In a Nutshell

Victor Pelevin “The Sacred Book of Werewolf”

Love and tragedy go hand in hand.  Homer and Euripides wrote about that, so did Stendhal and Oscar Wilde.  And now it’s my turn.

Until I learned from my own experience what love is, I thought of it as a specific kind of pleasure that tailless monkeys can derive from being together, in addition to sex.

I formed this impression from the numerous descriptions I had come across in poems and books.  How was I to know that the writers were not describing love as it actually is at all, but constructing the verbal imitations that would look best on paper.  I thought of myself as a professional of love, since I had been inducing the experience in others for so many centuries.  But it’s one thing to pilot the B-29 towards Hiroshima, and quite another to watch it from the central square of the city.

Love turned out to be nothing like what they write about it.  It was ludicrous, rather than serious – but that didn’t mean it could be dismissed out of hand.  It was not like being drunk (the most popular comparison in literature) – but it was even less like being sober.  My perception of the world didn’t change: I didn’t think Alexander was anything like a fairy-tale prince in his Maibach.  I could see all the sinister sides of his character but, strangely enough, those things only added to his charm in my eyes.  My reason even came to terms with his barbarous political views and began to discover a certain harsh northern originality in them.

Love was absolutely devoid of any meaning.  But it gave meaning to everything else.  It made my heart as light and empty as a balloon.  I didn’t understand what was happening to me.  But not because I had become more stupid – there simply was nothing to understand in what was happening.  They may say that love like that doesn’t run deep.  But I think that anything that is deep isn’t love, it’s deliberate calculation or schizophrenia.

I myself wouldn’t even attempt to say what love is – probably both love and God can only be defined by apophasis, through those things that they are not.  But apophasis would be wrong, too, because they are everything.  Writers who write about love are swindlers, and the worst of them is Leo Tolstoy, clutching his programmatic bludgeon “The Kreutzer Sonata”.  Although I have a lot respect for Tolstoy.

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Posted on November 17th, 2009 under Literature, Quotes • Tags: "The Sacred Book of Werewolf", apophasis, calculation, drunk, imitation, Leo Tolstoy, love, ludicrous, meaning, schizophrenia, sex, sober, swindlers, tragedy, Victor Pelevin, writers. • • RSS 2.0 feed • Leave a response, or trackback