Essays in love

14. The reasons behind such arguments were never the surface ones: whatever Chloe's deficiencies with the Guide Michelin, or my intolerance to driving around in large circles through the Spanish countryside, what was at stake were far deeper anxieties. The strength of the accusations we made, their sheer implausibility, showed that we argued not because we hated one another, but because we loved one another too much – or, to risk confusing things, because we hated loving one another to the extent we did. Our accusations were loaded with a complicated subtext, I hate you, because I love you. It amounted to a fundamental protest, I hate having no choice but to risk loving you like this. The pleasures of depending on someone pale next to the paralysing fears that such dependence involves. Our occasionally fierce and somewhat inexplicable arguments during our trip through Valencia were nothing but a necessary release of tension that came from realizing that each one had placed all their eggs in the other's basket – and was helpless to aim for more sound household management. Our arguments sometimes had an almost theatrical quality to them, a joy and exuberance would manifest itself as we set about destroying the bookshelf, smashing the crockery, or slamming doors: 'It's nice being able to feel I can hate you like this,' Chloe once said to me. 'It reassures me that you can take it, that I can tell you to fuck off and you'll throw something at me but stay put.' We needed to shout at one another partly to see whether or not we could tolerate each other's shouting. We wanted to test each other's capacity for survival: only if we had tried in vain to destroy one another would we know we were safe.

It is easiest to accept happiness when it is brought about through things that one can control, that one has achieved after much effort and reason. But the happiness I had reached with Chloe had not come as a result of any personal achievement or effort. It was simply the outcome of having, by a miracle of divine intervention, found a person whose company was more valuable to me than that of anyone else in the world. Such happiness was dangerous precisely because it was so lacking in self-sufficient permanence. Had I after months of steady labour produced a scientific formula that had rocked the world of molecular biology, I would have had no qualms about accepting the happiness that ensued from such a discovery. The difficulty of accepting the happiness Chloe represented came from my absence in the causal process leading to it, and hence my lack of control over the happiness-inducing element in my life. It seemed to have been arranged by the gods, and was consequently accompanied by all the primitive fear of divine retribution.

'All of man's unhappiness comes from an inability to stay in his room alone,' said Pascal, advocating a need for man to build up his own resources over and against a debilitating dependence on the social sphere. But how could this possibly be achieved in love? Proust tells the story of Mohammed II who, sensing that he was falling in love with one of the wives in his harem, at once had her killed because he did not wish to live in spiritual bondage to another. Short of this, I had long ago given up hopes of achieving self-sufficiency. I had gone out of my room, and begun to love another – thereby taking on the risk inseparable from basing one's life around another human being.

The anxiety of loving Chloe was in part the anxiety of being in a position where the cause of my happiness might so easily vanish, where she might suddenly lose interest, die, or marry another. At the height of love, there appeared a temptation to end the relationship prematurely, so that either Chloe or I could play at being the executioner, rather than see the other partner, or habit, or familiarity end things. We were sometimes seized by an urge (manifested in our arguments about nothing) to kill our love affair before it had reached its natural end, a murder committed not out of hatred, but out of an excess of love - or rather, out of the fear that an excess of love may bring. Lovers may kill their own love story only because they are unable to tolerate the uncertainty, the sheer risk, that their experiment in happiness has delivered.

Hanging over every love story is the thought, as horrible as it is unknowable, of how it will end. It is as when, in full health and vigour, we try to imagine our own death, the only difference between the end of love and the end of life being that at least in the latter, we are granted the comforting thought that we will not feel anything after death. No such comfort for the lover, who knows that the end of the relationship will not necessarily be the end of love, and almost certainly not the end of life.

17

Contractions

Though questions of reality and falsehood in this area are notorious for resisting scrutiny and systematic analysis, after our return from Spain I began to suspect – without quite being able to look at the evidence in the face – that Chloe had started to simulate all or some of her orgasms.

Her customary behaviour was replaced by an exaggerated activity apparently designed to divert me from her lack of genuine involvement in the process. The change was not accompanied by any obvious sign of uninterest. Indeed, lovemaking as a whole became more passionate. Not only was it performed more often, it was also performed in different positions and at different hours of the day, it was more turbulent, there were screams, even crying, the gestures closer to anger than the gentleness normally associated with the act.

What should have been said to Chloe was eventually shared with a great male friend instead.

'I don't know what's happening, Will, sex simply isn't what it used to be.'

'Don't worry, it goes in phases, you can't expect it to be high octane every time. Not even I expect that.'

'I just feel something else is wrong, I don't know what, but in the months since we came back from Spain, I've been noticing stuff. And I don't mean only in the bedroom, that's just a kind of symptom. I mean everywhere.'

'Like?'

'Well, nothing I could put a finger on directly. All right, here's one thing I remember. She likes a different cereal than me, but because I spend a lot of time at her place, she usually buys the kind of cereal I like so we can have breakfast together. Then all of a sudden last week, she stops buying it, and says it's too expensive. I don't want to come to any conclusions, I'm just noticing.'

4. Will and I were standing in the reception area of our office. A cocktail party was in progress to celebrate the firm's twentieth birthday. I had brought Chloe with me, for whom this was a first chance to see my work-space.

'Why does Will have so many more commissions than you?' Chloe asked Will and me after wandering around the exhibits.

'You answer that one, Will.'

'That's because real geniuses always have a hard time getting their work accepted,' answered Will, cancelling out what might have been a compliment through exaggeration.

'Your designs are brilliant,' Chloe told him, 'I've never seen anything so inventive, especially for office projects. The use of materials is just incredible, and the way you've managed to integrate the brick and metal so well. Couldn't you do things like that?' Chloe asked me.

'I'm working on a number of ideas, but my style is very different, I work with different materials.'

'Well, I think Will's work is great, incredible in fact. I'm so glad I came to see it.'

'Chloe, it's great to hear you say so,' answered Will.

'I'm so impressed, your work is exactly the kind of thing I'm interested in and I think it's such a pity that more architects don't do what you're trying to do. I imagine it can't be easy.'

'It's not that easy, but I've always been taught to go with the things I believe in. I build the houses that make me feel real, and then the people who live in them end up absorbing a kind of energy from them.'

'I think I see what you mean.'

'You'd see better if we were out in California. I was working on a project in Monterey, and I mean, there you'd really get a sense of what you can do by using different kinds of stone as well as some steel and aluminium, and working with the landscape instead of against it.'

5. It is part of good manners not to question the criteria responsible for eliciting another's love. The dream is that one has not been loved for criteria at all, but rather for who one is, an ontological status beyond properties or attributes. From within love, as within wealth, a taboo surrounds the means of acquiring and sustaining affection or property. Only poverty, either of love or money, leads one to question the system - perhaps the reason why lovers do not make great revolutionaries.

6. Passing an unfortunate woman in the street one day, Chloe had asked me, 'Would you have loved me if I'd had an enormous birthmark on my face like she does?' The yearning is that the answer be 'yes' – an answer that would place love above the mundane surfaces of the body, or more particularly, its cruel unchangeable ones. I will love you not just for your wit and talent and beauty, but simply because you are you, with no strings attached. I love you for who you are deep in your soul, not for the colour of your eyes or the length of your legs or size of your chequebook. The longing is that the lover admire us stripped of our external assets, appreciating the essence of our being without accomplishments, ready to repeat the unconditional love said to exist in some parts between parent and child. The real self is what one can freely choose to be, and if a birthmark arises on our forehead or age withers us or recession bankrupts us, then we must be excused for accidents that have damaged what is only our surface. And even if we are beautiful and rich, then we do not wish to be loved on account of these things, for they may fail us, and with them, love. I would prefer you to compliment me on my brain than on my face, but if you must, then I would rather you comment on my smile (motor- and muscle-controlled) than on my nose (static and tissue-based). The desire is that I be loved even if I lose everything: leaving nothing but 'me', this mysterious 'me' taken to be the self at its weakest, most vulnerable point.

Do you love me enough that I may be weak with you? Everyone loves strength, but Do you love me for my weakness? That is the real test. Do you love me stripped of everything that might be lost, for only the things I will have for ever?

That evening at the architectural office, I first began to sense Chloe slipping away from me, losing admiration for my work and beginning to question my value in relation to other men. Because I was tired, and Chloe and Will were not, I went home and they chose to go on to the West End for a drink. Chloe told me she'd call as soon as she got home, but by eleven o'clock, I decided to call her. The answerphone replied, as it did when I called again at two thirty that morning. The urge was to confess my anxieties into the machine, but to formulate them seemed to bring them closer into existence, dragging a suspicion into the realm of accusation and counter-accusation. Perhaps it was nothing - or at least everything: I preferred to imagine her in an accident than playing truant with Will. I called the police at four in the morning, and asked them in the most responsible tone a man drunk on vodka may adopt, if they had not seen evidence, perhaps a mutilated body or wrecked Volkswagen, of my angel in a short green skirt and black jacket, last seen in an office near the Barbican. No, sir, no such sighting had been made, was she a relative or just a friend? Could I wait till morning, and contact the station again then?

'One can think problems into existence} Chloe had told me. I dared not think, for fear of what I might find. The freedom to think involves the courage to stumble upon our demons. But the frightened mind cannot wander, I stayed tethered to my paranoia, brittle as glass. Bishop Berkeley and later Chloe had said that if one shuts one's eyes, the outer world may be said to be no more real than a dream, and now more than ever the power of illusion came to seem comforting, the urge not to look truth in the face, the urge that if only one did not think, an unpleasant truth might not exist.

9- Feeling implicated in her absence, guilty for my suspicions, and angry at my own guilt, I pretended to have noticed nothing when Chloe and I met at ten o'clock the following day. Yet she must have been guilty – for why else would she have gone to her local supermarket to add to her kitchen the missing breakfast cereal to fill Weltschmertz's stomach? She accused herself not by her indifference, but by her sense of duty, a large packet of Three Cereal Golden Bran prominently placed on the window ledge.

