Essays In Love

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Francine Prose, New Republic 'Witty, funny, sophisticated, neatly tied up, and full of wise and illuminating insights.

I am generally quite good with silences–as in, I don’t mind just sitting or walking in silence with someone. With the verve of a novelist and the insight of a philosopher, Alain de Botton uncovers the mysteries of the human heart.And it feels like the only option IS to kill yourself and be done with it and then think about how guilt-wrecked the other party will be for causing you to go to such measures. If self-hatred gains the upper hand, then the one who has received love will declare that the beloved (on some excuse or other) is not good enough for them (not good enough by virtue of associating with no-goods).

We locate inside another a perfection that eludes us within ourselves, and through our union with the beloved hope to maintain (against the evidence of all self-knowledge) a precarious faith in our species.To have killed myself would have been to forget that I would be too dead to derive any pleasure from the melodrama of my own extinction. However, when I’m acutely aware that the other person is supermegafoxyawesomehot, then I immediately take on the burden of feeling boring and tedious. I would have benefitted SO much from knowing about how love works and that so many of the things I felt weren’t abnormal at all (hell no am I talking to anyone about that stuff). De Botton was the one who made me realise that my soulmate was a sensitive mindreader who knew instinctively what I needed and when without my having to say a single word.

Desperate needs bring about a hallucination of their solution: thirst hallucinates water, the need for love hallucinates a prince or princess. There’s less of a chance to make a fool of yourself (or at least be aware of how foolish you sound) because you didn’t intend on furthering that relationship anyway. He is the founder of two social enterprises, the first promoting architecture, Living Architecture, which gets top architects to build holiday homes for rental by everyone. For my part, I know I’d probably succumb to a stereotype threat and if for some bizarre reason all the people I have known in my life were in a room together, I would probably beg the ground to swallow me whole because I would be switching from mask to mask in a matter of microseconds. I know I’d feel very left out and somewhat frustrated that I couldn’t just scoop out their memories and understand every aspect of their being.The beautiful and complex prose is enough alone to make you read it but then there's that incredible insight that you can only give when perceiving something from a subjective second person position. Everyone will undoubtedly relate to the different stages of the relationship, from initial uncomfortable exchanges, charged with expectation, to the concern that you are more involved than your object of desire. The Jesus complex was nothing more than a self-defence mechanism, I had not wanted Chloe to leave me, I had loved her more than I had ever loved a woman, but now that she had flown to California, my way of accepting the unbearable loss was to reinvent how valuable she had been in the first place.