"The greatest happiness love can offer is the first pressure of hands between you and your beloved." Stendhal is not good for me. But I am addicted. The first few days I couldn't put it down. Later I recognized, I had to, for it made me so miserable. Away from it I didn't know what to do with myself, and so I would fall into it. I hoped that it would exorcise all the longing that lingered, but it made it worse. Stendhal, no matter how vile he made being in love seem like, how utterly absurd ("in love realities obligingly rearrange themselves to conform with desire") and irrational ("From the moment he falls in love even the wiseset man no longer sees anything as it really is....He no longer admits an element of chance in things and loses his sense of the probable; judging by its effect on his happiness, whatever he imagines becomes reality"), still he colored it with a sliver of pathetic heroism.

I suppose I was going about it all wrong. If I wanted to stop being sick with love, it probably wouldn't help to read about why people do it, and how they fall into it. Far from being able to distance oneself from the feeling, one would even feel a greater inclination for it, reinforced by the act of placing oneself comfortably amidst a seamless narrative, forging bonds with countless, nameless, faceless others suffering the same miserable fate.

It didn't help to think of my actual situation either. It made me confused ("Torn between doubt and delight, the poor lover convinces himself that she could give him such pleasure as he could find nowhere else on earth"). I knew it wasn't going anywhere ("It only needs a very small quantity of hope to beget love") and I knew I didn't want to go on like this ("Love is like a fever which comes and goes quite independently of the will").

It is common knowledge, the only way to cure an obsession is to find another, stronger one. The strongest love is often forged during childhood: the bond with one's parents, siblings, first pet, etc. So I found myself, as I did when I was three, in the presence of one of my first loves, the black and the white of a piano. I must've played for fourteen hours the other day, stopping only to eat, nap, answer the phone. I can't say I'm cured, but I've found a new disease. A month ago, alone in a hotel room in Japan, I was a glorious wreck. Now, still in general a mess, but at least, once and for all, finally over it. ("There are moments in violent and unrequited love when you suddenly think you are not in love anymore. It is like coming across a spring of fresh water in the middle of the sea.")

Stendhal is not good for me.