'Is something wrong with it? Isn't that the one you like?' asked Chloe, watching me stumble over my mouthfuls.

10. She said she had stayed the night at her girlfriend Paula's house. Will and she had chatted till late in a bar in Soho, and as she'd had a bit to drink, it had seemed easier to stop off in Bloomsbury than make the journey back home to Islington. She had wanted to call me, but it would surely have woken me up. I had said I wanted to go to sleep early, so wasn't it the best thing? Why was I making that face? Did I want more milk to go with the three cereals?

An urge accompanies epistemically stunted accounts of reality - the urge, if they are pleasant, to believe them. Like an optimistic simpleton's view of the world, Chloe's version of her evening was desirably believable, like a hot bath in which I wished to sit for ever. If she believes in it, why shouldn't I? If it's this simple for her, why should it be so complicated for me? I wished to be taken in by her story of a night spent on the floor of Paula's flat in Bloomsbury, able in that case to set aside my alternative evening (another bed, another man, unfaked pleasure). Like the voter from whom the politician's caramel promise draws a tear, I was lured by falsehood's ability to appeal to my deepest emotional yearning.

Therefore, as she had spent the night with Paula, had bought cereal, and all was forgiven, I felt a burst of confidence and relief, like a man awaking from a nightmare. I got up from the table and put my arms around the beloved's thick white pullover, caressing her shoulders through the wool, then bending down to kiss her neck, nibbling at her ear, feeling the familiar perfume of her skin and the brush of her hair against my face. 'Don't, not now,' said the angel. But, disbelieving, caught up in the familiar perfume of her skin and brush of hair against his face, Cupid continued to pucker his lips against her flesh. T said once already, not now!' repeated the angel, so that even he might hear.

The pattern of the kiss had been formed during their first night together. She had placed her head beside his and, fascinated by this soft juncture between mind and body, he had begun running his lips along the curve of her neck. It had made her shudder and smile, she had played with his hand, and shut her eyes. It had become a routine between them, a signature of their intimate language. Don't, not now. Hate is the hidden script in the letter of love, its foundations are shared with its opposite. The woman seduced by her partner's way of kissing her neck, turning the pages of a book, or telling a joke watches irritation collect at precisely these points. It is as if the end of love was already contained in its beginning, the ingredients of love's collapse eerily foreshadowed by those of its creation.

14. I said once already, not now. There are cases of skilled doctors, experts at detecting the first signs of cancer in their patients, who will somehow ignore the growth of football-sized tumours in their own body. There are examples of people who in most walks of life are clear and rational, but who are unable to accept that one of their children has died or that their wife or husband has left them – and will continue to believe the child has merely gone missing or the spouse will leave their new marriage for the old. The shipwrecked lover cannot accept the evidence of the wreckage, continuing to behave as though nothing had changed, in the vain hope that by ignoring the verdict of execution, death will somehow be stalled. The signs of death were everywhere waiting to be read - had I not been struck by the illiteracy pain had induced.

The victim of love's demise grows unable to locate original strategies to revive the corpse. At precisely the time when things might still have been rescued with ingenuity, fearful and hence unoriginal, I became nostalgic. Sensing Chloe drawing away, I attempted to pull her back through blind repetition of elements that had in the past cemented us. I continued with the kiss, and in the weeks thereafter, insisted that we return to cinemas and restaurants where we had spent pleasant evenings, I revisited jokes we had laughed at together, I readopted positions our bodies had once moulded.

I sought comfort in the familiarity of our in-house language, the language used to ease previous conflicts, a joke designed to acknowledge and hence render inoffensive the temporary fluctuations of love.

'Is something wrong today?' I asked one morning when Venus looked almost as pale and sad as I.

'Today?'

'Yes, today, is something wrong?'

'No, why? Is there any reason it should be?'

'I don't think so.'

'So why are you asking?'

'I don't know. Because you're looking a bit unhappy'

'Sorry for being human.'

'I'm just trying to help. Out of ten today, what would you give me?'

'I really don't know.'

'Why not?'

'I'm tired.'

'Just tell me.'

'I can't.'

'Come on, out of ten. Six? Three? Minus twelve? Plus twenty?'

'I don't know.' 'Have a guess.'

'For Christ's sake, I don't know, leave me alone, damn it!'

The in-house language unravelled, it grew unfamiliar to Chloe, or rather, she feigned forgetting, so as not to admit denial. She refused complicity in the language, she played the foreigner, she began reading me against the grain, and found errors. I could not understand why things I was saying and that in the past had proved so attractive were now suddenly so irritating. I could not understand why, having not changed myself, I should now be accused of being offensive in a hundred different ways. Panicking, I embarked on an attempt to return to the golden age, asking myself, "What had I been doing then that I perhaps am not doing now?' I became a desperate conformist to a past self that had been the object of love. What I had failed to realize was that the past self was the one now proving so annoying, and that I was therefore doing nothing but accelerating the process towards dissolution.

I became an irritant, one who has gone beyond caring for reciprocation. I bought her books, I took her jackets to the dry cleaner's, I paid for dinner, I suggested we make a trip to Paris at Christmas time to celebrate our anniversary. But humiliation could be the only result of loving against all evidence. She could sulk me, shout at me, ignore me, tease me, trick me, hit me, kick me, and still I would not react -and thereby grew abhorrent.

19. At the end of a meal I had spent two hours preparing (largely taken up by an odd argument we fell into over Balkan history after Chloe began a peculiar defence of Serbian nationalism), I took Chloe's hand and told her, 1 just wanted to say, and I know it sounds sentimental, that however much we fight and everything, I still really care about you and want things to work out between us. You mean everything to me, you know that.'

Chloe (who had always read more psychoanalysis than fiction) looked at me suspiciously and replied, 'Listen, it's kind of you to say so, but it worries me; you've got to stop turning me into your ego ideal like this.'

20. Things had reduced themselves to a tragicomic scenario: on the one hand, the man identifying the woman as an angel, on the other, the angel identifying love as some- thing only a little short of a pathology.

18

Romantic Terrorism

Why don't you love me? is as impossible a question (though a far less pleasant one) to ask as Why do you love me? In both cases, we come up against our lack of conscious control in the amorous structure, the fact that love has been brought to us as a gift for reasons we never wholly determine or deserve. To ask such questions, we are forced to veer on one side towards complete arrogance, on the other to complete humility: What have I done to deserve love? asks the humble lover; I can have done nothing. What have 1 done to be denied love? protests the betrayed one, arrogantly claiming possession of a gift that is never one's due. To both questions, the one who hands out love can only reply: Because you are you – an answer that leaves the beloved dangerously and unpredictably strung between grandiosity and depression.

Love may be born at first sight, but it does not die with corresponding rapidity. Chloe must have feared that to talk or even leave would have been hasty, that she might have been opting for a life offering no more favourable alternative. It was hence a slow separation, the masonry of affect only gradually prising itself loose from the loved one. There was guilt at the residual sense of responsibility towards a once-prized object, a form of treacly liquid left at the bottom of the glass that needed time to drain off.

3. When every decision is difficult, no decision is taken. Chloe prevaricated, I joined her (for how could any decision be pleasant for me?). We continued to see one another and sleep with one another. We even made plans to visit Paris at Christmas time, yet Chloe was curiously disengaged from the process, as though she were making arrangements for someone else – perhaps because it was easier to deal in air- line tickets than the issues that lay behind their purchase or non-purchase. Her apathy embodied the hope that by doing nothing, another might take the decision for her, that by displaying her indecision and frustration while not acting on it I would ultimately perform the move that she had needed (but been too scared) to make herself.

4. We entered the era of romantic terrorism.

‘Is there anything wrong?’

'No, why, should there be?'

'I just thought you might want to talk about things.'

'What things?'

'About us.'

'You mean about you,' snapped Chloe.

'No, I mean about us.'

'Well, what about us?'

'I don't know, really. It's just a sense I have that ever since about the middle of September, we haven't really been communicating. It's like there's a wall between us and you're refusing to acknowledge it's there.'

'I don't see a wall.'

'That's what I mean. You're even refusing to admit there was ever anything other than this.'

'Than what?'

Once a partner has begun to lose interest, there is apparently little the other can do to arrest the process. Like seduction, withdrawal suffers under a blanket of reticence. The very breakdown of communication is hard to discuss, unless both parties have a desire to see it restored. This leaves the lover in a desperate situation. Honest dialogue seems to produce only irritation and smothers love in the attempt to revive it. Desperate to woo the partner back at any cost, the lover might at this point be tempted to turn to romantic terrorism, the product of irredeemable situations, a gamut of tricks (sulking, jealousy, guilt) that attempt to force the partner to return love, by blowing up (in fits of tears, rage or otherwise) in front of the loved one. The terroristic partner knows he cannot realistically hope to see his love reciprocated, but the futility of something is not always (in love or in politics) a sufficient argument against it. Certain things are said not because they will be heard, but because it is important to speak.

When political dialogue has failed to resolve a grievance, the injured party may also in desperation resort to terrorist activity, extracting by force the concession it has been unable to seduce peacefully from its opposite number. Political terrorism is born out of deadlocked situations, behaviour that combines a party's need to act with an awareness (conscious or semi-conscious) that action will not go any way towards achieving the desired end – and will if anything only alienate the other party further. The negativity of terrorism betrays all the signs of childish rage, a rage at one's own impotence in the face of a more powerful adversary.

7. In May 1972, three members of the Japanese Red Army, who had been armed, briefed and financed by the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), landed on a scheduled flight at Lod Airport, near Tel Aviv. They disembarked, followed the other passengers into the terminal building, and once inside, pulled machine-guns and grenades out of their hand luggage. They began firing on the crowd indiscriminately, slaughtering twenty-four people and injuring a further seven before they were themselves killed by the security forces. What relation did such butchery have with the cause of Palestinian autonomy? The murders did not accelerate the peace process, they only hardened Israeli public opinion against the Palestinian cause, and in a final irony for the terrorists, it turned out the majority of their victims were not even Israelis, but belonged to a party of Puerto Rican Christians who had been on a religious pilgrimage to Jerusalem. Yet the action found its justification elsewhere, in the need to vent frustration in a cause where dialogue had ceased to produce results.

