Barnes. Pdf

 
Chapters 
72
Love Poetry or whatever. Then there are love letters; these are collected into The Golden Quill Treasury of Love Letters 
(available by mail order). But there is no genre that answers to the name of love prose. It sounds awkward, almost self-
contradictory. Love Prose: A Plodder's Handbook. Look for it in the carpentry section.
The Canadian writer Mavis Gallant put it like this: 'The mystery of what a couple is, exactly, is almost the only true 
mystery left to us, and when we have come to the end of it there will be no more need for literature - or for love, for that 
matter.' When I first read this, I gave it in the margin the chess marking `!?' indicating a move which, though possibly brilliant, 
is probably unsound. But increasingly the view convinces, and the marking is changed to `!!' 
`What will survive of us is love.' This is the cautiously-approached conclusion of Philip Larkin's poem `An Arundel Tomb'. 
The line surprises us, for much of the poet's work was a squeezed flannel of disenchantment. We are ready to be cheered; but 
we should first give a prosey scowl and ask of this poetic flourish, Is it true? Is love what will survive of us? It would be nice 
to think so. It would be comforting if love were an energy source which continued to glow after our deaths. Early television 
sets, when you turned them off, used to leave a blob of light in the middle of the screen, which slowly diminished from the size 
of a florin to an expiring speck. As a boy I would watch this process each evening, vaguely wanting to hold it back (and seeing 
it, with adolescent melancholy, as the pinpoint of human existence fading inexorably in a black universe). Is love meant to 
glow on like this for a while after the set has been switched off? I can't see it myself. When the survivor of a loving couple 
dies, love dies too. If anything survives of us it will probably be something else. What will survive of Larkin is not his love but 
his poetry: that's obvious. And whenever I read the end of `An Arundel Tomb' I'm reminded of William Huskisson. He was a 
politician and a financier, well-known in his time; but we remember him today because on the 15th of September 1830, at the 
opening of the Liverpool and Manchester Railway, he 
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became the first person to be run down and killed by a train (that's what he became, was turned into). And did William 
Huskisson love? And did his love last? We don't know. All that has survived of him is his moment of final carelessness; death 
froze him as an instructive cameo about the nature of progress. 
`I love you.' For a start, we'd better put these words on a high shelf; in a square box behind glass which we have to break 
with our elbow; in the bank. We shouldn't leave them lying around the house like a tube of vitamin C. If the words come too 
easily to hand, we'll use them without thought; we won't be able to resist. Oh, we say we won't, but we will. We'll get drunk, or 
lonely, or - likeliest of all - plain damn hopeful, and there are the words gone, used up, grubbied. We think we might be in love 
and we're trying out the words to see if they're appropriate? How can we know what we think till we hear what we say? Come 
off it; that won't wash. These are grand words; we must make sure we deserve them. Listen to them again: 'I love you'. Subject, 
verb, object: the unadorned, impregnable sentence. The subject is a short word, implying the self-effacement of the lover. The 
verb is longer but unambiguous, a demonstrative moment as the tongue flicks anxiously away from the palate to release the 
vowel. The object, like the subject, has no consonants, and is attained by pushing the lips forward as if for a kiss. `I love you'. 
How serious, how weighted, how freighted it sounds. 
I imagine a phonic conspiracy between the world's languages. They make a conference decision that the phrase must 
always sound like something to be earned, to be striven for, to be worthy of. Ich liebe dich: a late-night, cigarette-voiced 
whisper, with that happy rhyme of subject and object. Je t'aime: a different procedure, with the subject and object being got 
out of the way first, so that the long vowel of adoration can be savoured to the full. (The grammar is also one of reassurance: 
with the object positioned second, the beloved isn't suddenly going to turn out to be someone different.) Ya tebya lyublyu: the 
object once more in consoling second position, but this time - despite the hinting rhyme of subject and object - an implication 
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of difficulty, obstacles to be overcome. Ti amo: it sounds perhaps a bit too much like an apéritif, but is full of structural 
conviction with subject and verb, the doer and the deed, enclosed in the same word. 
Forgive the amateur approach. I'll happily hand the project over to some philanthropic foundation devoted to expanding the 
sum of human knowledge. Let them commission a research team to examine the phrase in all the languages of the world, to see 
how it varies, to discover what its sounds denote to those who hear them, to find out if the measure of happiness changes 
according to the richness of the phrasing. A question from the floor: are there tribes whose lexicon lacks the words I love you? 
Or have they all died out? 
We must keep these words in their box behind glass. And when we take them out we must be careful with them. Men will 
say `I love you' to get women into bed with them; women will say `I love you' to get men into marriage with them; both will 
say 'I love you' to keep fear at bay, to convince themselves of the deed by the word, to assure themselves that the promised 
condition has arrived, to deceive themselves that it hasn't yet gone away. We must beware of such uses. 1 love you shouldn't go 
out into the world, become a currency, a traded share, make profits for us. It will do that if we let it. But keep this biddable 
phrase for whispering into a nape from which the absent hair has just been swept. 
I'm away from her at the moment; perhaps you guessed. The transatlantic telephone gives off a mocking, heard-it-all-before 
echo. `I love you', and before she can answer I hear my metallic other self respond, 'I love you.' This isn't satisfactory; the 
echoing words have gone public. I try again, with the same result. I love you 1 love you - it's become some trilling song popular 
for a lurid month and then dismissed to the club circuit where pudgy rockers with grease in their hair and yearning in their 
voice will use it to unfrock the lolling front-row girls. l love you 1 love you while the lead guitar giggles and the drummer's 
tongue lies wetly in his opened mouth. 
We must be precise with love, its language and its gestures. 
[p. 231]

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J
ULIAN 
B
ARNES
: A History of the World in 10 ½