First published in 1993 (Picador) Alain de
Botton's Essays in Love is lovely but also bitter sweet. It's
written as a fictional narrative that details a love affair from
sweetest beginnings to heartbreaking end, and because it's written in
the first person it's hard not to imagine that you're reading an
autobiographical account. Whether autobiographical or not there's no
way that de Botton could have written so insightfully without
experiencing every moment himself. It's beautifully written and I found
myself reading and re-reading sections because they perfectly express -
and bring into clarity - torments that I've experienced but only dimly
understood.
For instance the chapter called 'speaking love',
which exquisitely recounts the agonising problem of figuring out when
and how to say I love you. I agree with de Botton's view that those
three words have become so overloaded with cultural baggage - made at
the same time vastly important yet also utterly devalued by
tabloid-celebrity-consumer culture - that saying them can easily seem
both profoundly unoriginal and fall so far short of expressing how you
really feel as to actually amount to a real-terms depreciation of the
very thing you're trying to express.
This book is about love, not
sex, so anyone expecting a kind of philosophical Joy of
Sex will be disappointed. De Botton quite properly reflects the
importance of the physical, but the focus here is on all of the other
kinds of intercourse that really are - in de Botton's view - the main
course of love. This is not a recipe book for dessert. Instead de
Botton beautifully recounts and gently deconstructs the ebb and flow of
the narrative of love. But if words are the means by which we fall in
love then so can they also presage the end of love. One insight that
struck a chord was the observation by Chloe, de Botton's (presumably
fictional) lover, that "one can talk problems into existence".
Alain
de Botton is a philosopher, and this book weaves
philosophical insights into its narrative. But this is philosophy at
its most practical and accessible. The genius of de Botton, in my view,
is that he - perhaps uniquely in our generation - is able to write
philosophy that helps directly with the vexed problems of living life
in our complex postmodern secular society. Normally the currency of
poets and playwrights, few philosophers have taken on love. Shopenhauer was perhaps the best known 19C philosopher to
address love and relationships, but pathologically pessimistic and
misogynistic his insights offer cold comfort. In stark
contrast de Botton is sensitive, positive and life affirming.
Like
most complex human conditions love is not something that can be
understood with a rational reductionist approach (unless perhaps you
happen to be an evolutionary psychologist).
But any purely rational approach, while of course doomed to succeed
within its own narrow scope, will fail to satisfy. De Botton
understands this well. One of the 'lessons in love', the last chapter
in this book, offers the paradoxical insight that we must be prepared
to both understand the lessons from previous love affairs but then
abandon those (ultimately flawed) analyses in order to allow ourselves
to fall joyously into love.
To anyone who has been in love, or
wants to be in love, and seeks a deeper understanding of that condition
I can quite unreservedly recommend this book.