Both of us could only spare a weekend in Paris, so we left on the last flight out of Heathrow on Friday, and planned to return late on the Sunday. Though we were going to France to celebrate our anniversary, it felt more like a funeral. When the plane landed in Paris, the airport terminal was sombre and empty. It had begun to snow and a fierce arctic wind was blowing. There were more passengers than taxis, so we ended up sharing a ride with a woman we had met at passport control, a lawyer travelling from London to Paris for a conference. Though the woman was attractive, I was in no mood to find her so, but nevertheless flirted with her as we made our way into the city. When Chloe attempted to join the conversation, I would interrupt her with a remark addressed exclusively (and seductively) to the woman. But success in inducing jealousy is dependent on a significant factor: the inclination of the targeted audience to give a damn. Hence terroristic jealousy is always a gamble: how far could I go in trying to make Chloe jealous? What if she were not to react? Whether she was merely hiding that jealousy so as to call my bluff (like politicians who appear on television and declare how unconcerned they are with the terrorist threat), or whether she genuinely did not care, I could not be sure. But one thing was certain, Chloe did not allow me the pleasure of a jealous reaction, and was more pleasant than she had been in a long time when we finally settled into our room in a small hotel on the Rue Jacob, perhaps cheered by the thought that I would, after all, get over her.

9 Terrorists take a gamble in assuming that their actions will prove terrifying enough to provide a form of bargaining power. There is the story of a wealthy Italian businessman who, late one afternoon, received a phone call in his office from a terrorist gang, telling him that they had kidnapped his youngest daughter. A huge sum was stipulated as ransom, and the threat levelled that if it wasn't paid, the daughter would never be seen alive again. But the businessman casually replied that, if they killed the girl, they would in fact be doing him a huge favour. He had ten children, he explained wearily, and they had all been a great disappointment and a trial to him, expensive to keep and the unfortunate result of only a few moments of exertion in the bedroom on his part. The ransom would not be paid, and if they wanted to kill her, that was their choice. And with that blunt message, the businessman put down the phone. Within hours, the girl was released.

10. It was still snowing when we awoke the next morning, but it was too warm for it to settle, so the pavements turned to mud, brown beneath a low grey sky. We had decided to visit the Musée d'Orsay after breakfast, and planned to go on to a cinema in the afternoon. I had just shut the door to the hotel room, when Chloe asked me brusquely, 'Have you got the key?'

'No,' I answered, 'you told me a minute ago you had it.'

'Did I? No, I didn't,' said Chloe, 'I don't have the key. You've just locked us out.'

'I haven't locked us out. I shut the door thinking you had the key, because the key wasn't where I left it.'

'Well, that's really silly of you, because I don't have it either, so we're locked out – thanks to you.'

'Thanks to me! For Heaven's sake, stop blaming me for the fact that it was you who forgot the key.'

'I had nothing to do with the key.'

At that moment, Chloe turned towards the lifts, and (with novelistic timing) the room key fell out of her coat pocket onto the maroon carpet of the hotel.

'Oh, I'm sorry. I did have it all along, oh, well,' said Chloe.

But I decided I would not forgive her with ease, and snapped, 'That's it,' and headed for the stairs silently and melodramatically, Chloe calling after me, 'Wait, don't be silly, where are you going? I said I was sorry.'

A structurally successful terroristic sulk must be sparked by some wrong-doing, however small, on the part of the sulked, and yet is marked by a disproportion between insult inflicted and sulk elicited, drawing a punishment bearing little relation to the severity of the original offence - and one that cannot easily be resolved through normal channels. I had been waiting to sulk Chloe for a long time, but to begin sulking when one has not been wronged in any definite way is counter-productive, for there is a danger the partner will not notice and guilt not flourish.

I could briefly have shouted at Chloe, she back at me, and then our argument over the room key would have unwound itself. At the basis of all sulks lies a wrong that might have been addressed and disappeared at once, but that instead is taken by the injured partner and stored for later and more painful detonation. Delays in explanations give grievances a weight that they would lack if the matter had been addressed as soon as it had arisen. To display anger shortly after an offence occurs is the most generous thing one may do, for it saves the sulked from the burgeoning of guilt and the need to talk the sulker down from his or her battlement. I did not wish to do Chloe such a favour, so I walked out of the hotel alone and headed towards Saint-Germain, where I spent two hours browsing in a series of bookshops. Then, instead of returning to the hotel to leave a message, I ate lunch alone in a restaurant, then went to see two films in a row, eventually returning to the hotel at seven o'clock in the evening.

13- The key point about terrorism is that it is primarily designed to attract attention, a form of psychological warfare with goals (for instance, the creation of a Palestinian state) unrelated to military techniques (opening fire in the arrival lounge of Lod Airport). There is a discrepancy between means and ends, a sulk being used to make a point relatively unconnected to the sulk itself –I am angry at you for accusing me of losing the key symbolizing the wider (but unspeakable) message I am angry at you for no longer loving me.

14. Chloe was no brute and, whatever I might claim, had generous tendencies for self-blame. She had tried to follow me to Saint-Germain, but had lost me in the crowd. She had returned to the hotel, waited a while, and then gone to the Musée d'Orsay. When I finally came back to the room, I found her resting in bed, but without speaking to her, went into the bathroom and took a long shower.

The sulker is a complicated creature, giving off messages of deep ambivalence, crying out for help and attention, while at the same time rejecting it should it be offered, wanting to be understood without needing to speak. Chloe asked if she could be forgiven, saying she hated to leave arguments unresolved and wanted us to spend a pleasant anniversary evening that night. I said nothing. Unable to express the full extent of my anger with her (an anger that had nothing to do with a key), I had grown unreasonable. Why had it become so hard for me to say what I meant? Because of the danger of communicating my real grievance: that Chloe had ceased to love me. My hurt was so inexpressible, had so little to do with a forgotten key, that I would have looked like a fool to bring the matter up at this stage. My anger was hence forced underground. Unable to say directly what I meant, I resorted to symbolizing meaning, half hoping, half dreading that the symbol would be decoded.

After my shower, we finally made it up over the key incident, and went out for dinner to a restaurant on the Île de la Cité. We were both on best behaviour, keen to avoid tensions, chatting on neutral territory about books, films, and capital cities. It might have seemed (from the waiter's point of view) that the couple was indeed a happy one – and that romantic terrorism had scored a significant victory.

Yet ordinary terrorists have a distinct advantage over romantic terrorists, the fact that their demands (however outrageous) do not include the most outrageous demand of all, the demand to be loved. I knew that the happiness we were enjoying that evening in Paris was illusory, because the love that Chloe was displaying had not been given spontaneously. It was the love of a woman who feels guilty for the fact she has ceased to feel affection, but who nevertheless attempts a display of loyalty (as much to convince herself as her partner). Hence my evening was not a happy one: my sulk had worked, but its success had been empty.

Though ordinary terrorists may occasionally force concessions from governments by blowing up buildings or school children, romantic terrorists are doomed to disappointment because of a fundamental inconsistency in their approach. You must love me, says the romantic terrorist, I will force you to love me by sulking you or making you feel jealous, but then comes the paradox, for if love is returned, it is at once considered tainted, and the romantic terrorist must complain, If I have only forced you to love me, then I cannot accept this love, for it was not spontaneously given. Romantic terrorism is a demand that negates itself in the process of its resolution, it brings the terrorist up against an uncomfortable reality – that love's death cannot be arrested.

19- As we walked back towards the hotel, Chloe slipped her hand in my coat pocket and kissed me on the cheek. I did not return her kiss, not because a kiss was not the most desired conclusion to a terrible day, simply because I could no longer feel Chloe's kiss to be genuine. I had lost the will to force love on its unwilling recipient.

19

Beyond Good and Evil

Early on Sunday evening, Chloe and I were sitting in the economy section of a British Airways jet, making our way back from Paris to London. We had recently crossed the Normandy coast, where a blanket of winter cloud had given way to an uninterrupted view of dark waters below. Tense and unable to concentrate, I shifted uncomfortably in my seat. There was something threatening about the flight, the dull background throb of the engines, the hushed grey interior, the candy smiles of the airline employees. A trolley carrying a selection of drinks and snacks was making its way down the aisle and, though I was both hungry and thirsty, it filled me with the vague nausea that meals may elicit in aircraft.

Chloe had been listening to her Walkman while dozing, but she now pulled out the plugs from her ears and stared with her large watery eyes at the seat in front of her.

'Are you all right?' I asked.

There was a silence, as though she had not heard. Then she spoke.

'You're too good for me,' she said.

'What?'

I said, "You're too good for me."

' 'What? Why?'

'Because you are.'

'What are you saying this for, Chloe?'

'I don't know.'

'If anything, I'd put it the other way round. You're always the one ready to make the effort when there's a problem, you're just more self-deprecating about your . . .'

'Shush, stop, don't,' said Chloe, turning her head away from me.

'Why?'

'Because I've been seeing Will.'

'You've what?'

'I've been seeing Will, OK.'

'What? What does seeing mean? Seeing Will?'

'For God's sake, I've been to bed with Will.'

'Would madam like a beverage or light snack?' enquired the stewardess, choosing this moment to introduce her wares.

'No, thank you.'

'Nothing at all, then?'

'No, I'm all right.'

'How about for sir?'

'No thanks, nothing.'

3. Chloe had started to cry.

'I can't believe this. I just cannot believe this. Tell me it's a joke, some terrible, horrible joke, you've been to bed with Will. When? How? How could you?'

'God, I'm so sorry, I really am. I'm sorry, but I . . . I . . . I'm sorry . . .'

Chloe was crying so hard, she was unable to speak. Tears were streaming down her face, her nose was running, her whole body shaken by spasms, her breathing halting, gasping. She looked in such pain, for a moment I forgot the import of her revelation, concerned only to stop the flow of her tears.

