Big, Legendary Loves vs Small, Real, Anonymous and Hidden Loves
We all love beauty, lyricism. We love poetry and love stories.
We love the big romantic loves. We admire the big demonstrations
of collective love, and we like to sanctify and to raise their
interpreters up to the condition of icons: Saint Francis of
Assisi, Mother Teresa, and so on.
But nevertheless these loves are somehow dislocated. They are
distant loves, with unreal elements. They aren’t really good
human models of love. They concern saints – something we surely
aren’t. They concern literary characters of the past. Mostly,
they are products of legend and imagination. Not real loves.
In this view, we should search elsewhere to find the real great
loves. And we should accept that the greater ones are anonymous
and hidden, and not the eulogised and chanted ones.
Often they are just loves made of devotion, generosity, humility
– elements that we, in our dreams and fantasies, do not
appreciate much. Maybe they aren’t as romantic, lyrical or with
the grandiose elements of the loves of Romeo and Juliet or
Abelard and Heloise. And yet they can be greater (because they
are truly real).
Books, Films,
Cultural Stuff on these and
other related issues? See
Love Essays Store
(in association with Amazon)
Romantic Love? See also:
Love is madness
Beauty and love
Love is a game
Love and fidelity
Abelard
and Heloise
Love in
Literature
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