Chapter 8 Parenthesis (Интермедия)

Concepts: LOVE

1. Cambridge dictionary:

To like another adult very much and be romantically and sexually attracted to them, or to have strong feelings of liking a friend or person in your family.

https://dictionary.cambridge.org/ru/%D1%81%D0%BB%D0%BE%D0%B2%D0%B0%D1%80%D1%8C/%D0%B0%D0%BD%D0%B3%D0%BB%D0%B8%D0%B9%D1%81%D0%BA%D0%B8%D0%B9/love

   2. Merriam-Webster dictionary:

1) strong affection for another arising out of kinship or personal ties maternal love for a child;

2) attraction based on sexual desire: affection and tenderness felt by lovers;

3) affection based on admiration, benevolence, or common interests;

4) the object of attachment, devotion, or admiration;

5) unselfish loyal and benevolent concern for the good of another, such as:

a) the fatherly concern of God for humankind;

b) brotherly concern for others;

6) a god (such as Cupid or Eros) or personification of love.

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/love

   3. Dictionary:

1) a profoundly tender, passionate affection for another person;

2) a feeling of warm personal attachment or deep affection, as for a parent, child, or friend;

3) sexual passion or desire;

4) a person toward whom love is felt; beloved person; sweetheart;

5) a personification of sexual affection, as Eros or Cupid.

6) strong predilection, enthusiasm, or liking for anything.

https://www.dictionary.com/browse/love

Компонентно-дефиниционный анализ языковой единицы:

- Strong feeling of liking a friend/family;

- Sense of attraction;

- Affection for adult;

- To be sexually/romantically attracted to adults;

- Based on sexual desire/admiration/tenderness;

- Loyal concern for smb. (God, children, humankind);

- A God (Cupid or Eros);

- Beloved person.

LOVE in the BOOK

Examples: `I love you,' I whisper into that sleeping nape, `I love you.' All novelists know their art proceeds by indirection.

Then again, poets seem able to turn bad love - selfish, shitty love - into good love poetry. Prose writers lack this power of admirable, dishonest transformation. We can only turn bad love into prose about bad love. So we are envious (and slightly distrustful) when poets talk to us of love. And they write this stuff called love poetry. It's collected into books called The Great Lovers' Valentine World Anthology of Love Poetry or whatever.

The Canadian writer Mavis Gallant put it like this: 'The mystery of what a couple is, exactly, is almost the only true mystery left to us, and when we have come to the end of it there will be no more need for literature - or for love, for that matter.'

Is love what will survive of us? It would be nice to think so. It would be comforting if love were an energy source which continued to glow after our deaths. Early television sets, when you turned them off, used to leave a blob of light in the middle of the screen, which slowly diminished from the size of a florin to an expiring speck. As a boy I would watch this process each evening, vaguely wanting to hold it back (and seeing it, with adolescent melancholy, as the pinpoint of human existence fading inexorably in a black universe). Is love meant to glow on like this for a while after the set has been switched off? I can't see it myself. When the survivor of a loving couple dies, love dies too. If anything survives of us it will probably be something else.

'I love you'. Subject, verb, object: the unadorned, impregnable sentence. The subject is a short word, implying the self-effacement of the lover. The verb is longer but unambiguous, a demonstrative moment as the tongue flicks anxiously away from the palate to release the vowel.

I imagine a phonic conspiracy between the world's languages. They make a conference decision that the phrase must always sound like something to be earned, to be striven for, to be worthy of. Ich liebe dich: a late-night, cigarette-voiced whisper, with that happy rhyme of subject and object. Je t'aime: a different procedure, with the subject and object being got out of the way first, so that the long vowel of adoration can be savoured to the full. Ya tebya lyublyu: the object once more in consoling second position, but this time - despite the hinting rhyme of subject and object - an implication of difficulty, obstacles to be overcome. Ti amo: it sounds perhaps a bit too much like an apéritif, but is full of structural conviction with subject and verb, the doer and the deed, enclosed in the same word.

We must keep these words in their box behind glass. And when we take them out we must be careful with them. Men will say `I love you' to get women into bed with them; women will say `I love you' to get men into marriage with them; both will say 'I love you' to keep fear at bay, to convince themselves of the deed by the word, to assure themselves that the promised condition has arrived, to deceive themselves that it hasn't yet gone away. We must beware of such uses. 1 love you shouldn't go out into the world, become a currency, a traded share, make profits for us. It will do that if we let it. But keep this biddable phrase for whispering into a nape from which the absent hair has just been swept.

