Love from my bookshelf

That’s what I thought love would be like.
Reading Whitman and fighting the urge not to express your aesthetic superiority.

-Paul Beatty, Slumberland

Some passages about love in the books I’m reading lately:

From The Diary of Frida Kahlo, a letter to Diego:

Diego.
Nothing compares to your hands
nothing like the green-gold of
your eyes. My body is filled
with you for days and days. you are
the mirror of the night. the vio-
lent flash of lightning. the
dampness of the earth.
…All my joy
is to feel life spring from
your flower-fountain that mine
keeps to fill all
the paths of my nerves
which are yours.

From Franz Kafka’s Letters to Milena:

…love is to me that you are the knife which I turn within myself.

From Anne Carson’s “The Glass Essay”:

To see the love between Law and me
turn into two animals gnawing and craving through one anothertowards some other hunger was terrible.
[…]
What is love?
My questions were not original.
Nor did I answer them.

From Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being:

But was it love? The feeling of wanting to die beside him was clearly exaggerated: he had seen her only once before in his life! Was it simply the hysteria of a man who, aware deep down of his ineptitude for love felt the self-deluding need to simulate it? . . .

Looking out over the courtyard at the dirty walls, he realized he had no idea whether it was hysteria or love.

From Paul Beatty’s Slumberland:

Do you love me?

I’d never been in love. I’d always thought love was like reading Leaves of Grass in a crowded Westside park on a sunny Tuesday afternoon, having to suppress the urge with each giddy turn of the page to share your joy with the surrounding world. By ‘sharing’ I don’t mean quoting Whitman’s rhythm-machine poetics to a group of strangers waiting for auditions to be posted at the Screen Actors Guild, but wanting to stand up and scream, “I’m reading Walt Whitman, you joyless, shallow, walking-the-dog-by-carrying-the-dog, casting-courch-wrinkles-imprinted-in-your-ass, associate-producer’s-pubic-hairs-on-your-tongue, designer-perambulator-pushing-the-baby-you-and-your-Bel-Air-trophy-wife-had-by-inserting-someone-else’s-spermbank-jizz-in-a-surrogate-mother’s-uterus-because-you-and-your-sugar-daddy-were-too-busy-with-your-nonexistent-careers-to-fuck, no-day-job-having California Aryan assholes! I’m reading Whitman! . . . I’m reading Whitman, expanding my mind and melding with the universe! What have you done today? . . . Have you looked a the leaves of grass? No? I didn’t think so!” That’s what I thought love would be like. Reading Whitman and fighting the urge not to express your aesthetic superiority.