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“No specter assails us in more varied disguises than loneliness, and one of its most impenetrable masks is called love.” – Arthur Schnitzler, quoted by Clive James.

I’ve been reading James’ Cultural Amnesia, a fine book; essentially excerpts from James’ commonplace-book with essays built around them, on a general theme.  Probably for personal reasons, my favorite parts are the few times when he writes about love.  The Schnitzler essay is one of the very best.

“That we feel bound by a steady longing for freedom, and that we also seek to bind someone else, without being convinced that such a thing is within our rights – that is what makes any loving relationship so problematic.”  The question here is about possessiveness, and the first thing to see is that there would be no possessiveness if there were nothing real to possess.  So this is not loneliness concealed by an impenetrable mask.  This is the other person, whom you love enough to be worried about her rights.  You are worried, that is, about someone who is not yourself.  You want to be free, and assume that she does too: but you want her to be yours.  You could want that with a whole heart if your heart were less sympathetic.  There have been men in all times, and there are still men all over the world, who have no trouble believing that their women belong to them.  But those men are not educated.  If Schnitzler’s writings on the subject can be said to have a tendency, it is to say that love provides an education.  What is problematic about the relationship is essentially what tells you that it is one.  It might not be an indissoluble bond, but as an insoluble problem it gives you the privilege of learning that freedom for yourself means nothing without freedom for others.  When you love, the problem begins, and so does real life.

There are some things about this that are awkwardly put – truly conscious love tends to make us all awkward, I think – but the conflict between the desire to hold and the desire to do what is best for the woman you love is very real.  Wendell Berry’s novel Jayber Crow is in certain ways a long, sorrowful meditation on this problem.  “If you love somebody enough, and long enough, finally you must see yourself.”  What you see is all the ways you fail that other person.