Love, Memory And Habit
Time heals wounds and bad memories – pains, affronts,
failures, bad fortune, strokes. But not only. Also the
amazing and the majestic are subject to that law and may
turn banal by time. We often get accustomed to things, and
forget their fantastic and marvellous side.
It’s a universal law, in which love – with all it contains
of grandiose – is not immune: «Love does
not just sit there, like a stone; it has to be made, like
bread, remade all the time, made new», Ursula Guin
wrote, applying time’s rule to love.
The lack of novelty can indeed be the tomb of many loves – a
tomb from which it returns no more, or only returns in our
memories, or in the myths created by literature or by pink
publications.
And notwithstanding time and habit aren’t the only
explanation for vulgarization, at least concerning love.
There are other causes, obviously.
Sometimes, in the case of romantic love, it is simply the
illusion that dies, it’s mirage of the fantastic beings
created by the passionate heart that vanishes.
Other
times it’s the absence of a true love:
How many men think they desire a woman when all they really
want is an orgasm?André Comte-Sponville, French
philosopher, A short Treatise on the Great Virtues
Or changes that happen in us:
He no longer loves the person whom he loved ten years ago. I
quite believe it. She is no longer the same, nor is he. He
was young, and she also; she is quite different. He would
perhaps love her yet, if she were what she was then.
Pascal. Thoughts
Português