'Simon May, in his book Love: A History, attributes
Viewing the ancient carved effigies of a husband and
this to love gradually coming to replace religion as the
wife on a grave, he notices, ‘with a sharp tender shock’,
organising principle of our lives. As he points out, idealised
that the man’s left hand is withdrawn from its gauntlet
conceptions of love tend to be underpinned by beliefs that
and is reaching over and holding the hand of the female
mirror the way major religions view God and devotional
statue. Corby says, ‘His immediate response is to try, rather
practice — love is unconditional, eternal, and selfless,’
sceptically, to rationalise and downplay the scene: “They
explained Corby. ‘As the sway of religion declined, and as
would not think to lie so long. / Such faithfulness in effigy
other age-old communal certainties came to be usurped
/ Was just a detail friends would see”. In the final stanza,
by widespread individualism, love — an ideal conception
however, he works his way through marvellously hedged
of love as absolute and redemptive — became ever more
and equivocating language to arrive at a breathtaking final
important as a source of comfort, security, and identity.’
line that, in my view, vindicates the naive conception of love:
He admits personally favouring the naive variety over the suspicious view that love is always about something
The stone fidelity
other than love. ‘Let’s face it, we have enough to be cynical
They hardly meant has come to be
about,’ he points out. ‘Ironically, this view is supported
Their final blazon, and to prove
by some of the most clear-sighted and sceptical writers
Our almost-instinct almost true:
of the twentieth century. ‘Love loves to love love,’ writes
What will survive of us is love.’
James Joyce in Ulysses. Samuel Beckett — whose work is synonymous with bleakness and despair — often portrays
Further reading:
love’s capacity to endure and gives some sort of meaning to an otherwise meaningless life (the French philosopher Alain Badiou remarks on this in his book In Praise of Love). The playwright Sarah Kane surprised many when she claimed that Blasted — a play that shocked the world with
James Corby (2012). ‘Blake, Yeats, Larkin: nihilism and the indifferent consolation of Post-Romanticism, New Questions on Literary Criticism.’ Istanbul: DAKAM Publishing, 2012. 159-169 [available on OAR@UM]
sordid scenes of rape and infant necrophagia — was all about love, love that endures the worst and still survives.’ This tension between the sceptical and naive view of love is brilliantly dramatised in an experience recounted in a poem by the famously pessimistic writer, Philip Larkin. The poem describes a visit he made with his
Adrian Grima, 'Fashioning' the Maltese Family’, The Family, Law, Religion and Society in the European Union and Malta, Ed. Peter G. Xuereb. Malta: EDRC, University of Malta, 2006. um.edu.mt/__data/ assets/pdf_file/0003/145623/Maltese_Family.pdf FOCUS
girlfriend, Monica Jones, to Chichester Cathedral.
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