Yet Nature, on to whom we pitch responsibility for all we cannot understand, isn't very good when set to automatic. Trusting virgins drafted into marriage never found Nature had all the answers when they turned out the light. Trusting virgins were told that love was the promised land, an ark on which two might escape the Flood. It may be an ark, but one on which anthropophagy is rife; an ark skippered by some crazy greybeard who beats you round the head with his gopher-wood stave, and might pitch you overboard at any moment. Let's start at the beginning. Love makes you happy? No. Love makes the person you love happy? No. Love makes everything all right? Indeed no. I used to believe all this, of course. Who hasn't (who doesn't still, somewhere below decks in the psyche)? It's in all our books, our films; it's the sunset of a thousand stories. What would love be for if it didn't solve everything?

It implies that love is a transforming wand, one that unlooses the ravelled knot, fills the top hat with handkerchiefs, sprays the air with doves. But the model isn't from magic but particle physics. My love does not, cannot make her happy; my love can only release in her the capacity to be happy. And now things seem more understandable. How come I can't make her happy, how come she can't make me happy?

Is it a useful mutation that helps the race survive? I can't see it. Was love implanted, for instance, so that warriors would fight harder for their lives, bearing deep inside them the candlelit memory of the domestic hearth?

Then is love some luxury that sprang up in peaceful times, like quilt-making? Something pleasant, complex, but inessential?

We don't need it for the expansion of our race; indeed, it's inimical to orderly civilization.

It reminds me of those half-houses which according to normal criteria of map reading shouldn't exist.

Perhaps love is essential because it's unnecessary.

Because the history of the world, which only stops at the half-house of love to bulldoze it into rubble, is ridiculous without it. The history of the world becomes brutally self-important without love. Our random mutation is essential because it is unnecessary.

Love and truth, that's the vital connection, love and truth. Have you ever told so much truth as when you were first in love? Have you ever seen the world so clearly? Love makes us see the truth, makes it our duty to tell the truth. Lying in bed: listen to the undertow of warning in that phrase. Lying in bed, we tell the truth: it sounds like a paradoxical sentence from a first-year philosophy primer.

And I'm not saying love will make you happy - above all, I'm not saying that. If anything, I tend to believe that it will make you unhappy …But you can believe this and still insist that love is our only hope.

That contorted organ, like the lump of ox meat, is devious and enclosed. Our current model for the universe is entropy, which at the daily level translates as: things fuck up.

Характеристики концепта LOVE:

- Energy source, which glow on like TV for a while after the set has been switched off

- Something to be earned, to be striven for, to be worthy of

- A phonic conspiracy in languages:

- Ich liebe dich: a late-night, cigarette-voiced whisper;

- Ya tebya lyublyu an implication of difficulty, obstacles to be overcome;

- Ti amo: it sounds perhaps a bit too much like an aperitif.

   - Saying «I love you» for:

- assuring themselves that the promised condition has arrived;

- getting women into bed with men;

- getting men into marriage with women.

  - The promised land, an ark on which two might escape the Flood (an ark skippered by some crazy greybeard who beats you round the head with his gopher-wood stave, and might pitch you overboard at any moment)

- Does not make person you love happy

- Does not make everything all right

- Can release in the beloved the capacity to be happy

- Useful mutation

- Something pleasant, complex, but inessential

- Inimical to orderly civilization

  - Is essential because it's unnecessary

  - Makes us see the truth

  - Half-houses which according to normal criteria of map reading shouldn't exist

   - Will make you unhappy

   - Is our only hope

   - Devious and enclosed

Article:

Love is Not Enough

By Mark Manson

In 1967, John Lennon wrote a song called, “All You Need is Love.” He also beat both of his wives, abandoned one of his children, verbally abused his gay Jewish manager with homophobic and anti-semitic slurs, and once had a camera crew film him lying naked in his bed for an entire day.

Thirty-five years later, Trent Reznor from Nine Inch Nails wrote a song called “Love is Not Enough.” Reznor, despite being famous for his shocking stage performances and his grotesque and disturbing videos, got clean from all drugs and alcohol, married one woman, had two children with her, and then canceled entire albums and tours so that he could stay home and be a good husband and father.

One of these two men had a clear and realistic understanding of love. One of them did not. One of these men idealized love as the solution to all of his problems. One of them did not. One of these men was probably a narcissistic asshole. One of them was not.

In our culture, many of us idealize love. We see it as some lofty cure-all for all of life’s problems. Our movies and our stories and our history all celebrate it as life’s ultimate goal, the final solution for all of our pain and struggle. And because we idealize love, we overestimate it. As a result, our relationships pay a price.

When we believe that “all we need is love,” then like Lennon, we’re more likely to ignore fundamental values such as respect, humility and commitment towards the people we care about. After all, if love solves everything, then why bother with all the other stuff — all of the hard stuff?

