A couple of brief essays. 

The first on my first impression of the US in 1980.

The second on my first visit to Rushford, a small town in southeastern Minnesota.

The third is some musing on love.

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The chic Frenchwoman who stepped into the Boeing at Paris and sat next to me spread a pleasantly distracting aroma.  On my way to the United States for the first time, a sense of anticipation made it hard to focus on the Fodor guide I had bought at Kolkata airport. Presently my neighbor started talking.

“Excusez-moi,” she asked in French, “I hope I’m not in the non-smoking area?”

“No, you’re not,” I said, thankful for my years of apprenticeship with the Alliance Française. “In fact, I’ll keep you company.” I lit my cigarette as well as hers.

When the Air France stewardess brought the meal, I mentioned in passing I enjoyed French cuisine. She didn’t.

“That’s tough, for a French woman not to like French food,” I said.

“But I’m not French!”

“No?” I was nearly incredulous.

“Je suis Americaine.”

“Why the devil are we then talking in French for so long?” I swore in confusion.

That was my first lesson about the United States, long before I reached its shores. Americans can be anywhere and anything. You never know, so you never stereotype.

America, forever you elude me!

My family subscribed to American journals like Time and Newsweek; in college I studied US history and constitution, and outside I wolfed down Updike, Albee and Lowell. Yet, on first immersion in US life, my reaction was one of unmitigated surprise. I realized that my world of Luce and Lowell was quite different from the America I was experiencing.

Sheer size was an element in that surprise. As our wizened janitor told me, “Anything they make anywhere, folks here make it bigger.” You arrive at a US airport and get promptly lost in its vastness. You get into a car and find it large enough you could think of living in it. The road you are on is fearfully large, with eight lanes of zooming vehicles, and towering stores and offices on either side.

With bulk comes bounty. A superlative profusion of goods. The bigger, the better? Sure, but also the more, the merrier. Anything you need in ten varieties or perversely want in twenty, you get in two hundred varieties. Any time I walked into a Macy’s or Bloomingdale’s,  the abundance of goods staggered me: shirts and skirts, watches and latches, panties and perfumes. Before I could name it, they had it. Even the modest street-corner store stumped me: a giant cornucopia of a dozen brands of oversize chips and underarm spray.

But the supreme marvel no doubt are the fast food chains – Wendy’s, Hardee’s and McDonald’s. Accustomed to wait thirty minutes for the most pedestrian meal, I now had a freckled teenager conjure up in three minutes straight a trayful of calories: hamburger, cherry pie, milkshake and all. Vive le junk food! Vive le American speed!

Speed was visibly a part of American life.

I was overnight transported to a society where everybody rushed pell-mell – even if one was just going home to relax. Relaxation was often amazingly strenuous. My office was in a huge wooded area, with nature paths and shaded walkways, and on sunny days I took a stroll at lunchtime. I encountered several joggers, but never another stroller. Curious, I asked a colleague, and she told me with a straight face, “You see, they don’t have the time. They are trying to get all the relaxation they can out of that hour.”

America is nothing if not comfortable. The degree of comfort for the populace was truly stunning. I felt almost totally protected from the vagaries of weather. The houses I lived in were air-conditioned in summer and overheated in winter. So were the cars, buses, drugstores and coffee houses. Telephones in every room, lest I need to stir unnecessarily; pushbuttons instead of dials to spare me the inordinate effort of dialing. Clothes for the mildest variation of weather; instant dinners cooked at lightning speed; self-correcting typewriters; automatic automobiles. And the supreme comfort? I never paid cash. I simply waved a plastic card.

America, you amaze me.

America is also a land where, I soon discovered, curious things abound. Three of those I haven’t still got used to.

Born in India, the first thing I looked for on my office desk was a glass of water. No sign of it. It took me time to discover that there were niches in the office wall that housed little water fountains. You simply put your head in the niche and drink the water right from the fountain, not using a glass. Hygienic doubtless, but not without problems. I placed my finger on a button to get the water jet going, then as I lowered my head to drink, the finger pressure involuntarily increased and I got an embarrassing splash all over my face.

Electric switches were another set of adversaries. Having known all my life to move a switch lever down to get the lights on, it bothered me to find that I had darkened a whole conference room in a misguided attempt to turn on something. Some switches even moved left and right instead of up and down, violating what had seemed to me a sacred rule.

