I love you
I love you too
okay, well are you sure that by "love" you mean what I said?
...?
...?
Once in a while I can actually apply something I learned in AP English to real life, but don't tell my teacher because I dropped her class senior year and refused to come back no matter how much she begged. My laziness prevailed and I didn't want to do all the work. Plus the lady be crazy. Loved her, but not interested in having books I've read so many times I have to make a new cover for it out of a gift bag... although the handles would be nice.
The Bridge of San Luis Rey
It's one or those stories that if they made it into a move it would be "Love Actually"-esque; I love that movie.
The story is about different types of love, and how although you can love someone to your deepest capacity, it may not be enough, and it's never the same.
If you don't feel like reading it, I'll give you some important points.
"Either we live by accident and die by accident, or we live by plan and die by plan. Some say that we shall never know and that to the gods we are like the flies that the boys kill on a summer day, and some say, on the contrary, that the very sparrows do not lose a feather that has not been brushed away by the finger of God."
Does your life have a meaning, a plan, a purpose? It's one of the questions the book poses. It basically asks if we've learned what we were meant to, if we've become the best version of ourselves, we've served our purpose in the world and all the lives we'll ever touch in it, is that the moment we die? Is life done when it's done because we no longer serve a purpose. Or, can our death serve a bigger purpose than our life ever could?
And then there is love. All kinds of love. Sibling love. Parental love. Romantic love. The story follows the lives of 5 people who die when a bridge fell, and it leads you to decided whether life is meaningful and therefore the end of it represents something, or if it's all just random and doesn't matter whatsoever.
"Now [Esteban] discovered that secret from which one never quite recovers, that even in the most perfect love one person loves less profoundly than the other. There may be two equally good, equally gifted, equally beautiful, but there may never be two that love one another equally well"
I love you different.
And you get to decide if different is okay, if different is enough.
But why stay hung up on the comparison? If both parties are happy, moving forward with their lives, living the way they each feel they were meant to live, what difference does it make who loves whom more profoundly? Further, what scale is used to quantify love?
ReplyDeleteI think it's a thing better left less examined. In the end the point total doesn't matter. In the end how happy we were is really all that matters.
In the book we see the unhappiness. The best examples are brotherly love (one is loved less and it hurts him, but you can't break up with your brother) and a mother is loved less by her daughter. Her daughter couldn't care less about her, and she moves across the sea. You'll never stop loving your child, so you have to live with the pain.
ReplyDeleteI think that loving more or less can't be true. As the book seems to say, everyone loves in their own way. Who is to say that one way is better than another? You can only love in the best way you know how and that's all that matters. That is what makes love real...knowing that you loved in the best way you could and knowing that that love meant something to you.
ReplyDelete