'Chloe, please don't cry, it's all right. We can talk about this. Tidge, please, take this handkerchief. It'll be OK, it will, I promise . . .'

'My God, I'm so sorry, God I'm sorry, you don't deserve this, you really don't.'

Chloe's devastation temporarily eased the burden of betrayal. Her tears represented a brief reprieve for my own. The irony of the situation was not lost on me – the lover comforting his beloved for the upset betraying him has caused her.

4. The tears might have drowned every last passenger and sunk the whole aeroplane had the captain not prepared to land soon after they had begun. It felt like the Flood, a deluge of sadness on both sides at the inevitability and cruelty of what was happening: it simply wasn't working, it was going to have to end. Things felt all the more lonely, all the more exposed in the technological environment of the cabin, with the clinical attentions of stewardesses, with fellow passengers staring with the smug relief others feel in the face of strangers' emotional crises.

5. As the plane pierced the clouds, I tried to imagine a future: a period of life was coming brutally to an end, and I had nothing to replace it with, only a terrifying absence. We hope you enjoy your stay in London, and will choose to fly with us again soon. To fly again soon, but would I live again soon? I envied the assumptions of others, the security of fixed lives and plans to take off again soon. What would life mean from now on? Though we continued holding hands, I knew how Chloe and I would watch our bodies grow foreign. Walls would be built up, the separation would be institutionalized, I would meet her in a few months or years, we would be light, jovial, masked, dressed for business, ordering a salad in a restaurant – unable to touch what only now we could reveal, the sheer human drama, the nakedness, the dependency, the unalterable loss. We would be like an audience emerging from a heart-wrenching play but unable to communicate anything of the emotions they had felt inside, able only to head for a drink at the bar, knowing there was more, but unable to touch it. Though it was agony, I preferred this moment to the ones that would come, the hours spent alone replaying it, blaming myself and her, trying to construct a future, an alternative story, like a confused playwright who does not know what to do with his characters (save kill them off for a neat ending ...). All this till the wheels hit the tarmac at Heathrow, the engines were thrown into reverse, and the plane taxied towards the terminal, where it disgorged its cargo into the immigration hall. By the time Chloe and I had collected our luggage and passed through customs, the relationship was formally over. We would try to be good friends, we would try not to cry, we would try not to feel victims or executioners.

6. Two days passed, numb. To suffer a blow and feel nothing – in modern parlance, it means the blow must have been hard indeed. Then one morning, I received a hand-delivered letter from Chloe, her familiar black writing poured over two sheets of creamy-white paper:

I am sorry for offering you my confusion, I am sorry for ruining our trip to Paris, I am sorry for the unavoidable melodrama of it. I don't think I will ever cry again as much as I did aboard that miserable aeroplane, or be so torn by my emotions. You were so sweet to me, that's what made me cry all the more, other men would have told me to go to hell, but you didn't, and that's what made it so very difficult.

You asked me in the terminal how I could cry and yet still be sure. You must understand, I cried because I knew it could not go on, and yet there was still so much holding me to you. I realize I cannot continue to deny you the love you deserve, but that I have grown unable to give you. It would be unfair, it would destroy us both.

I shall never be able to write the letter which I would really want to write to you. This is not the letter I have been writing to you in my head for the last few days. I wish I could draw you a picture, I was never too good with a pen. I can't seem to say what I want, I only hope you'll fill in the blanks.

I will miss you, nothing can take away what we have shared. I have loved the months we have spent together. It seems such a surreal combination of things, breakfasts, lunches, phone calls in mid-afternoon, late nights at the Electric, walks in Kensington Gardens. I don't want anything to spoil that. When you've been in love, it is not the length of time that matters, it's everything you've felt and done coming out intensified. To me, it's one of the few times when life isn't elsewhere. You'll always be beautiful to me, I'll never forget how much I adored waking up and finding you beside me. I simply don't wish to continue hurting you. I could not bear for it slowly all to go stale.

I don't know where I will go from here. I will perhaps spend time on my own over Christmas or spend it with my parents. Will is going to California soon, so we'll see. Don't be unfair, don't blame him. He likes you very much and respects you immensely. He was only a symptom, not the cause of what's happened. Excuse this messy letter, its confusion will probably be a reminder of the way I was with you. Forgive me, you were too good for me. I hope we can stay friends. All my love . . .

7. The letter brought no relief, only reminders. I recognized the cadences and accent of her speech, carrying with it the image of her face, the smell of her skin – and the wound I had sustained. I wept at the finality of the letter, the situation confirmed, analysed, turned into the past tense. I could feel the doubts and ambivalence in her syntax, but the message was definitive. It was over, she was sorry it was over, but love had ebbed. At the end of a relationship, it is the one who is not in love who makes the tender speeches. I was overwhelmed by a sense of betrayal, betrayal because a union in which I had invested so much had been declared bankrupt without my feeling it to be so. Chloe had not given it a chance, I argued with myself, knowing the hopelessness of these inner courts announcing hollow verdicts at four thirty in the morning. Though there had been no contract, only the contract of the heart, I felt stung by Chloe's disloyalty, by her heresy, by her night with another man. How was it morally possible this should have been allowed to happen?

It is surprising how often rejection in love is framed in moral language, the language of right and wrong, good and evil, as though to reject or not reject, to love of not to love, was something that naturally belonged to a branch of ethics. It is surprising how often the one who rejects is labelled evil, and the one who is rejected comes to embody the good. There was something of this moral attitude in both Chloe's and my behaviour. Framing her rejection, she had equated her inability to love with evil, and my love for her as evidence of goodness – hence the conclusion, made on the basis of nothing more than that I still desired her, that I was 'too good' for her. Assuming that she largely meant what she said and was not simply being polite, she had made the ethical point that she was not good enough for me, by virtue of nothing more than having ceased to love me – something she had deemed made her a less worthy person than I, a man who, in all the goodness of his heart, still felt able to love her.

But however unfortunate rejection may be, can we really equate loving with selflessness, and rejection with cruelty, can we really equate love with goodness and indifference with evil? Was my love for Chloe moral, and her rejection of me immoral? The guilt owed to Chloe for rejecting me depended primarily on the extent to which love could be seen as something that I had given selflessly - for if selfish motives entered into my gift, then Chloe was surely justified in equally selfishly ending the relationship. Viewed from such a perspective, the end of love appeared to be a clash between two fundamentally selfish impulses, rather than between altruism and egoism, morality and immorality.

According to Immanuel Kant, a moral action is to be distinguished from an amoral one by the fact that it is performed out of duty and regardless of the pain or pleasure involved. I am behaving morally only when I do something without consideration of what I may get in return for it, when I am guided solely by duty: '* (Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals, Immanuel Kant (Harper Torchbooks, 1964).

For any action to be morally good, it is not enough that it should conform to the moral law - it must also be done for the sake of the moral law.’ Actions performed as a result of disposition cannot count as moral, a direct rejection of the utilitarian view of morality based around inclination. The essence of Kant's theory is that morality is to be found exclusively in the motive from which an act is performed. To love someone is moral only when that love is given free of any expected return, if that love is given simply for the sake of giving love.

I called Chloe immoral because she had rejected the attentions of someone who had on a daily basis brought her comfort, encouragement, support, and affection. But was she to blame in a moral sense for spurning these? Blame is surely due when we spurn a gift given at much cost and sacrifice, but if the giver has derived as much pleasure from giving as we derive from receiving, then is there really a case for using moral language? If love is primarily given out of selfish motivations (i.e. for one's own benefit even as it arises out of the benefit of the other), then it is not, in Kantian eyes at least, a moral gift. Was I better than Chloe simply because I loved her? Of course not, for though my love for her included sacrifices, I had made them because it made me happy to do so, I had not martyred myself, I had acted only because it accorded so perfectly with my inclinations, because it was not a duty.

12. We spend our time loving like utilitarians, in the bedroom we are followers of Hobbes and Bentham, not Plato and Kant. We make moral judgements on the basis of preference, not transcendental values. As Hobbes put it in his Elements of Law:

Every man calleth that which pleaseth and is delightful to him, good; and that evil which displeaseth him: insomuch that while every man differeth from other in constitution, they differ also one from another concerning the common distinction of good and evil. Nor is there such thing as agathon haplos, that is to say, simply good...’

Elements of Law, Thomas Hobbes (ed. Molesworth, 1839-45).

13. I had called Chloe evil because she 'displeasethed' me, not because she was in herself inherently evil. My value system was a justification of a situation rather than an explanation of Chloe's offence according to an absolute standard. I had made the classic moralist's error, traced so succinctly by Nietzsche:

First of all, one calls individual actions good or bad quite irrespective of their motives but solely on account of their useful or harmful consequences. Soon, however, one forgets the origin of these designations and believes that the quality good and evil is inherent in the actions themselves, irrespective of their consequences . . .*

* Human, all too Human, Friedrich Nietzsche (University of Nebraska Press, 1986).

What gave me pleasure and pain determined the moral labels I chose to affix to Chloe. I was an egocentric moralizer, judging the world and her duties within it according to my own interests. My moral code was a mere sublimation of my desires.

14. At the summit of self-righteous despair, I asked, ‘Is it not my right to be loved and her duty to love me?' Chloe's love was indispensable, her presence in the bed beside me as important as freedom or the right to life. If the government assured me these two, why could it not assure me the right to love? Why did it place such an emphasis on the right to life and free speech when I didn't give a damn about either, without someone to lend that life meaning? What use was it to live if it was without love and without being heard? What was freedom if it meant the freedom to be abandoned?

But how could one possibly extend the language of rights to love, to force people to love out of duty? Was this not simply another manifestation of romantic terrorism, of romantic fascism? Morality must have its boundaries. It is the stuff of High Courts, not of salty midnight tears and the heart-wrenching separations of well-fed, well-housed, over-read sentimentalists. I had only ever loved selfishly, spontaneously, like a utilitarian. And if utilitarianism states an action is right only when it produces the greatest happiness for the greatest number, then the pain now involved both in loving Chloe and hers in being loved was the surest sign that our relationship had not simply grown amoral, but immoral.

