Between the two words, koi and ai, there is no variation of intensity, but an essential incompatibility. Can one fall in love with a person one has a liking for? Unthinkable. One falls in love with a person one cannot stand, a person who represents an unbearable danger. Schopenhauer saw in love the ruses of our reproductive instincts: I cannot express the horror this theory inspires in me. I see, in love, the ruses of my instinct not to assassinate another person: when I feel the need to kill a specific individual, some mysterious mechanism--an immune reflex? phantasm of innocence? fear of being sent to jail?--causes me to crystallize around that person. And so it has transpired that, to the best of my knowledge, I have, to date, never murdered a soul.Hateful and selfish.
Engagement contains the idea of a gage, a pledge, I added, to plead my cause. The fiancee pledges her troth. It's lovely, don't you think? Whereas the meaning of the word marriage is filled with platitudes, just like the contract that defines it.
These are bits and pieces of the mystery, not given that we should understand and thereby dissolve it, but that with each new speck its depth might be expanded and we humbled.
Friday, May 29, 2009
Tokyo Fiancee
Amelie Nothomb
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