Love, etc

"In my experience, for what it's worth, you don't meet someone, then be given a certain amount of evidence about them, and on the basis of that decide that you like them. Its the opposite: you like someone and then go looking for evidence to suppport that feeling.

Oliver used to have a theory he called Love, etc: In other words, the world divides into people for whom love is everything and the rest of life is a mere 'etc', and people who don't value love enough and find the most exciting part of life is the 'etc'. People don't divide up that way.

And another thing. Beforehand, you think: when I grow up I'll love someone, and I hope it goes right, but if that goes wrong I'll love another person. Always assuming that you can find these people in the first place and that they'll let you love them. What you expect is that love, or the ability to love, is always there, waiting. But I don't think that love - and life - are like that. You can't make yourself love someone, and you cant, in my experience, make yourself stop loving someone. In fact, if you want to divide people up in the matter of love, I'd suggest doing it this way: some people are fortunate, or unfortunate, enough to love several people, either one after the other, or overlapping; while other people are fortunate, or unfortunate, enough to be able to love only once in their life. They love once and, whatever happens, it doesnt go away. Some people can only do it once. I've come to realize that I'm one of these. "

"Like most of his life's writing, the play was concerned with love. And as in his life, so in his writing: love did not work. Love might or might not provoke kindness, gratify vanity, and clear the skin, but it did not lead to happiness; there was always an inequality of feeling or intention present. Such was love's nature. Of course it 'worked' in the sense that it caused life's profoundest emotions, made him fresh as spring's linden-blossom and broke him like a traitor on the wheel. It stirred him from well-mannered timidity to relative boldness, though a rather theoretical boldness, one tragicomically incapable of action. It taught him the gulping folly of anticipation, the wretchedness of failure, the whine of regret, and the silly fondness of remembrance. He knew love well. Thirty years earlier, he had written himself into the part of Rakitin, who offers the audience his conclusions abt love: "In my opinion, Alexei Nikolaevich, every love, happy as well as unhappy, is a real disaster when you give yourself over to it entirely." These views were deleted by the censor.

So did he fall in love with his own creation? If love, as some assert, is purely self-referring business, if the object of love is finally unimportant because what lovers value are their own emotions, then what more appropriate circularity than for a dramatist to fall in love with his own creation? Who needs the interference of the real person, the real her beneath the sunlight, the lamplight, the heartlight? Here is a photo of Verochka, dressed as for the schoolroom: timid and appealing, with ardour in her eyes and an open palm denoting trust. "