It was unfortunate that anger could not be wedded to blame. Pain mobilized me to seek an offender, but responsibility could not be pinned on Chloe. I learnt that humans stood in a relation of negative liberty towards one another, duty-bound not to hurt others, but certainly not forced to love one another if they did not wish. A primitive belief made me feel that my anger entitled me to blame someone else, but I recognized that blame can only be linked to choice. One does not get angry with a donkey for not being able to sing, for the donkey's constitution never gave it a chance to do anything but snort. Similarly, one cannot blame a lover for loving or not loving, for it is a matter beyond their choice and hence responsibility - though what makes rejection in love harder to bear than donkeys who can never sing is that one did once see the lover loving. One finds it easier not to blame the donkey for not singing because it never sang, but the lover loved, perhaps only a short while ago, which makes the reality of the claim I cannot love you any more all the harder to digest.

17. The arrogance of wanting to be loved had emerged only now it was unreciprocated – I was left alone with my desire, defenceless, beyond the law, shockingly crude in my demands: Love me! And for what reason? I had only the usual paltry, insufficient excuse: Because I love you . . .

20

Psycho-Fatalism

Whenever something calamitous happens to us, we are led to look beyond everyday causal explanations in order to understand why we have been singled out to receive such terrible, intolerable punishment. And the more devastating the event, the more inclined we are to imbue it with a significance it does not objectively have, the more likely we are to slip into a brand of psychological fatalism. Bewildered and exhausted by grief, I suffocated on question marks: 'Why me? Why this? Why now?' I scoured the past to look for origins, omens, offences, anything that might count as an explanation for the wound I had sustained.

I was forced to abandon the optimism of everyday life. I gave up television and the daily papers. I took time off work. I became obsessed by millennial disasters: the risks of earthquakes, floods, and avian flus. I felt the transience of everything, the illusions upon which civilizations are built. I saw in happiness a violent denial of reality. I looked commuters in the face and wondered why they were unbothered by their own meaninglessness. I understood the pain of history, a record of carnage enveloped in nauseous nostalgia. I felt the arrogance of scientists and politicians, newscasters and petrol-station attendants, the smugness of accountants and gardeners. I linked myself to the great outcasts, I became a follower of Caliban and Dionysus, and all who had been reviled for looking pus-filled truth in the face. In short, I briefly lost my mind.

But did I have a choice? Chloe's departure had rocked my confidence in just about everything. I felt that I had lost the ability to control my own destiny and had witnessed a childish, petulant demon take charge of me, make me smile, encourage me to feel safe, and then smash me onto the rocks. I was a character in a narrative whose grander design I was helpless to alter. I repented for the arrogance of my previous faith in free will.

Once more I thought of destiny, once more I felt the almost divine nature of love. Both its arrival and departure, the first so beautiful, the second gruesome, reminded me that I was but a plaything for the games of Cupid and Aphrodite. Unbearably punished, I sought out my guilt. Unsure of quite what I had done, I confessed to everything. I tore myself apart looking for reasons: every insolence returned to haunt me, acts of ordinary cruelty and thoughtlessness – none of these had been missed by the gods, who had now chosen to wreak their terrible revenge on me.

The ancient myths were dead, of course. We don't tend to believe that gods direct our lives. Yet we have replaced them with a strong belief that there are comparably mysterious inner forces which govern what happens to us: I had been psychologically cursed to be unhappy in love.

It was psychoanalysis that provided names for my demons. It explained that life often unfolds in ways that defy self-awareness. In the Freudian world, a man may consciously try to love a woman, but unconsciously he may be doing everything to drive her into another's arms. Now Chloe had left, a new interpretation of our love story came to mind. It was a story that had been doomed to fail, that had been chosen because it would fail, and because in its failure, it would repeat a classic and perversely satisfying pattern of family neurosis. When my own parents had divorced, I recalled my mother warning me that I should be careful not to fall into an unhappy relationship, because her mother had fallen into one, and her mother before that. Was this not a hereditary psychological curse? The curse of Freud was upon me.

The essence of a curse is that the person labouring under it cannot know of its existence. It is a secret code within the individual writing itself over a lifetime. Oedipus is warned by the Oracle that he will kill his father and marry his mother – but conscious warnings serve no purpose, they cannot defuse the ominous prognosis. Oedipus is cast out from home in order to avoid the Oracle's prediction, but nevertheless ends up marrying Jocasta. His story is told for him, not by him. The curse defies the will.

8. What curse did I labour under? Nothing other than an inability to enjoy happy relationships, possibly the greatest misfortune known to man in modern society. Exiled from the shaded grove of love, I would be compelled to wander the earth till the day of my death, unable to shake off my compulsion to make those I love flee from me. I sought a name for this evil, and one night, in tears, found it contained in a dictionary of psychoanalytic terms under the entry for repetition compulsion:

... an ungovernable process originating in the unconscious. As a result of its actions, the subject deliberately places himself in distressing situations, thereby repeating an old experience, but he does not recall this prototype; on the contrary, he has the strong impression that the situation is fully determined by the circumstances of the moment.*

* The Language of Psychoanalysis, J. Laplanche, J. B. Pontalis (Karnac Books, 1988).

9. No philosophy is further from the thought that what happens to us is random than psychoanalysis (even to deny meaning is meaningful). I did not simply love Chloe and then she left me. I loved Chloe in order that she would leave me. Buried deep in my unconscious, a pattern had been forged, in the early months or years. The baby had driven away the mother, or the mother had left the baby, and now the man had recreated the same scenario, different actors but the same plot. It was not for the shape of her smile or the liveliness of her mind that I had chosen Chloe. It was because the unconscious, the perverse casting director of my life, had recognized in her a suitable character to leave the stage after inflicting the requisite amount of suffering.

10. Unlike the curses of the Greek gods, psychological fatalism at least held out the promise that it could be escaped. Where id was, ego might be. Had I had the strength to rise from my bed, I might have made it to the couch, and there, like Oedipus at Colonnus, begun to build an end to my sufferings. But I was unable to summon the necessary sanity to make it out of the house and seek help. I was unable even to talk, I could not share my grief with others, hence it ravaged me. I lay curled on the bed, the blinds drawn, irritated by the slightest noise or light, unduly upset if the milk in the fridge was stale or a drawer failed to open first time. Watching everything slip out of my grasp, I concluded that the only way to regain at least a measure of control was to kill myself.

21

Suicide

The Christmas season arrived, bringing with it carol singers, cards of good will and the first snowfalls. Chloe and I had been due to spend the Christmas weekend at a small hotel in Yorkshire. The brochure sat on my desk: 'Abbey Cottage welcomes its guests to warm Yorkshire hospitality in exquisite surroundings. Sit by the open fire in the oak-beamed living room, take a walk along the moors, or simply relax and let us take care of you. A holiday at Abbey Cottage is everything you always wanted from a hotel – and more.'

Two days before Christmas and hours before my death, at five o'clock on a sombre Friday evening, I received a call from Will Knott:

'I thought I'd ring to say goodbye, I'm due to fly back to San Francisco on the weekend.' 'I see.'

'Tell me, how are things with you?' 'I'm sorry?'

'Is everything all right?'

'All right? Well, yes, you could put it that way.'

'I was sorry to hear about you and Chloe. It's really too bad.'

'I was happy to hear about you and Chloe.'

'You've heard. Yeah, it just worked out. You know how much I always liked het, and she gave me a call and told me you guys had split up, and things moved from there.'

'Well, it's fantastic, Will.'

'I'm glad to hear you say it. I don't want this to get between us or anything, because a great friendship is not something I like to throw away. I always hoped you two could patch things up, I think you would have been great together, it's a real pity, but anyway. What are you doing over Christmas?'

'Staying home, I think.'

'Looks like you're going to get a real snowfall here, time to bring out the skis, eh?' 'Is Chloe with you now?'

'Is she with me now? Yes, no, I mean, she isn't actually with me right now. She was here, but she's just gone off to the store actually, we were talking about Christmas crackers, and she said she loved them, so she's gone to buy some.'

'That's great, give her my regards.'

'I'm sure she'd be delighted to hear we spoke. You know she's coming with me to spend Christmas in California?'

'Is she?'

'Yeah, it'll be great for her to see it. We'll spend a couple of days with my parents in Santa Barbara, then maybe go for a few days to the desert or something.'

'She loves deserts.'

'That's right, that's what she told me. Well, listen, I'd better leave you to it, and wish you a happy holiday. I've got to start sorting my stuff out around here. I may be back in Europe next fall, but anyway, I'll give you a call, and see how you're doing . . .'

I went into the bathroom and took out every last tablet I had collected, and laid them out on the kitchen table. With a mixture of pills, several glasses of cough syrup, and whisky, I would have enough to end the whole charade. What more sensible reaction than this, to kill oneself after rejection in love? If Chloe really was my whole life, was it not normal that I should end that life to prove it was impossible without her? Was it not dishonest to be continuing to wake up every morning if the person I claimed was the meaning of existence was now buying Christmas crackers for a Californian architect with a house in the foothills of Santa Barbara?

My separation from Chloe had been accompanied by a thousand platitudinous sympathies from friends and acquaintances: it might have been nice, people drift apart, passion can't last for ever, better to have lived and loved, time will heal everything. Even Will managed to make it sound unexceptional, like an earthquake or a snowfall, something that nature sends to try us, and whose inevitability one should not think of challenging. My death would be a violent denial of normality – it would be a reminder that I would not forger as others had forgotten. I wished to escape the erosion and softening of time, I wished the pain to last for ever only so as to be connected to Chloe via its burnt nerve endings. Only by my death could I assert the importance and immortality of my love, only through self-destruction could I remind a world grown weary of tragedy that love was a deadly serious matter.