But the most confusing of all was that most innocent of gadgets, a water faucet. I had so far turned little wheels anticlockwise to make the water flow and done the reverse to shut it off. Now I had to master strange contraptions that stood in the place of plain, pedestrian faucets and seemed to sneer at me. The basin in my apartment had what looked like a car gear lever, and evidently I ‘drove’ poorly, for it was only by accident that I could ever get a drop out of the nozzle. And when I succeeded, I ended up with scalded fingers.

(Mario Miranda's cartoon, courtesy of Public Affairs Office, US Embassy, New Delhi)

Strange country, inscrutable practices. In New York City, you can’t let a suitcase out of your sight for a minute; it will disappear as fast as in Chowpatty or Chowringhee. In a Midwest town I visited, people leave their car keys in their cars and consider it a bother to lock the house for a mere two-hour visit to the market. An American is remarkably at home with mechanical things, oiling his bike or repairing her eggbeater over the weekend. A local exhibition of inventors displayed a mind-boggling variety of 83 mousetraps, each a shining tribute to Yankee ingenuity. Yet the Federal Government’s Department of Transportation estimates that a full one-third of all car repair bills Americans pay are spurious – the mechanic is inept or the repairs unnecessary. I evoked impatient honks when I drove below 65 mph on a highway – though the speed limit was 60 mph. Yet my friends sat patiently through a gauntlet of fifteen commercials for cars, coats and contraceptives to listen to a half-hour news program on television.

Curious too is the American system of credit. If you follow Polonius’s advice of never being a borrower, you will be quite uncreditworthy. You are expected to live beyond your means, borrow and buy. If you do so, and keep paying token sums, you will be rewarded with pretty little pieces of plastic – credit cards – to enable you to borrow even more. And curiouser is what you can do with those little cards. You can do what I did: practically buy up the store, from food to furniture, art to antiques, jigs to jewelry – till the bill collector catches up with you.

America, you intrigue me.

America confused me too.

I had studied economics and worked in management, I visualized the US at the pinnacle of economic development, with vast industries and a massive service sector. That was true, but so too was the large number of skilled unemployed, who survived on unemployment compensation. Humiliatingly, they went from employer to employer, facing a selection process as tainted by prejudice, cronyism and sheer red tape as in Bolivia or Bangladesh. If they were a fringe, how could a rich, efficient society maintain this inhuman fringe?

It is an efficient society: trains and planes move on time, good are delivered on schedule. But it harbors a bureaucracy the most spendthrift in the world and, by many accounts, less than competent. It is a rich society, but in all its major cities fester pockets of abysmal poverty where a stranger dare not walk in daylight. It is a marvelously clean society, where an Asian or African is thankful for hygienic food and potable water, dust-free rooms and deodorized toilets. But the next moment he or she is confused by dirty low-cost housing, squalid subways and filthy ghettoes where broken bottles litter the streets and garbage piles stink.

It is a remarkable humane society, too. Some of the kindest and most generous people I have ever met are Americans, from Peggy in Minneapolis, who supported Mother Teresa’s orphanages, to Paul in Dallas who donated to welfare agencies in Sudan, from Mark, who lent me a car for weeks when I didn’t have one, to Earl and Karlaine who took me along to parties where they were invited but I wasn’t.

Yet I also think of the careless schoolboy in Wheaton who was knocked by sixteen cars and killed because not a single driver would stop for his sake. Americans disregard the daily carnage on their roads, and I read with incomprehension that the last Christmas season Ford and General Motors achieved a better body count of Americans than the Viet Minh in a whole war.

Stand outside any grocery store, in Chicago, Seattle or San Francisco, and you will see withered, wrinkled people painfully pushing home trolley carts laden with purchases. Alone and helpless. At the same time, there are well-maintained homes for the elderly. The contrast between private indifference and public thoughtfulness is baffling. As baffling as the stark contrast between the private and public means of transport: on the one hand, an endless array of shining cars, of every conceivable cost, contour and comfort, and on the other, a handful of buses, with infrequent service, limited routes and expensive tickets.

America, you bewilder me.

What in the US left the strongest impression on me in the end?

One surely was the invincible dignity of Everyman. Call it arrogance, call it brashness, call it whatever you like, you had to reckon with the fact that the meanest of the land could and would stand up to you, if he felt you were being overbearing. It didn’t matter whether he cleaned the floor or gathered garbage, like lanky Len in my office or big Butch in my Reston neighborhood. He knew what he was worth: the respect of a person. Len could ask for a ride without feeling self-conscious, and Butch would offer you a ride without a second thought.

