Love Is a Game
The literary and lyrical love
Love can be a game. An intensely lyrical game full of
dreams, as the one described by Shakespeare in Romeo and
Juliet:
O! swear not by the moon, the inconstant moon,
That monthly changes in her circled orb,
Lest that thy love prove likewise variable.
For stony limits cannot hold love out,
And what love can do, that dares love attempt.
No, no, there is more danger in your eyes than twenty of
their swords.
Love can also be a game of flirt and coquette played by the
woman, or a game of adventure, conquest and seduction played
by the man, as the libertine loves told by Ovid:
You should follow Goddesses examples, and do not disdain the
pleasures afforded by your lovers desires.
Love can be a sadomasochistic game, brutal and imposed, or
freely allowed, played in the darkness of rooms and staging.
Love can be fetishist, as Karl Kraus remembers:
There is no unhappier creature on earth than a fetishist who
yearns to embrace a woman’s shoe and has to embrace the whole
woman.
But not all loves are games. Man is an animal who loves to play
games, but when reality imposes itself, and our dearest beings
are concerned, the game ends. There is no place to game, in the
truer loves.
Books, Films,
Cultural Stuff on these and
other related issues? See
Love Essays Store
(in association with Amazon)
Quotations
Love as a Game: Marcel Proust
Marcel Proust, 1871-1922, French writer
Life is sown with miracles that only people who love can wait
for.
Young Girls in Flower
To love is, someway, as in the stories, and we can’t do anything
till the end of enchantment stops.
In search of lost time
When love is very great, the real woman role is inconceivably
small.
Young Girls in Flower
Love is a flagrant example of how meagre reality is for us.
Albertine
We can be with the loved one and, notwithstanding, not having
her with us.
Sodom and Gomorrah
In love, what is dangerous and cause of suffering, isn’t the
woman in herself, but her constant presence, and the constant
curiosity about what she is doing.
In search of lost time
We just love what shows up as something inaccessible; we don’t
love what we already have.
The prisoner
The possession of the being we love is a greater joy than love
itself.
The prisoner
Often, we just find or feel we are in love in the day of
separation.
Albertine
It’s a great suffering to let life without ever knowing what
would be to kiss the woman we have loved so much.
The Guermantes Way
In the people we love, immanent to our love, is a certain kind
of dream that we often are unable to identify.
Remembrance of Things Past
Quotations
Romantic Love as Illusion: Proust, Shakespeare, E. Morin, Comte
Sponville, Lucrecius
How grievous to think I have dispended years of my life, and
have wished to die, and that my greater love involved a woman
that did not please me, that did not make my kind…
Marcel Proust, 1871-1922, French writer, Swann’s Way
Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind
And therefore is winged Cupid painted blind.
William Shakespeare, 1564-1616, English poet, Midsummer’s
Night Dream
I was adored once, too.
William Shakespeare, 1564-1616, English poet, King’s Night
Love is an adventure that risks to be an illusion and a lye, and
to finish in tragedy.
E. Morin, French philosopher and sociologist, Method V
The error we all make when we fall in love is to attribute the
extraordinary adventure we are living to the qualities of the
loved being.
Francesco Alberoni, Italian essayst, Le choc amoureux
I swear to you, not that I will love you forever, but that I
will remain forever faithful to the love we know now.
Love me for as long as you want to, my love, but do not forget
us.
At first everything about the other person seems marvellous;
then he appears as he is.
We ought not to confuse love with the illusions we have about it
when we are in love or with how we imagine it when we are not in
love and want to be.
Every now and then I hear of a man and a woman who love (…) who
live together in absolute ad complete oneness. I also hear of
people who have seen the Virgin Mary, and I attach no greater
importance to these later reports.
What would be more improbable, miraculous and contrary to our
daily experience than two beings merging into one?
A. Comte-Sponville, French philosopher, Small Treaty on the
Great Virtues
It is on the essence of love to profess to love forever but in
fact to love only for a time.
Clément Rosset, French authour, Le Príncipe the cruauté
From the very fountain of enchantment rises a drop of bitterness
to torment even in the flowers.
Lucrecius, 98-55 b.C, Roman poet and philosopher, De rerum
natura
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
Big and small loves
Love and fidelity
Abelard
and Heloise
Love in
Literature
Português
