Dating Follies: Love and Literature
By Fay A.
Anyone who knows me well knows that I fancy myself a bit of a “book-dork,” so a summer reading issue is quite a fun assignment for me to dive into. Sitting around in the quiet and allowing myself to disappear into another time; another place; another life altogether, is one of my absolute favorite pastimes.
Summer reading issue? That’s Christmas in June for me. Knowing that I may be able to turn someone on to a new title or author gives me great pleasure. I am going to focus on one of my favorite writers. His style may take a bit of brain-power to wrap your head around, but in the end the experience is more than worth it. In my eyes he has shared with us one of the greatest examples of love being expressed in the English language. So settle in class, this week we will be talking about some of the great loves in literature.
Justine, by Lawrence Durrell, may very well be the most beautiful thing ever done with the English language. Published in 1957, it is the first novel of a series referred to as the Alexandria Quartet. The story revolves around a love triangle between the narrator, a nameless Englishman, a beautiful woman named Justine, and her wealthy and powerful husband, Nessim.
Rich with fascinating characters and fantastic plot twists, the bulk of the story takes place in Alexandria, Egypt, a city which by the end of the book becomes a character all of its own. For me, the draw of this book is its use of the language. Durrell has an undeniable gift.
The narrator has a girlfriend, Melissa, who loves him and cares for him with every ounce of her spirit, in every way that she knows how. Yet for him, “Melissa was a sad painting from a winter landscape contained by dark sky; a window-box with a few flowering geraniums lying forgotten on the window-sill of a cement factory.” And then, he meets Justine, a married woman who seems almost unable to truly love or be loved, yet he is powerless when it comes to his feelings for her. He knows that his love for her must be only between the two of them, due to the pain it would cause all those around them if it ever were found out. As he reflects on the pressure of having to live with such a secret, he describes this feeling to a friend saying, “I feel as if heaven lay close upon the earth and I between them both, breathing through the eye of a needle.”
Such simple words, yet when put together the way Durrell does, they become so profound and meaningful. They touch the inside of you and make you remember a time when you felt exactly that… it’s beautiful.
As you get deeper into this book, you become more and more in tune with the hearts and minds of these characters. You learn that Justine is much more than coarse and uncaring; she is fragile, and struggling with her feelings. At one part of the story she looks to the narrator and asks, “Who invented the human heart, I wonder? Tell me, and then show me the place where he was hanged.”
She later writes in her diary, “It is hard to fight with one’s heart’s desire; whatever it wished to get, it purchases at the cost of the soul.” The narrator faces his own internal battle now, loving a woman who is so deeply broken. He then begins to come to his own conclusions on the truth about love, “that it is an absolute which takes all or forfeits all. The other feelings, compassion, tenderness, and so on, exist only in the periphery and belong to the constructions of society and habit.”
The plot only grows from here. There is the story of Nessim and the insightful wisdom of Clea and Balthazar, who become narrators in other volumes of the Alexandria Quartet. This is a book busting at its bindings with phrases that you will want to carry around in your subconscious forever.
I do not mean to give the impression that this is one of the great happily-ever-after love stories of the ages. In my personal opinion, it is quite far from it; but it is real, and honest, and full of true human emotion that will make you look at life and love in a new light.
Lawrence Durrell teaches us two very important lessons in Justine, “A city becomes a world when one loves one of its inhabitants,” and, “There are only three things to be done with a woman… you can love her, suffer for her, or turn her into literature.”
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