Barnes. Pdf

 
Chapters 
73
If it is to save us, we must look at it as clearly as we should learn to look at death. Should love be taught in school? First term: 
friendship; second term: tenderness; third term: passion. Why not? They teach kids how to cook and mend cars and fuck one 
another without getting pregnant; and the kids are, we assume, much better at all of this than we were, but what use is any of 
that to them if they don't know about love? They're expected to muddle through by themselves. Nature is supposed to take 
over, like the automatic pilot on an aeroplane. Yet Nature, on to whom we pitch responsibility for all we cannot understand, 
isn't very good when set to automatic. Trusting virgins drafted into marriage never found Nature had all the answers when they 
turned out the light. Trusting virgins were told that love was the promised land, an ark on which two might escape the Flood. It 
may be an ark, but one on which anthropophagy is rife; an ark skippered by some crazy greybeard who beats you round the 
head with his gopher-wood stave, and might pitch you overboard at any moment. 
Let's start at the beginning. Love makes you happy? No. Love makes the person you love happy? No. Love makes 
everything all right? Indeed no. I used to believe all this, of course. Who hasn't (who doesn't still, somewhere below decks in 
the psyche)? It's in all our books, our films; it's the sunset of a thousand stories. What would love be for if it didn't solve 
everything? Surely we can deduce from the very strength of our aspiration that love, once achieved, eases the daily ache, works 
some effortless analgesia? 
A couple love each other, but they aren't happy. What do we conclude? That one of them doesn't really love the other; that 
they love one another a certain amount but not enough? I dispute that really; I dispute that enough. I've loved twice in my life 
(which seems quite a lot to me), once happily, once unhappily. It was the unhappy love that taught me most about love's nature 
- though not at the time, not until years later. Dates and details - fill them in as you like., But I was in love, and loved, for a 
long time, many years. At first I was brazenly happy, bullish with solipsistic joy; yet most of the time I was 
[p. 232]
puzzlingly, naggingly unhappy. Didn't I love her enough? I knew I did – and put off half my future for her. Didn't she love me 
enough? I knew she did - and gave up half her past for me. We lived side by side for many years, fretting at what was wrong 
with the equation we had invented. Mutual love did not add up to happiness. Stubbornly, we insisted that it did. 
And later I decided what it was I believed about love. We think of it as an active force. My love makes her happy; her love 
makes me happy: how could this be wrong? It is wrong; it evokes a false conceptual model. It implies that love is a 
transforming wand, one that unlooses the ravelled knot, fills the top hat with handkerchiefs, sprays the air with doves. But the 
model isn't from magic but particle physics. My love does not, cannot make her happy; my love can only release in her the 
capacity to be happy. And now things seem more understandable. How come I can't make her happy, how come she can't make 
me happy? Simple: the atomic reaction you expect isn't taking place, the beam with which you are bombarding the particles is 
on the wrong wavelength. 
But love isn't an atomic bomb, so let's take a homelier comparison. I'm writing this at the home of a friend in Michigan. It's 
a normal American house with all the gadgets technology can dream (except a gadget for making happiness). He drove me 
here from Detroit airport yesterday. As we turned into the driveway he reached into the glove pocket for a remote-control 
device; at a masterful touch, the garage doors rolled up and away. This is the model I propose. You are arriving home - or think 
you are - and as you approach the garage you try to work your routine magic. Nothing happens; the doors remain closed. You 
do it again. Again nothing. At first puzzled, then anxious, then furious with disbelief, you sit in the driveway with the engine 
running; you sit there for weeks, months, for years, waiting for the doors to open. But you are in the wrong car, in front of the 
wrong garage, waiting outside the wrong house. One of the troubles is this: the heart isn't heart-shaped. 
`We must love one another or die', wrote W. H. Auden, 
[p. 233]
bringing from E. M. Forster the declaration: `Because he once wrote "We must love one another or die", he can command me 
to follow him.' Auden, however, was dissatisfied with this famous line from `September 1, 1939'. `That's a damned lie!' he 
commented, `We must die anyway.' So when reprinting the poem he altered the line to the more logical `We must love one 
another and die'. Later he suppressed it altogether. 
This shift from or to and is one of poetry's most famous emendations. When I first came across it, I applauded the honest 
rigour with which Auden the critic revised Auden the poet. If a line sounds ringingly good but isn't true, out with it - such an 
approach is bracingly free of writerly self-infatuation. Now I am not so sure. We must love one another and die certainly has 
logic on its side; it's also about as interesting on the subject of the human condition, and as striking, as We must listen to the