Why True Love is a Myth and It's Plato’s Fault

The modern notion of “soul mate”, that there is someone out there who is just the right mate for us, is actually based on an old myth.

Plato is to blame. He included a famous myth in his work of Symposium that “people were hermaphrodites until God split them in two, and now all the halves wander the world over seeking one another. Love is the longing for the half of ourselves we have lost.”

Though I used to argue from the other side of the fence, I had ceased believing in Plato’s delusive concept myself, that there is someone out there waiting to share her life with me. The sooner we all make peace with that fact, the better we would feel.

Even the idea that “we should marry for love” is fairly novel too. For those of us whose ancestry hail from Asia and Africa, we can recall how our grandparents or some great-grandparents got united under “arranged marriages”. Does that mean that love founded after such a marriage is sealed is less real than Plato’s idea of true love, then?

Not necessarily.

In some cases, it is due to the less expectation of our partner that makes the love even more fulfilling.
Hence theone question we should ask ourselves.

Which school of thought do you believe in: Plato’s idea of “other half” or the traditional concept of “arranged love”?






Post’script ~
Lest I seem to contradict myself, I do not believe in the traditional concept of “arranged love” either. My feet are firmly planted on the middle ground. I like to play it by ear.

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"All Our Worldly Goods" by Irène Némirovsky

Reading this book sort of reminds me of the movie  "L'Heure d'été" by Olivier Assayas. As typical of French provincial stories are, they evoke a sense of modest amounts of artistry blended with sweet melancholy.

In other words, they are similar to British provincial stories, if not for the fact that the French ones are more infused with subtle emotions.

In this novel we will see how marriages were still arranged in the early 20th century, albeit the claims that European families of those days were getting more and more "contemporary" and "liberal".

The conflicts within the characters tend to run minimal. Even the tragedies, though they inflict deep scars, tend to unite the family members closer.

The way that the love runs deep between the two protagonists, Pierre and Agnes, despite the ongoing continent-wide WW2 that drafts him into the military has been depicted beautifully.

I only lament the book synopsis on the back cover which may be more directed toward contemporary US readers who are in thirst of more passionate dramas.

Consider this synopsis below:
 
Pierre and Agnes marry for love against the wishes of his parents and his grandfather, the tyrannical family patriarch. Their marriage provokes a family feud that cascades down the generations.

It sounds too American, I say. Such showy acts of passion are in fact, absent for the most part.


But overall I admire Némirovsky's beautful style of prose (albeit she was not French herself), and I look forward into reading some more of her works...

Verdict: 7 out of 10 stars

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List of cities with more population than Wyoming

Living in Wyoming, where the population is only around 580,000, must be extremely boring.

For one, it is the 10th largest state in USA. However, in terms of population, it is the smallest state in the country.

In case you don't know what a population of 580,000 would look like, I'll give you international readers some comparison. The following are mid-sized cities around the world that have more approximate population than the entire state of Wyoming combined:

1. Leeds, England (799,000) 
2. Kagoshima, Japan (600,000)
3. Bandar Lampung, Indonesia (790,000)
4. Vancouver, BC, Canada (600,000)
5. Louisville, KY, USA (597,000)

Sad, ain't it?

I am having a hard time myself living in a mid-sized town like this one in Northern Kentucky. Outside of work, going to campus, and occasional hanging out with pals, it is dull here.

I can't imagine what how dismal life could look like if I were to relocate there.

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"The Unbearable Lightness of Being" by Milan Kundera

For ordinary readers looking for a light read, I can assure you: “The Unbearable Lightness of Being” can be unbearable for you. Though raised and educated in the mid-20th century France, the author Milan Kundera is Czech by birth. Therefore, we readers can expect what is so typical of Soviet-era Eastern European writings…replete with melancholy and drab colours, even when the backdrop of the story hovers between Zurich, Vienna and Prague.

However, there are several excellent qualities that make it worthy of read.

Reading the book is akin to what a man feels when he takes a stroll in the park, sees a beautiful stranger, brings her home and afterwards sleeps with her. Then, he starts peeling in detail, layer by layer, on that fleeting experience with the stranger. What does the experience of being in love feel like? When we love someone, does the volition to own the other’s body necessarily carry the weight of unifying one’s body to the partner’s? Is the activity of sex an obligation, a pursuit of pleasure, or both? How can love carry more weight when it is devoid of sex (and vice versa)?

Consider this example.  The main female protagonist of the story, Tereza, is married to a man, Tomas, who sleeps around with other women. She is fully aware of this fact, yet she willingly gives in to Tomas’ pursuits of outside pleasures, since she contends that he is merely satisfying the bodily needs while his soul belongs to her alone.

Or is it so?

Because at times she postulates that since the activity of sex itself does not necessarily define the emotions of love with it, she should be perfectly fine with it. In other words, she is not jealous of her husband when he seeks pleasure from other women. She is only jealous when her body is treated like other women’s. On this aspect, she compartmentalises herself, becoming a detached observer to the marital conundrums.

The banality of life is another interesting topic that Kundera has touched with his two separate yet interconnected stories. When the pleasures of life have become one’s routine, is it possible to rekindle the flames that had once surfaced when we experienced it for the first time? For example, going on a hike for the 100th time may not carry the same excitement and adrenaline rush as when we were about to do it for the first time ever. Marital and love can also carry out the same dissatisfaction due to this very reason: it becomes banal.

Though the topics dealt in the book revolve around love and pleasure, this is not a romance book. Far from it, even. Kundera has peeled each of the layers that each of us carries when the notion of romantic love, namely eros, and helps us to define how we see them and why we see them the way we do. We may not agree with his opinions, but at least we can give them a try.

Verdict:  8 out of 10 stars

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on Getting intellectual nourishment

Working as a librarian in the busiest public library branch in Kentucky has gained me nearly unlimited access to every single book that has ever been published in English since the 1930s, which is great considering that my very definition of a paradise includes reading a good novel with the company of a few friends.

Starting from the second week of March, I have decided to start posting my own reviews of some books I have read - either those in the distant past or those I came upon recently. This new project of mine has nothing to do with any classes I am taking at community college.

Quite the contrary, I have been dying of thirst for intellectual nourishment...and enrolling in a small-town community college sates me none of that.

Hence my book reviews, which I will faithfully post every Saturday.

The French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, who at the dawn of the 1980s promulgated the notion of “cultural capital”: the idea that aesthetic choices are an artifact of socioeconomic position. He documented a correlation between taste and class position: The scarcer or more difficult to access an aesthetic experience is –literary world very much included- the greater its ability to set us apart from those further down the social ladder. This kind of value is, in his analysis, the only real value that “refined” tastes have. My book review project would hopefully help me in fulfilling my own need for reaching that aesthetic ideals.

Most will be fiction, some will be non-fiction, depending on whatever genre I feel like reading at the time. As a general rule, I would never post reviews on chick-lit or horror or Christian fictions, though I may find exceptions every now and then.

Unlike my old project of translating Indonesian songs once a week, I will not take suggestions from anybody on what books I should read or review. I will review the books when I feel like it, but one thing for sure, I can promise you a book review for your weekends.

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