Nowhere in the world is blue collar so reconcilable with blue blood, junk job so far from junk status. Among my friends, lawyers, academics and managers, there was none who hadn’t worked earlier as a messenger boy, dishwasher or waiter. There is even planned reversion: Jerry, who headed a university department, now drives a taxi at night to sustain his interest in painting during the day. Manual labor is a part of everyone’s life. My neighbor, career diplomat Ed, stripped to the waist on the brighter Sunday mornings and lovingly hosed his blue Toyota. Doctor Jim cooked his food, judge Joan polished her shoes, accountant Bill weeded his backyard garden. Truly, a country where the white-collar world knows how the other half lives.

A different kind of half to watch: the women. Never make the mistake of saying the sexist “girls” or the quaint “ladies.” The US is the first modern society where more women work in offices and factories than at home, and the economic clout counts. They are better educated, infinitely more independent and are experimenting boldly with options that will send a chill down many a male spine. Totally without male help, they are running organizations, rearing children capably, leading successful professional lives, and even conducting liaisons – with other women. The ones I know, Margaret, Carlene and Jeanne, aren’t asking for rights; they are asserting them.

The other thing that took my breath away was the staggering bounty of educational opportunities. Not just schools and universities and standard courses. But thousands of educational programs, of all kinds, at all levels, long and brief, expensive and cheap, formal and non-formal, and everywhere. Sitting in Boston, Boise or Boulder you can learn how Jains manage their communities in western India or Eskimos paddle their kayaks. There is no excuse for ignorance. Every local library is swarming with avid kids, checking on everything from neutrons to necrophilia, tetanus to Tamerlane.

But the deepest impression I retain is also a broader one: of a vibrant people, restless and relentless, uninhibited and unfearing, searching for every pleasure and every adventure, exploring every mortal issue, constantly questing for every answer to every question. Tactless and naïve, but also tenacious and fresh, they hunger for facts and stop at nothing. That is why their media are the best. Their press and networks daily tear down the sacred and sanctimonious. For them there is no sacred cow and everything is fair game: judges and tycoons, congressmen and corporation presidents, the Pope and the President’s wife. It is all slightly fearsome. But it is also thrilling, dramatic, exciting. And it is the last hope for living free.

America, you impress me.

But all these thoughts and reactions were in the months and years ahead, yet to come on that sultry afternoon my Boeing landed at Dulles International Airport with a sharp jolt. And then I was jostling ahead with a motley crowd of summer tourists, getting into lines, going up and down stairs, riding on escalators, showing papers, answering questions, and finally entering the lounge area.

All around me people were greeting people, talking, laughing, hugging. My French-looking, French-talking neighbor ran over to an all-American crew-cut GI type and promptly burst into the purest Americanese. Amid the hubbub, I stood aside, tired, lost, expectant.

And, then, there was a sudden swirl of long blonde hair, a familiar flash of glimmering blue eyes, a dizzy blur of the world’s sweetest sounds, smells and sensations. Next moment, the bright overhead lights of the airport were going round and round, as were a pair of slender arms around my neck. Found! I was no longer tired or lost: I was home, I was home.

America, I love you.


(1981)


ooo

I crossed the bridge and drove into Rushford downtown. Symbolically, I was crossing a more significant bridge: I was driving into an unknown town to meet my unknown parents-in-law.

I had met Jane in Calcutta, where I worked for a European company and Jane had come to do project research. We had married in India a year later, and another six months later we were both working in Washington, DC. But I had not met her family nor visited the small town in Minnesota where they lived. The time had come to change that.

I had flown from Washington to the Twin Cities, rented a car at Minneapolis airport, and now, a late fall afternoon, with the leaves turning orange and gold, I was driving into Rushford to meet Jane’s father and mother. Uneasily I pondered that we had not only married in their absence in a foreign land, but were very different persons. Jane was blonde, young, just out of the university; I was black-maned, distinctly older, with several years of working experience. She was a small-town American; I was an Indian who had never lived in a city that counted less than six million people.

Our backgrounds underscored the difference. Her father worked in a local quarry, while her mother, a homemaker, moonlighted in a small-town factory. They had lived their life in a Midwestern setting, venturing rarely into a city. My parents were both well-traveled academic administrators, whose friends were mostly doctors, lawyers, writers and journalists. It was symptomatic that my two brothers were a psychologist and a journalist. We had written books and traveled internationally. My in-laws would probably find me alien and strange, a dubious match for their all-American daughter.

I slowed the car and told Jane, “We better take some gas.” I avoided saying what came naturally to me: petrol, not gas. Also avoided was the admission that I preferred to defer the hour of reckoning.

At the gas station, the attendant looked at me as he placed the nozzle in the car, “Where are you from?”

