Love

We are human beings and subject to a range of emotions, ranging from hate to love. Perhaps one of the most significant of human emotions is love, that attachment to another being, an emotion we also find in our four-legged friends. 

There is the love of a child for his mother, of a mother for her child. Or simply of one human being for another. It means holding and being held. A friend once wrote me that over the distance, we were separated by an ocean and by time, we were both beginning to understand what romantic love was in the Middle Ages – a love without possession or fulfilment, even without hope of these, only a cherishing deep in one’s private heart. It means remembering, being there for each other whatever hardships the world may hold. A woman may love her husband, stick with him as wilful, authoritarian and egocentric as he may be, as many times as he may have betrayed her.

Love may be passionate, it may be calm and enduring.

It may be a deep friendship such as that shown in the film Driving Miss Daisy based on the unlikely friendship between a chauffeur and his aging mistress, now in a retirement home.  Their relationship had begun as simply that of the man who drove her car, a chauffeur with whom she did not always agree. But slowly, gradually, she came to understand that he was a person, to depend on him. And he came to understand her, more than her son, who had little time for his mother.

Love often is something kept to oneself.  James Joyce was in his early 20s when he wrote The Dead, The Dubliners, but he knew what love was when he described the feelings of Gabriel and his wife upon returning from a Christmas dinner. She is overcome with emotion as she tells him of a boy who once loved her when they both were young. It is then that he realizes that she had a life she had kept hidden in her deepest heart years ago and that he had no way of knowing this part of her soul, that he really did not know his wife. It is night. At the window, he watches the snow slowly falling over the moors and hills, over the dark waves. Over the graves and crosses in the churchyard where the boy who once had loved her was buried. Falling faintly upon all the living and the dead.

Love may simply be something that is there. After I had left home, when my mother wrote me, she did not have to say “I love you” for it was clear in her words.

“Your father is asleep. It is already late, but the music is still painting strange patterns against my wall – strange, because so many of the little notes are lost trying to come through to me. Some of the ones that get through must have come from Irish pipes – tomorrow being St. Patrick’s Day. The wall transforms them so that they sound like a jubilant spring concert of little frogs, big frogs, coming from the pond. Of course it’s much too cool for them yet. But when you’re here, maybe they will really be singing and we will listen to them together.”