on love

Perhaps it was by chance that I strolled in the Warwick Arts Centre just in time to hear the announcement over the PA system that the matinee performance of Three Sisters was about to resume after the interval. Compelled by the novelty to watch this famous play by Chekhov, coupled with an impetus of curiosity and sheer want of entertainment, I enquired about the show. It turned out that that evening's performance was to be its last. Rushing over to the box office I immediately bought a ticket and walked out of the theatre satisfied.

That evening, I ambled out of the the theatre once more, altered by the single fact of having been a voyeur at Chekhov's masterpiece. It had been an evening of scrambling for subtitles on the overhead screen and an attempt to catch most of what occured on stage, for it had been performed in its original language, Russian. For a long time I could not get Masha's line out of my head:

"When you read a novel, any novel, then it seems that everything is so old hat and everything is easily understood, but when you fall in love yourself then it becomes obvious to you that nobody knows anything and each person must make their own decisions"

Act 3

And so it is that nothing can prepare you for the assail of decisions when you commit yourself to someone. Commit not with mere words, but as the Australian natives would translate in English, with all one's 'insides'. Personally, due to the influence of such and such great men, I feel no affiliation with the term 'fall' when it comes to the love Masha speaks of. For the clumsiness of failing arms and legs in the movement of falling has no association with the act of true love. This temporary gust that trips us might be more properly termed 'infatuation', not at all a bad thing but an impure form that prepares us for the perfection of what is to come; falling is falling short.

True love, on the other hand, is defined by sacrifice. Yes, together with the connotations sacrifice alludes to: difficulty, pain, sorrow. Love is all these, just as ice is water, and vapour is water. No pure substance is begotten without a process, and this process by any other name would be as bitter. And yet not bitter: the taste of love turns sweet, for in that process of sacrifice the bitterness of giving up (when is not thinking about oneself first sweet) is refined into a thing pure and beautiful. The pain given in the betterment of another is transformed in substance by love and produces love.

And then, the heart of matter: water is not merely ice, water is not only vapour. Love is not only difficulty, pain or sorrow. It carries such properties of refinement within itself and more. Water quenches the slaking thirst of a dying man, it cools the heat of the desert soul, and washes away the stains of past hurts. Love is not a static goal of finality; it is the entire movement from start to finish. It is a journey that encompasses the test of the Venom symbiote for Spidey, the One ring of corruption for Galadriel, the Turkish Delight for Edmund.