It is the very nature and structure of this inner dialogue that explain the failed life of this man. But what makes the book so compelling is that its drama − becoming unloved − corresponds to the very form of the novel, a pure consciousness in action through internal dialogue. To “fall out of love” is to stop believing in who the beloved claimed he was.Īt first blush then, the reader should have compassion for a man who has been betrayed and left forlorn. Yet sometimes, almost by chance, we get a glimpse at the beloved’s soul, and see in it an ugliness we had not suspected, we hear a cacophonous voice we had not paid attention to before. We love as long as we believe this person represents something that matters to us, his goodness or integrity, or his very love for us. Love is much like a religious belief: to love someone is to believe in something they represent. But unloving can also be something altogether different: not the result of the repeated assault on the self, but an event that creates a sudden breach in our perception of the other. Or unloving may operate like an inverse magnetic force, pulling us away from someone, sometimes even against our own will. Or it can be like the slow and invisible deposit of emotional stalagmites, which turns us into a stony block of hostility that invades the grotto of our inner self. It is like the fabric of our clothes that slowly tears itself apart, by small patches, until it leaves us naked and we suddenly notice we are shivering in the cold. Unloving, then, takes many forms and metaphors.
Shouldn’t we collectively be more preoccupied than we have been with what it means to “unlove?” Such silence is all the more puzzling when the number of divorces, bad marriages, or more generally, broken relationships is staggering.
Yet, a culture that has so much to say about love falls bizarrely silent on the far more mysterious moment when we fall out of love, when the one who kept us awake at night now leaves us cold. Endless novels, poems and films teach us the art of becoming Plato’s disciples, loving the perfection manifested by the beloved. To be in love is to become an adherent of Plato: In the beloved, we see the reflection of some perfect Idea that exists only through him or her. Our culture has endlessly represented the ways in which a new love miraculously erupts, the mythical moment when we know someone is destined to be ours the feverish waiting for a phone call or an email, the thrill that runs up our spine at the mere thought of him. Sex and religious Zionism in the 21st century.
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