It was seven o'clock, and the snow was still falling, starting to form a blanket over the city. It would be my shroud. The one reading this will be alive, but the author will be dead, I reflected as I penned my note. It was the only way I could say I love you, I'm mature enough not to want you to blame yourself for this, you know how I feel about guilt. I hope you will enjoy California, I understand the mountains are very beautiful, I know you could not love me, please understand I could not live without your love... The suicide text had gone through many drafts: a pile of scrapped notepaper lay beside me. I sat at the kitchen table, wrapped in a grey coat, with only the shivering of the fridge for company. Abruptly, I reached for a tub of pills and swallowed what I only later realized were twenty effervescent vitamin C tablets.

I imagined Chloe receiving a visit from a policeman shortly after my inert body had been found. I imagined the look of shock on her face, Will Knott emerging from the bedroom with a soiled sheet draped around him, asking, 'Is there anything wrong, darling?' and she answering 'Yes, oh, God, yes!' before collapsing into tears. The most terrible regret and remorse would follow. She would blame herself for not understanding me, for being so cruel, for being so short-sighted. Had any other man been so devoted to her as to take his own life for her?

A notorious inability to express emotions makes human beings the only animals capable of suicide. An angry dog does not commit suicide, it bites the person or thing that made it angry, but an angry human sulks in its room and later shoots itself leaving a silent note. Man is the symbolic, metaphorical creature: unable to communicate my anger, I would symbolize it in my own death. I would do injury to myself rather than injure Chloe, enacting by killing myself what I was suggesting she had done to me.

My mouth was frothing now, orange bubbles breeding in its cavity and exploding as they came into contact with the air, spraying a light orange film over the table and the collar of my shirt. As I observed this acidic chemical spectacle silently, I was struck by the incoherence of suicide: I did not wish to choose between being alive or dead. I simply wished to show Chloe that I could not, metaphorically speaking, live without her. The irony was that death would be too literal an act to grant me the chance to see the metaphor read, I would be deprived by the inability of the dead (in a secular framework at least) to look at the living looking at the dead. What was the point of making such a scene if I could not be there to witness others witnessing it? In picturing my death, I imagined myself in the role of audience to my own extinction, something that could never really happen in reality, when I would simply be dead, and hence denied my ultimate wish – namely, to be both dead and alive. Dead so as to be able to show the world in general, and Chloe in particular, how angry I was, and alive, so as to be able to see the effect that I had had on Chloe and hence be released from my anger. It was not a question of being or not being. My answer to Hamlet was to be and not to be.

9. Those who commit a certain kind of suicide perhaps forget the second part of the equation, they look at death as an extension of life (a kind of afterlife in which to watch the effect of their actions). I staggered to the sink and my stomach contracted out the effervescent poison. The pleasure of suicide was to be located not in the gruesome task of killing the organism, but in the reactions of others to my death (Chloe weeping at the grave, Will averting his eyes, both of them scattering earth on my walnut coffin). To have killed myself would have been to forget that I would be too dead to derive any pleasure from the melodrama of my own extinction.

22

The Jesus Complex

If there is any benefit to be found in the midst of agony, it may perhaps lie in the ability of certain sufferers to take this misery as evidence (however perverse) that they are special. Why else would they have been chosen to undergo such titanic torment other than to serve as proof that they are different, and hence presumably better, than those who do not suffer?

I could not stand to be alone in my flat over the Christmas period, so I checked into a room in a small hotel off the Bayswater Road. I took with me a small suitcase and a set of books and clothes, but I neither read nor dressed. I spent whole days in a white bathrobe, lying on top of the bed and flicking through the channels of the television, reading room-service menus and listening to stray sounds coming up from the street.

3- There was at first very little to distinguish that noise from the general moan of the traffic below: car doors were screaming shut, lorries were grinding into first gear, a pneumatic drill was pounding the pavement. And yet above all that, I began to identify a quite different sound, rippling through the thin hotel wall from somewhere near my head, at that time pressed against a copy of Time magazine crushed against a sebaceous headboard. It was becoming undeniable, however much one tried to deny it (and heaven knows one might), that the sound from the next door room was none other than that of the mating ritual of the human species. 'Fuck,' I thought, 'they're fucking!'

When a man hears others in the midst of such activity, there are certain attitudes one may reasonably expect him to adopt. If he is young and imaginative, he may willingly induce a process of identification with the male through the wall, constructing, with his poet's mind, an ideal of the fortunate woman - Beatrice, Juliet, Charlotte, Tess - whose screams he natters himself to have induced. Or, if affronted by this objective recording of libido, he may turn away, think of England and raise the volume of the television.

But my reaction was remarkable only for its passivity – or, rather, I failed to push reaction any way beyond acknowledgement. Since Chloe had left, I had done little but acknowledge. I had become a man who, in every sense of the word, could not be surprised. Surprise is, we are told by psychologists, a reaction to the unexpected, but I had come to expect everything, and could hence be surprised by nothing.

What was passing through my mind? Nothing but a certain song heard once on the radio in Chloe's car, with the sun setting over the edge of the motorway:

I'm in love, sweet love,

Hear me calling out your name, I feel no shame,

I'm in love, sweet love,

Don't you ever go away, it'll always be this way.

I had grown intoxicated with my own sadness, I had reached the stratosphere of suffering, the moment where pain gives rise to the Jesus complex. The sound of the copulating couple and the song from happier days coalesced in the giant tears that had begun to flow at the thought of the misfortunes of my existence. But for the first time, these were nor angry, scalding tears, rather the bitter-sweet taste of waters grown tinged with the conviction that it was not I, but the people who had made me suffer, who were so blind. I was elated, at the pinnacle where suffering brings one over into the valley of joy, the joy of the martyr, the joy of the Jesus complex. I imagined Chloe and Will travelling through California, I listened to requests of 'more' and 'harder' from next door and grew drunk on the liquor of grief.

7. 'How great can one be if one is understood by everyone?' I asked myself, contemplating the fate of the Son of God. Could I really continue to blame myself for Chloe's inability to understand me? Her rejection was more a sign of how myopic she was than of how deficient I might have been. No longer was I necessarily the vermin and she the angel. She had left me for a third-rate Californian Corbusian because she was simply too shallow to understand. I began to reinterpret her character, concentrating on sides I found least pleasant. She was in the end very selfish, her charms only a superficial veneer masking an unattractive nature. If she seduced people into thinking she was adorable, it had more to do with her amusing conversation and kind smile than any genuine grounds for love. Others did not know her the way I did and it was clear (though I had not realized it originally) that she was inherently self-centred, rather caustic, at times inconsiderate, often thoughtless, on occasion ungracious, when she was tired impatient, when she wanted her own way dogmatic, and in her decision to reject me both unreflective and tactless.

8. Grown infinitely wise through suffering, I could forgive, pity, and patronize her for her lack of judgement - and to do so gave me infinite relief. I could lie in a lilac-and-green hotel room and be filled with a sense of my own virtue and greatness. I pitied Chloe for everything she could not understand, the infinitely wise seer who watches the ways of men and women with a melancholic, knowing grin.

9- Why was my complex, the perverse psychological trick that turned every defeat and humiliation into its opposite, to be named after Jesus? I might have identified my suffering with that of Young Werther or Madame Bovary or Swann, but none of these bruised lovers could compete with Jesus's untainted virtue and his unquestionable goodness beside the evil of those he tried to love. It was not just the weepy eyes and sallow face attributed to him by Renaissance artists that made him such an attractive figure, it was that Jesus was a man who was kind, completely just, and betrayed. The pathos of the New Testament, as much as of my own love story, arose out of the sad tale of a virtuous but misrepresented man, who preached the love of everyone for their neighbour, only to see the generosity of his message thrown back in his face.

It is hard to imagine Christianity having achieved such success without a martyr at its head. If Jesus had simply led a quiet life in Galilee making commodes and dining tables and at the end of his life published a slim volume entitled My Philosophy of life before dying of a heart attack, he would not have acquired the status he did. The agonizing death on the Cross, the corruption and cruelty of the Roman authorities, the betrayal by his friends, all these were indispensable ingredients for proof (more psychological than historical) that the man had God on his side.

Feelings of virtue breed spontaneously in the fertile soil of suffering. The more one suffers, the more virtuous one must be. The Jesus complex was entangled in feelings of superiority, the superiority of the underdog who considers himself above his oppressors, with their tyranny and blindness. Ditched by the woman I loved, I exalted my suffering into a sign of greatness (lying collapsed on a bed at three in the afternoon), and hence protected myself from experiencing my grief as the outcome of what was at best a mundane romantic break-up. Chloe's departure may have killed me, but it had at least left me in glorious possession of the moral high ground. I was a martyr.

The Jesus complex lay at opposite ends of the spectrum from Marxism. Born out of self-hatred, Marxism prevented me from becoming a member of any club that would have me. The Jesus complex still left me outside the club gates but, because it was the result of ample self-love, declared that I was not accepted into the club only because I was so special. Most clubs, being rather crude affairs, naturally could not appreciate the great, the wise, and the sensitive, who were to be left at the gates or dropped by their girlfriends. My superiority was revealed primarily on the basis of my isolation and suffering: I suffer, therefore I am special. I am not understood, but for precisely that reason, I am worthy of greater understanding.

In so far as it avoids self-hatred, one must have sympathy for the alchemy by which a weakness is turned into virtue - and the evolution of my pain towards a Jesus complex certainly implied a degree of mental good health. It showed that in the delicate internal balance between self-hatred and self-love, self-love was now winning. My initial response to Chloe's rejection had been a self-hating one, where I had continued to love Chloe while hating myself for failing to make the relationship work. But my Jesus complex had turned the equation on its head, now interpreting rejection as a sign that Chloe was worthy of contempt or at best pity

(that paragon of Christian virtues). The Jesus complex was nothing more than a self-defence mechanism, I had not wanted Chloe to leave me, I had loved her more than I had ever loved a woman, but now that she had flown to California, my way of accepting the unbearable loss was to reinvent how valuable she had been in the first place. It was clearly a lie, but honesty is sometimes more than we have strength for when, abandoned and desperate, we spend Christmas alone in a hotel room listening to the sound of orgasmic beatitude from next door.

