Remembering love
Last Saturday I went to the Christian Writer’s Day, which Karen has blogged about here (on 8th October). As the name suggests, it’s a gathering of Christians who are interested in writing. I’m always struck with panic over the preliminary writing task, which is when you are given a topic, about 15 minutes to write about it, and then you get to read out what you have come up with to everybody there (does that idea not frighten anyone else?).
The topic for this day was remembering when you were in love. As Karen says we "had to think back to the time when they were in love and write about that period of their lives—describing what they did, what their environment was like, etc.—but without mentioning the fact that they were in love. The results were quite interesting. I am trying to work out whether it feels different to be in love if you are a guy as opposed to a girl, and so far there doesn't seem to be much of a difference ...".
The thing is, I actually felt like the honorary boy of the group reading out my piece. In the panic of the exercise I grabbed at the first thing that came to mind, which goes way, way, back to the beginning of such things and started writing. And it was very different to the melancholy, "romantic" writing of some, describing a look, a smile, the meaning of a moment and so on.
If anybody recognizes themselves in this story, well it’s ancient history:
I stood behind the start line with the usual stomach-churning nervousness, though that was never so bad before the 1500m as before the 100m or 200m – those first few seconds after gun fire were not so win-or-lose crucial. The fellow with gun poised looked down at my Dunlop volleys, all the running shoes our single-parent existence afforded, with scorn and said "what are you running in? – tennis shoes?". I coloured in teenage embarrassment as all the competitors looked in the direction of my feet.
The gun finally fired and off we all ran. Never one to employ sophisticated athletic strategies I just decided today to do the best by my tennis shoes and head for the front of the mob as we rounded the first bend, partly driven by the gun-firer's scorn. And then I heard it, the "go Ali" from the long jump pits. And there he was, Simon (not his real name) from Peel Highschool (not his real school either – old loves always remain a sensitive spot) smiling, waving and cheering me on. I won that race by 50 seconds.
And that’s all I had. But it’s amazing what a little encouragement from that "someone special" can do for us isn’t it? We can run faster than we ever have before. It outweighs the scorn of a hundred others. It changes a bad day into a good day in an moment. And there’s numerous lines of poetry that could be inserted here ... but, you’ll have to excuse my current obsession with George Eliot. I was reading something the other day, which is a slightly more poignant description of what it means to be in love, slightly more womanly too. It describes a moment between Adam and Hetty. Adam loves Hetty and Hetty is newly in love with Arthur, which alters her behaviour to Adam thus (Hetty is a pretty monster in her vanity and absence of concern for other human beings, but I can tell that the author is working on me such that Hetty’s coming ruin will temporarily ruin me too):
And Hetty? You know quite well that Adam was mistaken about her. Like many another man, he thought the signs of love for another were signs of love towards himself. When Adam was approaching unseen by her, she was absorbed as usual in thinking and wondering about Arthur’s possible return: the sound of any man’s footstep would have affected her just in the same way – she would have felt it might be Arthur before she had time to see, and the blood that forsook her cheek in the agitation of that momentary feeling would have rushed back again at the sight of any one else just as much as the sight of Adam. He was not wrong in thinking that a change had come over Hetty: the anxieties and fears of a first passion, with which she was trembling, had become stronger than vanity, had given her for the first time that sense of helpless dependence on another’s feeling which awakens the clinging deprecating womanhood even in the shallowest girl that can ever experience it, and creates in her a sensibility to kindness which found her quite hard before. For the first time Hetty felt that there was something soothing to her in Adam’s timid yet manly tenderness: she wanted to be treated lovingly – O, it was very hard to bear this blank of absence, silence, apparent indifference, after those moments of glowing love! She was not afraid that Adam would tease her with love-making and flattering speeches like her other admirers: he had always been so reserved to her: she could enjoy without any fear the sense that this strong brave man loved her, and was near her. It never entered into her mind that Adam was pitiable too – that Adam, too, must suffer one day.
Helpless dependence is indeed what comes of the power of another to so alter our day with one smile. But it actually made me think that unrequited love is good for us, in creating that heightened sensibility to kindness from others ...