“We drove from Minneapolis, but we live in Washington, DC.” Then, realizing that the query had not really been answered, I added, “I am from India.”

“India! What brings you to Rushford?”

“My wife is from Rushford. We are visiting her parents.”

“You don’t say! What’s her name?”

I said the name and promptly evoked the response, “Oh, yes, Hub’s daughter.”

A large hand landed on my shoulder in a patent gesture of camaraderie, “Ah, you are Hub’s son-in-law. Welcome to our town!”

With that exchange, I was no longer an outsider, but an acceptable guest. No more a stranger or foreigner, who looks fishy and sounds funny, but someone with a respectable link to Rushford who could be a part of it.

---

Evidently, this was a friendly town.

A few more minutes, a few hundred yards, and we were at the house of my parents in law. A modest single-story house to which they had moved since their two daughters flew the coupe.

Jane rang the bell vigorously at her parents’ door. To the perceptible acceleration of my pulse, out came a pleasant looking woman, an apron around her waist. She smiled, held my hand and shyly asked, “What do you like to eat?” Evidently I was not the only one concerned about the first encounter. My mother-in-law was cooking and had some concern if what she prepared would suit a son-in-law from the mysterious orient. I found it frankly reassuring that she asked exactly what my mother would have asked in the circumstances.

My father-in-law, a broad-shouldered, strong-looking man, appeared in the next instant, carrying, to my embarrassment, my large suitcase from the car. We were assigned the corner bedroom, given time for a wash, and promptly called to dinner. My first Rushford dinner was a simple, wholesome dinner, over simple, wholesome conversation, which sent me soon to a relaxing, dreamless sleep.

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I saw more of Rushford the following week. I saw its shops and stores, bakeries and restaurants, its pool and library. Even more, I saw its streets and parks and playgrounds. And I saw its people. Its sturdy Scandinavian people, with names like Peterson, Johnson, Richardson and Larson (my wife came from among the Larsons, arguably the largest group, taking numerous columns in every Minnesota phone directory). They dressed casually, walked comfortably, worked diligently and talked – what can only be called –  Minnesotan.

As I watched them, they watched me too, the obvious non-Scandinavian, who haunted the Rushford cafés and bars, the American Legion and VFW in search of lively lager and sapid sandwiches. Rushford people talked to me, in streets, stores and shops. In bars, seats next to me filled up with congenial conversationalists. In gas stations and barber shops, people readily engaged me in genial small talk. Coming from a big city, I was surprised when a simple Hello on the street corner would evoke the unexpectedly warm response, “Haven’t seen you here before. New to Rushford?”

Evidently, this was a friendly town.

I hadn’t lived in a small town, in the US or in India. Rushford surprised me. The warmth of the neighborhood, the pleasure of simply walking around, seeing known faces and familiar places, not having to check behind me in dark corners, suddenly gave me a new sense of the quality of life.

I walked to the bluff or to the pool, or simply nowhere in particular, and enjoyed the breeze on my face and the quiet in my ears. None of the frantic pace of the metropolis, the stress and frenzy of getting things done, reaching places through dense traffic, running through life breathless and spent.

Rushford felt a very different kind of place. A place I could savor.

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All this was twenty years ago. Things have changed in my life. My hair has thinned; my waist isn’t what it was. We still live in Washington, but our work often takes us to other countries, sometimes for several months, even years. Our two-person family now has one cat (a wild cat we picked up in Rushford with the still-unrealized hope of domesticating it), two dogs, three rabbits – and two daughters. Lina, a tall, willowy sixteen, talkative and bibliophile, has befriended all neighbors and consumed practically all that the Rushford library has to offer. Monica, a sprightly twelve years old, prefers to assist Grandpa in his gardening chores and has joined the Fourth of July parade on horseback, in costume and jewelry lent by Grandma. They both love to go places on their own in their bicycles. Their less active dad prefers simply to sit in the backyard and read books, while intrepid squirrels gambol around him. 

Many things have indeed changed in twenty years. What has not changed is that we keep coming to Rushford every year and savor the quiet of small-town life. Jane’s parents, our ostensible reason for visiting Rushford, have aged. What has not aged or waned is my perception of Rushford as a place with a special quality of life, a special flavor of its own and special people all around.

By some miraculous process, Rushford, a Midwestern town with Scandinavian people, has become my town. 
 

 
(1999)



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The great paradox of love is that we both love and fall into love. It is a paradox because these are not only different but contradictory processes.

