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tags: Love
rel: Cold Intimacies - The Making of Emotional Capitalism Consuming Romantic Utopia - Eva Illouz
NOTE
I like Eva Illouz’s novels on love, and am seeking something complementary here. This was a quick read but I’m not sure I got what I wanted out of it.
Falling in and out of love
Ivan Klima says: there is little that comes so close to death as fulfilled love. Into your daily preoccupations, love and death will rise ab nihilo – out of nothingness.
NOTE
I don’t associate so closely love with death, so this is a jarring way to start the text. I understand the connection though, even in marriage rites “till death do us part.”
One may even (and one all too often does) believe that love-making skills are bound to grow as the experience accumu- lates; that the next love will be an experience yet more exhilarating than the one currently enjoyed, though not as thrilling or exciting as the one after next.
In every love, there are at least two beings, each of them the great unknown in the equations of the other. This is what makes love feel like a caprice of fate – that eerie and mysterious future, impossible to be told in advance, to be pre-empted or staved off, to be speeded up or arrested. To love means opening up to that fate, that most sublime of all human conditions, one in which fear blends with joy into an alloy that no longer allows its ingredients to separate.
Without humility and courage, no love. Both are required, in huge and constantly replenished supplies, whenever one enters an unexplored and unmapped land, and when love happens between two or more human beings it ushers them into such a territory.
It would be foolish and irresponsible to blame electronic gadgets for the slow yet consistent recession of personal, direct, face-to- face, multifaceted and multipurpose, continuous proximity. Yet virtual proximity boasts features that in a liquid modern world can be seen, with good reason, as advantageous – but which cannot easily be obtained under conditions of that other, not virtual, tête-à-tête. No wonder virtual proximity is given prefer- ence and practised with greater zeal and abandon than any other closeness. Loneliness behind the closed door of a private room with a mobile telephone within reach may seem much less risky and safer a condition than sharing the household’s common ground.
’As the generation weaned on the net enters its prime dating years, internet dating is really taking off. And it’s not a last resort. It’s a recreational activity. It’s entertainment.’