who is living in a secluded chateau in the depths of the country, the least touch of surprise arouses profound interest.
Stendhal (293)
An absence of mistrust is not enough; there must be a weariness of mistrusting (la lassitude de la me'fiance), and, as it were, courage must be impatient with the hazards of life. You are unconsciously bored by living without loving...
Stendhal (75)
Maybe you already have somebody
you might think yourself happily married
but something has been unfulfilled, not quite up to the ideal
(we all have a secret ego, born from the unrecapturable perfection of
our parents' love
in childhood, in infancy, in the womb, in baby heaven)
You're free now, through death, divorce, desertion or declaration
"He's just played the tyrant for too long. I must have new love."
Iris Murdoch (Ireland b.1919) The Black Prince (162)
You've just tied up a lot of loose ends
...I then felt free to fall in love...
Murdoch "A Word Child"