(October 25, 2019 at 9:43 pm)Belacqua Wrote:(October 24, 2019 at 3:28 pm)mordant Wrote: I don't know. It cuts both ways....
Yes, I completely agree that what I reported about love before is only one way of seeing things, and probably not how we experience it in our lives most of the time.
I guess part of the problem is that the English word "love" has too many different associations, many of which are incompatible. So it's fuzzy right off the bat.
If you've read Iris Murdoch's books, the kind of irrational passionate love she writes about may be close to the Platonic, but certainly isn't guaranteed to end up with a stable marriage or a non-crazy relationship.
The analogy I like is with music. Nobody goes to college and studies four years of music theory and music history and learns an instrument and then decides he loves music. You only do that if you already love music, for reasons that you probably can't describe. The love is an irrational attraction that comes first, and we may fill in conceptual details after.
To me, though, if a person (maybe an android) learned everything there was to know about music and didn't love it, I might say that he didn't really understand it. To know it means loving it, not just passing tests about key signatures.
This has been my experience with art. Beautiful things hooked me at a young age and I've been working to fill in the details ever since.
But again, yes: loving art is different from having a crazy girlfriend.
The art analogy is a very good one.
Certain art forms attracted me early on but I have gotten so frustrated "filling in the details ever since" that I have abandoned the pursuit. There is too much of a gap between my appreciation of the ideal and my actual skill at performance and the amount of discipline I'm willing to invest. And my tastes are esoteric enough that they end up being a lot of investment for a relatively solitary pursuit.
The same has been true of my relationships. My own abilities and the reality of Other People are both too limited to realize the irrational ideal. Sometimes it's wiser to let go of dreams. In the way that one's dreams of being a fireman or astronaut as a very young child give way to other pursuits, it doesn't make that shift in focus a bad choice. Sometimes we don't have realistic or even accurate ideals, plus, we way over-discount the value of seemingly "lesser" pursuits. Or as it has been put, "the perfect is the enemy of the good."