But if, like Reznor, we believe that “love is not enough,” then we understand that healthy relationships require more than pure emotion or lofty passions. We understand that there are things more important in our lives and our relationships than simply being in love. And the success of our relationships hinges on these deeper and more important values.

THREE HARSH TRUTHS ABOUT LOVE

The problem with idealizing love is that it causes us to develop unrealistic expectations about what love actually is and what it can do for us. These unrealistic expectations then sabotage the very relationships we hold dear in the first place. Allow me to illustrate:

1. Love does not equal compatibility. Just because you fall in love with someone doesn’t necessarily mean they’re a good partner for you to be with over the long term. Love is an emotional process; compatibility is a logical process. And the two don’t bleed into one another very well.

It’s possible to fall in love with somebody who doesn’t treat us well, who makes us feel worse about ourselves, who doesn’t hold the same respect for us as we do for them, or who has such a dysfunctional life themselves that they threaten to bring us down with them.

Abstract painting love is not enough

It’s possible to fall in love with somebody who has different ambitions or life goals that are contradictory to our own, who holds different philosophical beliefs or worldviews that clash with our own sense of reality. It’s possible to fall in love with somebody who sucks for us and our happiness. That may sound paradoxical, but it’s true.

When dating and looking for a partner, you must use not only your heart, but your mind. Yes, you want to find someone who makes your heart flutter. But you also need to evaluate a person’s values, how they treat themselves, how they treat those close to them, their ambitions and their worldviews in general. Because if you fall in love with someone who is incompatible with, you’re going to have a bad time.

2. Love does not solve your relationship problems.

Man and woman kissing love is not enough. While love may make you feel better about your relationship problems, it doesn’t actually solve any of your relationship problems.

This is how a toxic relationship works. The roller coaster of emotions are intoxicating, each high feeling even more important and more valid than the one before, but unless there’s a stable and practical foundation beneath your feet, that rising tide of emotion will eventually come and wash it all away.

3. Love is not always worth sacrificing yourself. One of the defining characteristics of loving someone is that you are able to think outside of yourself and your own needs to help care for another person and their needs as well.

But the question that doesn’t get asked often enough is exactly what are you sacrificing, and is it worth it?

In loving relationships, it’s normal for both people to occasionally sacrifice their own desires, their own needs, and their own time for one another. I would argue that this is normal and healthy and a big part of what makes a relationship so great.

But when it comes to sacrificing one’s self-respect, one’s dignity, one’s physical body, one’s ambitions and life purpose, just to be with someone, then that same love becomes problematic. A loving relationship is supposed to supplement our individual identity, not damage it or replace it. If we find ourselves in situations where we’re tolerating disrespectful or abusive behavior, then that’s essentially what we’re doing: we’re allowing our love to consume us and negate us, and if we’re not careful, it will leave us as a shell of the person we once were.

Remember this: The only way you can fully enjoy the love in your life is to choose to make something else more important in your life than love.

You can fall in love with a wide variety of people throughout the course of your life. You can fall in love with people who are good for you and people who are bad for you. You can fall in love in healthy ways and unhealthy ways. You can fall in love when you’re young and when you’re old. Love is not unique. Love is not special.

But your self-respect is. So is your dignity. So is your ability to trust. There can potentially be many loves throughout your life, but once you lose your self-respect, your dignity or your ability to trust, they are very hard to get back.

Love is a wonderful experience. It’s one of the greatest experiences life has to offer. And it is something everyone should aspire to feel and enjoy. But like any other experience, it can be healthy or unhealthy. Like any other experience, it cannot be allowed to define us, our identities or our life purpose. We cannot sacrifice our identities and self-worth to it. Because the moment we do that, we lose love and we lose ourselves.

Because you need more in life than love. Love is great. Love is necessary. Love is beautiful. But love is not enough.

https://observer.com/2015/03/love-is-not-enough/

 

Exercises:

1. Find the russian equivalents for the following words:

the gentle tug, clutching and slimy amphibian, the rudder, carpentry section, catherine wheel, the self-effacement of the lover, the doer and the deed, ringingly good, die out like the dodo, a wizened bean, the totem-pole, pangaed his way through, the blood of tumescence, valve system, the canopy, fabulation, many more jungles, graft, Christs`s passion, religion has become either wimpishly workaday,

2. 1). Did the narrator believe, that there is progress in the history of the world?

2) How does the narrator describe love? Are there any differences with the general definitions of love?

3. Below are some quotations dealing with love. Choose one and write an essay:

1)It`s not a lack of love, but a lack of friendship that makes unhappy marriages.

(F. Niezsche)

2) The heart has its reason of which reason knows nothing. (B. Pascal)

3) When you like someone, you love the person as they are, and not as you`d like them to be. (L. Tolstoy)

4)Love is a better teacher than duty. (A. Einstein)