Written in a thankfully empty train carriage, wending north from Rome to Florence, having walked the streets of that sun-roasted city from the early morning, and finding myself in the heat of the day in the cool of the Capitoline Museum, gazing at the marble heads of Caesar and Sulla, Marius and Agrippa, and realizing, looking at their faces that each were marked by a seemingly fierce disappointment with power. They each had a deep and abiding love of material hegemony, but power had not requited that love. What power had given back was not power itself but some other difficult revelation for which none of them were prepared. No matter where we turn our faces, we love but are powerless to know, except in the experience of the revelation itself, the way that a love will be returned.
I took a further step forward with the essay at a terrace table outside a little hotel in Volterra, Tuscany, where D.H Lawrence stayed around 1920, my Lawrentian Panama hat pulled down to keep the powerful westering sun off my face, sipping a macchiato and feeling perfectly requited in my love of Italy.
Finished early in the morning in the old convent where we run the Italy walking tour, having woken in the night with a few final thoughts with regard to grace and an almost physical sense, fleetingly granted by the vulnerabilities of the night hour, of the power of loving itself regardless of the form in which it might be returned.
Human beings live in disappointment and a self-appointed imprisonment when they refuse to love unless they are loved the selfsame way in return.
UNREQUITED
love is the love human beings experience most of the time. The very need to be fully requited may be to turn from the possibilities of love itself. Men and women have always had difficulty with the way a love returned hardly ever resembles a love given, but unrequited love may be the form that love mostly takes; for what affection is ever returned over time in the same measure or quality with which it is given? Every man or woman loves differently and uniquely, and each of us holds different dreams and hopes and falls in love or is the object of love at a very specific threshold in a very particular life where very, very particular qualities are needed for the next few years of our existence. What other human being could ever love us as we need to be loved? And whom could we know so well and so intimately through all the twists and turns of a given life that we could show them exactly the continuous and appropriate form of affection they need?
Requited love may happen, but it is a beautiful temporary, a seasonal blessing, the aligning of stars not too often in the same quarter of the heavens, an astonishing blessing. But it is a harvest coming only once every long cycle, and a burden to the mind and the imagination when we set that dynamic as the state to which we must always return in order to feel ourselves in a true, consistent, loving relationship.
Whether our affections are caught in romantic love, trying to see our neighbours as ourselves, or trying to love a great but distant God, our love rarely seems to be returned in the mode that it is given. That gift is returned in ways that, to begin with, we rarely recognise. Human beings live in disappointment and a self-appointed imprisonment when they refuse to love unless they are loved the selfsame way in return. It is the burden of marriage, the difficult invitation at the heart of parenting and the central difficulty in our relationship with any imagined, living future. The great discipline seems to be to give up wanting to control the manner in which we are requited, and to forgo the natural disappointment that flows from expecting an exact and measured reciprocation, from a partner, from a child, from our hopes for a loving God.
We seem to have been born into a world where love, except for brilliant, exceptional moments, seems to exist from one side only, ours, and that may be the difficulty and the revelation and the gift – to see love as the ultimate in giving and letting go – and through the doorway of that affection make the most difficult sacrifice of all, giving away the very thing we want to hold forever.
-from Consolations: The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words: Revised Edition
One of my favorites.
This is so close to my bones. Letting go in the name of love requires discipline I’m barely capable of and an enforced respect for the other that hurts and frustrates. I hope, once it’s moved through, that my heart will have learned to treasure love of the required kind. Thank you David.