23

Ellipsis

There is an Arabic saying that the soul travels at the pace of a camel. While most of us are led by the strict demands of timetables and diaries, our soul, the seat of the heart, trails nostalgically behind, burdened by the weight of memory. If every love affair adds a certain weight to the camel's load, then we can expect the soul to slow according to the significance of love's burden. By the time it was finally able to shrug off the crushing weight of her memory, Chloe had nearly killed my camel.

With her departure had gone all desire to keep up with the present. I lived nostalgically, that is, with constant reference to my life as it had been with her. My eyes were never really open, they looked backwards and inwards to memory. I would have wished to spend the rest of my days following the camel, meandering through the dunes of yesteryear, stopping at charming oases to leaf through images of happier days. The present held nothing for me, the past had become the only inhabitable tense. What could the present be next to it but a mocking reminder of the one

who was missing? What could the future hold beside yet more wretched absence?

When I was able to drown myself in memory, I would sometimes lose sight of the present without Chloe, hallucinating that the break-up had never occurred and that we were still together, as though I could have called her up at any time and suggested a film at the Odeon or a walk through the park. I would choose to ignore that she had decided to settle with Will in a small town in southern California, the mind would slip from factual reporting into a fantasy of the idyllic days of elation and laughter. Then, all of a sudden, something would throw me violently back into the Chloe-less present. The phone would ring and on my way to pick it up I would notice (as if for the first time, and with all the pain of that initial realization) that the place in the bathroom where Chloe used to leave her hairbrush was now empty. And the absence of that hairbrush would be like a stab in the heart, an unbearable reminder that she had left.

The difficulty of forgetting her was compounded by the survival of so much of the external world that we had shared together, and in which she was still entwined. Standing in my kitchen, the kettle might suddenly release the memory of Chloe filling it up, a tube of tomato paste on a supermarket shelf might by a form of bizarre association remind me of a similar shopping trip months before. Driving across the Hammersmith flyover late one evening, I recalled driving down the same road on an equally rainy night but with Chloe next to me in the car. The arrangement of pillows on my sofa evoked the way she placed her head down on them when she was tired, the dictionary on my bookshelf was a reminder of her passion for looking up words she did not know. At certain times of the week when we had traditionally done things together, there was an agonizing parallel between the past and present: Saturday mornings would bring back our gallery expeditions, Friday nights certain clubs, Monday evenings certain television programmes . . .

The physical world refused to let me forget. Life is crueller than art, for the latter usually assures that physical surroundings reflect characters' mental states. If someone in a Garcia Lorca play remarks on how the sky has turned low, dark, and grey, this is no longer an innocent meteorological observation, but a symbol of a psychological state. Life gives us no such handy markers – a storm comes, and far from this being a harbinger of death and collapse, during its course, a person discovers love and truth, beauty and happiness, the rain lashing at the windows all the while. Similarly, in the course of a beautiful warm summer day, a car momentarily loses control on a winding road and crashes into a tree fatally injuring its passengers.

The external world did not follow my inner moods, the buildings that had provided the backdrop to my love story and that I had animated with feelings derived from it now stubbornly refused to change their appearance so as to reflect my inner state. The same trees lined the approach to Buckingham Palace, the same stuccoed houses fronted the residential streets, the same Serpentine flowed through Hyde Park, the same sky was lined with the same porcelain blue, the same cars drove through the same streets, the same shops sold much the same goods to much the same people.

This refusal of change was a reminder that the world was an entity that would spin on regardless of whether I was in love or out of it, happy or unhappy, alive or dead. It could not be expected to change its expressions according to my moods, nor would the great blocks of stones that formed the streets of the city take time to consider my love story. Though they had been happy to accommodate my happiness, they had better things to do than to come crashing down now that Chloe was gone.

Then, inevitably, I began to forget. A few months after breaking up with her, I found myself in the area of London in which she had lived and noticed that the thought of her had lost much of the agony it had once held, I even noticed that I was not primarily thinking of her (though this was exactly her neighbourhood), but of the appointment that I had made with someone in a restaurant nearby. I realized that Chloe's memory had neutralized itself and become a part of history. Yet guilt accompanied this forgetting. It was no longer her absence that wounded me, but my growing indifference to it. Forgetting, however calming, was also a reminder of infidelity to what I had at one time held so dear.

9. There was a gradual reconquering of the self, new habits were created and a Chloe-less identity built up. My identity had for so long been forged around 'us' that to return to the T involved an almost complete reinvention of myself. It took a long time for the hundreds of associations that Chloe and I had accumulated together to fade. I had to live with my sofa for months before the image of her lying on it in her dressing-gown was replaced by another image, the image of a friend reading a book on it, or of my coat lying across it. I had to walk through Islington on numberless occasions before I could forget that Islington was not simply Chloe's district, but a useful place to shop or have dinner. I had to revisit almost every physical location, rewrite over every topic of conversation, replay every song and every activity that she and I had shared in order to reconquer them for the present, in order to defuse their associations. But gradually I forgot.

10. My time with Chloe folded in on itself, like an accordion that contracts. My love story was like a block of ice gradually melting as I carried it through the present. The process was like a film camera which had taken a thousand frames a minute, but was now discarding most of them, selecting according to mysterious whims, landing on a certain frame because an emotional state had coalesced around it. Like a century that is reduced and symbolized by a certain pope or monarch or battle, my love affair refined itself to a few iconic elements (more random than those of historians but equally selective): the look on Chloe's face as we kissed for the first time, the light hairs on her arm, an image of her standing waiting for me in the entrance to Liverpool Street Station, her white pullover, her laugh when I told her my joke about the Russian in a train through France, her way of running her hand through her hair . . .

11. The camel became lighter and lighter as it walked through time, it kept shaking memories and photos off its back, scattering them over the desert floor and letting the wind bury them in the sand, and gradually the camel became so light that it could trot and even gallop in its own curious way - until one day, in a small oasis that called itself the present, the exhausted creature finally caught up with the rest of me.

24

Love Lessons

We must assume that there are certain lessons to be drawn from love, or else we remain happy to repeat our errors indefinitely, like flies that drive themselves insane butting their heads against windowpanes, unable to understand that though the glass may look clear it cannot be flown through. Are there not certain basic truths to be learnt, shreds of wisdom that could prevent some of the excessive enthusiasms, the pain and the bitter disappointments? Is it not a legitimate ambition to become wise about love, in the way that one may become wise about diet, death, or money?

We start trying to be wise when we realize that we are not born knowing how to live, but that life is a skill that has to be acquired, like riding a bicycle or playing the piano. But what does wisdom counsel us to do? It tells us to aim for tranquillity and inner peace, a life free from anxiety, fear, idolatry, and harmful passions. Wisdom teaches us that our first impulses may not always be true, and that our appetites will lead us astray if we do not train reason to separate vain from genuine needs. It tells us to control our imagination or it will distort reality and turn mountains into molehills and frogs into princesses. It tells us to hold our fears in check, so that we can be afraid of what will harm us, but not waste our energies fleeing shadows on the wall. It tells us we should not fear death, and that all we have to fear is fear itself.

But what does wisdom say about love? Is it something that should be given up completely, like coffee or cigarettes, or is it allowed on occasions, like a glass of wine or a bar of chocolate? Is love directly opposed to everything that wisdom stands for? Do sages lose their heads or only overgrown children?

If certain wise thinkers have given a nod of approval to love, they have been careful to draw distinctions between its varieties, in much the way that doctors counsel against mayonnaise, but allow it when it is made with low-fat ingredients. They distinguish the rash love of a Romeo and Juliet from Socrates' contemplative worship of the Good, they contrast the excesses of a Werther with the brotherly love suggested by Jesus.

The difference could be grouped into categories of mature and immature love. Preferable in almost every way, the philosophy of mature love is marked by an active awareness of the good and bad within each person, it is full of temperance, it resists idealization, it is free of jealousy, masochism, or obsession, it is a form of friendship with a sexual dimension, it is pleasant, peaceful, and reciprocated (and perhaps explains why most people who have known the wilder shores of desire would refuse its painlessness the title of love). Immature love on the other hand (though it has little to do with age) is a story of chaotic lurching between idealization and disappointment, an unstable state where feelings of ecstasy and beatitude combine with impressions of drowning and fatal nausea, where the sense that one has finally found the answer comes together with the feeling that one has never been so lost. The logical climax of immature (because absolute) love comes in death, symbolic or real. The climax of mature love comes in marriage, and the attempt to avoid death via routine (the Sunday papers, trouser presses, remote-controlled appliances). For immature love accepts no compromise, and once we refuse compromise, we are on the road to some kind of cataclysm.

With the naive common sense that complex problems may elicit, I would sometimes ask (as though the answer could fit on the back of an envelope), 'Why can't we just all love one another?' Surrounded on every side by the agonies of love, by the complaints of mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters, friends, and soap-opera stars, I would hold out the hope that simply because everyone was inflicting and suffering from much the same pain, a common answer could be found – a metaphysical solution to the world's romantic problems on the grandiose scale of the Communists' answer to the inequities of international capital.

I was not alone in my utopian daydream, joined there by a group of people, let me call them romantic positivists, who believed that with enough thought and therapy, love could be made into a less painful, indeed almost healthy, experience. This assortment of analysts, preachers, gurus, therapists, and writers, while acknowledging that love was full of problems, supposed that genuine problems must have equally genuine solutions. Faced with the misery of most emotional lives, romantic positivists would try to identify causes – a self-esteem complex, a father complex, a mother complex, a complex complex – and suggest remedies (regression therapy, a reading of the City of God, gardening, meditation). Hamlet's fate could have been avoided with the help of a good Jungian analyst, Othello could have got his aggression out on a therapeutic cushion, Romeo might have met someone more suitable through a dating agency, Oedipus could have shared his problems in family therapy.

