Call the roll of those you love. Clear a space for them to gather. The living and the dead (for love is always living). Those you’ve known in person and those through the works they left.
Surprised? Some inclusions are obvious – grandkids lead the parade, and kids and spouse and siblings, if you’re lucky. Your bestie – it goes without saying. Others startle, perhaps raise a blush. (No fret – this experiment’s for your eyes only.)
Love differs from respect, admiration, awe – rational responses, verdicts based on evidence. I can admire where I ought. Love obeys no rules, snaps harnesses, crashes through fences. Irrepressible, it may be criminal, indefensible. Romeo and Juliet should have loved elsewhere. Look what it cost them.
Your list can’t be long if it be true. One psychologist, I read online, says 150 friends is the most a brain can handle. That strikes me as high. Love many, love none. For love takes time – time together and time to envision the beloved. Souls I love wander into my mind for unscheduled visits. We’re together more than either recalls.
Your list will be changeable as the seasons, if it be true. We love at different times for different reasons. We fall into and out of love (the metaphor in the verb matters here). Sometimes we evict; sometimes we can’t, though we’d like to. Many the love that fades, like a ship into the horizon. We don’t know when it vanished. We’re surprised it’s gone.
We may forget we love, then reconnecting reminds us. This happens to me with Mendelssohn, say, or Dryden. We flush at our failure to do love justice. We feel love as a responsibility, too easy to betray.
Some prize love more than others. Some seem not to care that no one likes them. Such prodigies of self-sufficiency astonish – and disgust – me. I tilt toward the opposite extreme (you may have noticed). I’m starved for love, never enough, tumbling in (and out), aching for involvement. It’s why I write, to entangle us. The more we’re together, I’m convinced, the more we’ll crave each other’s company.
But Bach and Shakespeare can’t love, you say, they’re dead!
Their bodies are, but so what? Love is an imaginative state. It is so if we feel it so – and none can say us nay. I know the makers I love. They speak to me – past the blur of words – of my joys, griefs, confusions. They’ve been where I am: I can hear them groan.
Is your gang assembled? I smile, viewing mine mingling – Beethoven with Dickens with Thoreau. Do Emily Dickinson and Jane Austen exchange words? Bruckner and Monet might get along (if I break the ice). Henry gets along with everybody (Henry the dog).
What point such scrutiny? It’s disquieting – and a waste of time!
Do you care who you are? I reply. For our passions define us – more than our deeds. Deeds are accidents, dependent on circumstances: to be a war hero one needs a war. Whom and how we love is who we are. Here our innate self, hiding beneath appearances, declares itself. Love, though it may be snuffed, cannot be faked.
My gathering consoles me. These embraces seem a good reason for being, when I have my doubts. I have given to them and they to me, we have helped each other along. My relationships are my accomplishments. “Think where man’s glory both begins and ends,” wrote Yeats, “and say my glory was I had such friends.” That is my creed too. That is my prayer.