Of Love and Death

This reminded me of a poem I had written 10+ years back about love and death being similar.

When it comes to love, there are a million theories to explain it. But when it comes to love stories, things are simpler. A love story can never be about full possession. The happy marriage, the requited love, the desire that never dims -- these are lucky eventualities but they aren't love stories. Love stories depend on disappointment, on unequal births and feuding families, on matrimonial boredom and at least one cold heart. Love stories, nearly without exception, give love a bad name.

We value love not because it's stronger than death but because it's weaker. Say what you want about love: death will finish it. You will not go on loving in the grave, not in any physical way that will at all resemble love as we know it on earth. The perishable nature of love is what gives love its profound importance in our lives. If it were endless, if it were on tap, love wouldn't hit us the way it does.

.. It is perhaps only in reading a love story (or in writing one) that we can simultaneously partake of the ecstasy and agony of being in love without paying a crippling emotional price. I offer this book, then, as a cure for lovesickness and an antidote to adultery. Read these love stories in the safety of your single bed. Let everybody else suffer.

That's from an Introduction by Jeffrey Eugenides, who is the editor of the delectable collection of "Great Love Stories" - My Mistress's Sparrow is Dead. The book includes stories by some really renowned authors ("From Chekhov to Munro", says the sub-title of the book). There's Chekov, Faulkner, James Joyce, Guy de Maupassant, Vladimir Nabokov, and Isaac Babel. Then there is Grace Paley, Alice Munro, Lorrie Moore, Milan Kundera, Eileen Chang, Richard Ford, Raymond Carver and Stuart Dybek. There are a few other authors who I have not heard of - including two by Harold Brodkey. I was surprised to see a story by George Saunders (Jon) and also David Bezmozgis's Natasha in the collection. But one has to admit this is unequivocally a compilation of some of the best stories from the last 100-odd years. Like Eugenides himself said about the process of choosing these stories: "How did I choose? The way people choose their mates: for intelligence, beauty, humor, and a sense that they'll be around for the long haul."

In any case, I hope to read some of these veritable gems in the next few weeks.

P.S. The title of the book is derived from the work of Roman poet Gaius Valerius Catullus, which Eugenides explains in the first part of his introduction.