Whereas art has a morbid obsession with the problems that attend love, romantic positivists throw the focus on the very practical steps that can be taken to prevent the most common causes of anguish and heartache. Next to the pessimistic views of much of Western romantic literature, romantic positivists appear as brave champions of a more enlightened and confident approach in an area of human experience traditionally left to the melancholy imagination of degenerate artists and psychotic poets.

Shortly after Chloe left, I came across a classic of romantic positivist literature on a stand in a station bookshop, a work by a certain Dr Peggy Nearly that went by the title of The Bleeding Heart. (Peggy Nearly, Capulet Books, 1987). Though in a hurry to get back to my office, I bought the book nevertheless, attracted by a notice on its pink back cover that asked, 'Must being in love always mean being in pain?' Who was this Dr Peggy Nearly, a woman who could boldly claim to answer such a riddle? From the first page of the book, I learnt that she was... a graduate of the Oregon Institute of Love and Human Relations, currently living in the San Francisco area, where she practises psychoanalysis, child therapy, and marriage counselling. She is the author of numerous works on emotional addiction, as well as penis envy, group dynamics, and agoraphobia.

10. And what was The Bleeding Heart about? It told the unfortunate yet optimistic story of men and women who fell in love with unsuitable partners, those who would treat them cruelly or leave them emotionally unfulfilled, take to drink or become violent. These people had made an unconscious connection between love and suffering, and could not stop hoping that the unsuitable types they had chosen to adore would change and love them properly. Their lives would be ruined by the delusion that they could reform people who were by nature incapable of answering their emotional needs. By the third chapter, Dr Nearly had identified the roots of the problem as lying in deficient parents, who had given these unfortunate romantics a warped understanding of the affective process. If they had never loved people who were nice to them, it was because their earliest emotional attachments had taught them that love should be unreciprocated and cruel. But by entering therapy and being able to work through their childhood, they might understand the roots of their masochism, and learn that their desire to change unsuitable partners was only the relic of a more infantile fantasy to convert their parents into proper care-givers.

11. Perhaps because I had finished reading it only a few days before, I found myself drawing an unlikely parallel between the plight of those described by Dr Nearly and the heroine of Flaubert's great novel, the tragic Emma Bovary. Who was Emma Bovary? She was a young woman living in the French provinces, married to an adoring husband whom she loathed because she had come to associate love with suffering. Consequently, she began to have adulterous affairs with unsuitable men, cowards who treated her cruelly and could not be depended upon to fulfil her romantic longings. Emma Bovary was ill because she could not stop hoping that these men would change and love her properly – when it was obvious that Rodolphe and Leon considered her as nothing more than an amusing distraction. Unfortunately, Emma lacked the opportunity to enter therapy and become self-conscious enough to realize the origins of her masochistic behaviour. She neglected her husband and child, squandered the family money, and in the end killed herself with arsenic, leaving behind a young child and a distraught husband.

12. It is sometimes interesting to think how differently events in the past might have unfolded had certain contemporary solutions been available. What if Madame Bovary had been able to discuss her problem with Dr Nearly? What if romantic positivism had had a chance to intervene in one of literature’s most tragic love stories? One wonders at how the conversation would have flowed had Emma walked into Dr Nearly's San Francisco clinic.

(Bovary on the couch, sobbing.)

Nearly: Emma, if you want me to help you, you'll have to explain what's wrong.

(Without looking up, Madame Bovary blows her nose into an embroidered handkerchief.)

Nearly: Crying is a positive experience, but I don't think we should be spending the entire fifty minutes on it.

Bovary: (speaking through her tears) He didn't write, he didn't . . . write. Nearly: Who didn't write, Emma?

Bovary: Rodolphe. He didn't write, he didn't write. He doesn't love me. I am a ruined woman. I am a ruined pathetic, miserable, childish woman. Nearly: Emma, don't speak this way. I've told you already, you must learn to love yourself.

Bovary: Why compromise by loving someone that stupid?

Nearly: Because you are a beautiful person. And it's because you don't see it that you are addicted to men who inflict emotional pain.

Bovary: But it was so good at the time.

Nearly: What was?

Bovary: Being there, with him beside me, making love to him, feeling his skin next to mine, riding through the woods. I felt so real, so alive, and now my life is in ruins.

Nearly: Maybe you felt alive, but only because you knew it couldn't last, that this man didn't really love you. You hate your husband because he listens to everything you say, but you can't stop falling in love with the sort of man who will take two weeks to answer a letter. Quite frankly, Emma, your view of love betrays evidence of compulsion and masochism.

Bovary: Does it? What do I know? I don't care if it's all a sickness, all I want is to kiss him again, to feel him holding me in his arms, to smell the perfume of his skin.

Nearly: You have to start to make an effort to look inside yourself, to go over your childhood, then perhaps you will learn that you don't deserve all this pain. It's only because you grew up in a dysfunctional family in which your emotional needs were not met that you are stuck in this pattern.

Bovary: My father was a simple farmer.

Nearly: Perhaps, but he was also emotionally unreliable, so that you now respond to an unmet need by falling in love with a man who can't give you what you really want.

Bovary: It's Charles that's the problem, not Rodolphe.

Nearly: Well, my dear, we'll have to go on with this next week. It's coming to the end of your session.

Bovary: Oh, Dr Nearly, I meant to explain earlier, but I won't be able to pay you this week.

Nearly: This is the third time you tell me this sort of thing.

Bovary: I apologize, but money is such a problem at the moment, I am so unhappy, I find myself spending it all on shopping. Just today, I went and bought three new dresses, a painted thimble, and a china tea set.

It is hard to imagine a happy end to Madame Bovary's therapy, or indeed a much happier end to her life. It takes a fervent romantic positivist to believe that Dr Nearly (if she was ever paid) could have converted Emma into the well-adjusted, uncompulsive, and caring wife that would have turned Flaubert's book into an optimistic tale of redemption through self-knowledge. Certainly Dr Nearly had an interpretation of Madame Bovary's problem, but there is a great difference between identifying a problem and solving it, between wisdom and the wise life. We are all more intelligent than we are capable, and awareness of the insanity of love has never saved anyone from the disease. Perhaps the concept of wise or wholly painless love is as much of a contradiction as that of a bloodless battle -Geneva Conventions aside, it simply cannot exist. The confrontation between Madame Bovary and Peggy Nearly is the confrontation between romantic tragedy and romantic positivism. It is the confrontation between wisdom and wisdom's opposite, which is not the ignorance of wisdom (that is easy to put right), but the inability to act on the knowledge of what one knows is right. Knowing the unreality of our affair had proved to be of no help to Chloe and me, knowing we might be fools had not turned us into sages.

Rendered pessimistic by the intractable pains of love,

I decided to turn away from it altogether. If romantic positivism could be of no help, then the only valid wisdom was the stoic advice never to fall in love again. I would henceforth retreat from the world, see no one, live frugally, and throw myself into austere study. I read with admiration stories of men and women who had escaped earthly distractions, made vows of chastity, and spent their lives in monasteries and nunneries. There were stories of hermits who had endured life in caves in the desert for forty or fifty years, living only off roots and berries, never talking or seeing other human beings.

But sitting at a dinner party one evening, lost in Rachel's eyes while she outlined the course of her office life for me, I was shocked to realize how easily I might abandon a stoic philosophy in order to repeat all the mistakes I had lived through with Chloe. If I continued to look at Rachel's hair tied elegantly in a bun, or at the grace with which she used her knife and fork or the richness of her blue eyes, I knew I would not survive the evening intact.

The sight of Rachel alerted me to the limits of the stoic approach. Though love might never be painless and was certainly not wise, neither could it be forgotten. It was as inevitable as it was unreasonable – and its unreason was unfortunately no argument against it. Was it not absurd to retreat into the Judaean hills in order to eat roots and shoots? If I wanted to be courageous, were there not greater opportunities for heroism in love? Moreover, for all the sacrifices demanded by the stoic life, was there not something cowardly within it? At the heart of stoicism lay the desire to disappoint oneself before someone else had the chance to do so. Stoicism was a crude defence against the dangers of the affections of others, a danger that it would take more endurance than a life in the desert to be able to face. In calling for a monastic existence free of emotional turmoil, stoicism was simply trying to deny the legitimacy of certain potentially painful yet fundamental human needs. However brave, the stoic was in the end a coward at the point of perhaps the highest reality, at the moment of love.

17. We can always blind ourselves to the complexities of a problem by suggesting solutions that reduce the issue to a lowest common denominator. Both romantic positivism and stoicism were inadequate answers to the problems raised by the agonies of love, because both of them collapsed the question rather than juggling with its contradictions. The stoics had collapsed the pain and irrationality of love into a conclusive argument against it – thereby failing to balance the undoubted trauma of our desires with the intractability of our emotional needs. On the other hand, the romantic positivists were guilty of collapsing a certain easy grasp of psychological wisdom into a belief that love could be rendered painless for all, if only we learnt to love ourselves a little more – thereby failing to juggle a need for wisdom with the inherent difficulties of acting on its precepts, reducing the tragedy of Madame Bovary to an illustration of Dr Nearly's truistic theories.

18. I realized that a more complex lesson needed to be drawn, one that could play with the incompatibilities of love, juggling the need for wisdom with its likely impotence, juggling the idiocy of infatuation with its inevitability. Love had to be appreciated without flight into dogmatic optimism or pessimism, without constructing a philosophy of one's fears, or a morality of one's disappointments. Love taught the analytic mind a certain humility, the lesson that however hard it struggled to reach immobile certainties (numbering its conclusions and embedding them in neat series), analysis could never be anything but flawed – and therefore never stray far from the ironic.

19- Such lessons appeared all the more relevant when Rachel accepted my invitation for dinner the following week, and the very thought of her began sending tremors through the region the poets have called the heart, tremors that I knew could have meant one thing only – that I had once more begun to fall.