"But what could be odder than the way that books which chime with one's condition or stage in life insinuate themselves into one's hand?" (4)

and so does Doris Lessing's love, again. I bought this book six years ago, read a couple of pages, and against the self-imposed rule of never leave a book unfinished, I dropped it without giving it a second look. But this summer, these words insinuated themselves:

"There seems to be a rule that what you condemn will turn up sooner or later, to be lived through. Forced to eat your vomit" (2). And later, "...the hard law ... says you must suffer what you despise" (9). Some people are better than others in living what they preach. But I suppose most of us are caught in the middle, pulled on the one hand by the logic of living with the restraint required to maintain one's sanity and on the other by the desire to know what lies beyond the rules (the paradigmatic forbidden fruit, borne from the tree of knowledge). Or plain recklessness. Ultimately, the universe has its way of making us understand, live how the other half lives.

I've been exchanging study hours for time rewards to read a few pages of this book. I don't get past more than a few pages, because the words jump at me, pulling me back, to read them over and over and over.

"Her body burned more fiercely, if this were possible. Burn, the word we use, shorthand for such shameful, such agonizing physical symptoms. Quite poetic, really, the word burn." (109)

"She was raging with desire. (Rage: another good word, like burn.) But why describe it, since there is no one who has not felt the mix of anguish, incredulity, and -- at the height of the illness -- a sick sweet submersion in pain because it is inconceivable that anything so terribly desired cannot be given, and if you relinquish the pain, then the hope of bliss is abandoned too." (120) This part is all too familiar, the madness that accompanies being 'in love'. I remember saying these words to myself some three years ago. To let go of the love that caused so much pain is, to let go of love. Why would anyone, for we all crave to love, even consider this a viable option? Yet now, looking back, I don't know why it should have been so hard at all. The phantom was a coverup for shame. I just couldn't see through it.

(Is it repeating itself now? Youth is a fountain of mistakes. But today I am not raging. And today there is no pain. Perhaps the hope of bliss has long been abandoned, with the quiet acceptance that this life comes in overlapping phases and the only reasonable hoping left to be done is the hope that this too shall pass.)

"There seems to be a general agreement that being in love is a condition unimportant, and even comic. Yet there are a few more painful for the body, the heart, and -- worse -- the mind, which observes the person it (the mind) is supposed to be governing behaving in foolish and even shameful ways...For people are too often in love, and they are usually not in love equally, or even at the same time. They fall in love with people not in love with them as if there were a law about it, and this leads to...if the condition she was in were not tagged with the innocuous 'in love', then her symptoms would be those of a real illness." (140) Psychosomatic. Emotional anguish manifest in physical pain.

The book is an antidote. There is no better cure for emotional distress than the detached, clinical study of it.