Purchasing : late 2017
Reading date : Sunday, 1st April, 2018
The fundamental reason that I read a novel is that there is a hope that I would find at least a single sentence which articualtes what I have felt in my real life before or at the moment and what I could deeply sympathize with. There is a time when emotions are extreme, but it is difficult to understand properly what I am feeling or to say it in right words. Alain de Botton in this book, "The Course of Love", shows us many insightful words that we can readily sympathize with. I could sense, while reading it, that he centainly understands how to love someone properly.
It tells us how we begin to love someone, how we become frustrated, and how we overcome it. At the beginning of love infatuation captures us. Objective knowledge doesn't come into it. It bypasses the normal processes of reason.
At the beginning, we are frightened and anxious. When we face someone we are deeply in love with we become clumsy, scared of saying and doing the wrong thing, and cannot find anything to talk about. It is always strange that 'we tend not to get very anxious when seducing people we don't much care about', says Alain de Botton.
He also says 'Love reaches a pitch at those moments when our beloved turns out to understand, more clearly than others have ever been able to, and perhpas even better than we do ourselves, the chaotic, embarrasing and shameful parts of us. We can admit to not being as respectable or as sober, as even-keeled or as 'normal', as society believes. We can be childish, imaginative, wild, hopeful, cynical, fragile, and multiple- all of this our lover can understand and accept us for.'
I cannot agree more with the view that to love someone means to give them the power to hurt us. When love reaches a certain point they are dependant on each partner. Each of them wants to be understood, heard. But, 'our romantic lives are fated to be sad and incomplete, because we are creatures driven by two essetial desires which point powerfully in entirely opposing directions.' When hurt, Alain de Botton encourages us to understand that 'few in this world are very simply nasty; those who hurt us are themselves in pain. The appropriate response is hence never cynicism or aggression but, at the rare moments one can manage it, always love.'
Alain de Botton is an observant, acute and clever writer. 'The Course of Love' explores how to maintain love over time as he constantlys says love is a skill, not just an enthusiasm. This doesn't mean that we should be anti-Romantist. It is completely opposite. Love is a skill because it is not so much the start of love as accumulating processes of understanding it.