Love, if it is to mean anything worthy of the value we attach to it, must be an enduring phenomenon. If I love you today, but not tomorrow, and again resurrect my love the day after, you would be reluctant to call it love. You may call it infatuation; you may describe it as a recurrent fixation; but you are unlikely to accept it as love. “Love is not love which alters when it alteration finds.” We expect love to be stronger and more durable than transient moods or sentiments. The moment we do that, we declare love to be an act of will. I love you and continue to do so -- if not eternally, at least for a considerable period -- because I choose to do so. I have decided that my love will continue, and it does, unless I choose to change the decision. If it is not an act of will, it does not. If it is a feeling, like anger, enthusiasm, excitement or hate, its continuation is quite dubious. Our experience tells us it will then end with a bang or whimper, but end it will.
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Falling in love is a rather different affair. The very phrase precludes its continuation: you cannot keep falling eternally. Yet its finite nature does not seem to eliminate its charm. If the whole world does not love a lover, at least it is fascinated by people who fall in love. Our books, magazines and tabloids appear riveted on them. Even hardhearted, businesslike people treat them indulgently. All because most of us retain a fading but unforgotten souvenir of our own experience of falling in love. It was a heady, heart-lifting experience that we can't recall it without a strong twinge of emotion. The mists of time cannot blur the radiance of that ephemeral yet all-enveloping, world-obliterating feeling. Some of that radiance is because it is so ephemeral. Its brevity enhances the wistfulness of our nostalgia.

This then is the paradox of love. The love we fall in we never forget and always treasure. It is short-lived, yet it retains our fascination and loyalty for ever. At the same time, we believe true love to be enduring and expect it to survive both travail and time. We want the genuine lover, as different from the fair-weather paramour, to persist and persevere. Love is important to us, perhaps the most important thing of all. Yet when we talk of falling in love, we are talking of a glorious feeling, a memorable fireworks of passion. And when we talk of loving, we are talking of a glorious act of will, a strong, deliberate decision of commitment.

Reconciling these two ideas of love is not easy. Falling in love happens suddenly, unpredictably, occasioned apparently by the encounter with a stranger who becomes the lover. Loving happens when you want it to happen, when you choose to love someone. For the one, you wait for the right time; for the other, any time is the right time. For the one, you sit back and wait for it to happen; for the other, you have the control and you make it happen. For the one, the other person, the lover, is the main actor who makes it all possible; for the other, you are the main actor, who doesn't have to have anyone's permission. Some might therefore treat the two ideas as irreconcilable.

The link of transcendence
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Yet there is a strong link. That link lies in the leap beyond myself. When I fall in love, something radical happens to my life. The earlier priorities are discarded; there is a sudden and drastic rearrangement of things that matter. The main priority becomes the person I love. The principal difference between the order before and the order (or disorder) after is that my earlier priorities were all closely related to me and my interests, whereas now I relegate those to a back seat. Less dramatically, loving involves the same relegation. I make a special place in my life for a person, and to do that I push back some of my earlier priorities that relate to me and my interests. Both involve transcending myself, my preoccupation with my comfort and convenience at a lower level and my work and values at a higher level.

The transcendence is so intensive in its force and so extensive in its impact that it is a commonplace to think of love as a form of derangement. Indeed it is. It is bizarre to change the way I do when I love or fall in love. It is no use thinking: I am no longer a weak and vulnerable adolescent, I am a busy doctor or important lawyer or earnest professor. I am acting in a way essentially alien to the sensible person, conscious of his or her good. I do not cease to be conscious of my good; I just happily let that consciousness be supplanted by a stronger awareness, my love. I gladly compromise what I would have never agreed to compromise earlier; I change in fundamental ways and behave very differently; I abandon what had previously seemed valuable, even essential.

In spite of appearances, the more crucial is the change when I decide to love. When I decide to love you, I love you not only in wealth or poverty, in health or sickness, but regardless of your reaction to my love. How well or poorly you respond to me, I want the best for you and love you. I do not give up even if you betray or humiliate me. This is the meaning of choosing to love you. It is all the more remarkable because it is deliberate. It is extraordinary when someone sensible, a doctor, lawyer or professor for instance, chooses to do something as strange as this. They are not required to do it, they have not "fallen" into it; they simply decide to do it. Impressively, they consider it worth their while to make the unusual commitment of love.

Whether I choose to love or I fall in love, there is a transcendent quality to my attitude. I place great importance on someone beyond myself. Without love, we can imagine giving that kind of importance only to ourselves. But love makes possible the miracle of this leap beyond ourselves. The leap is all the more miraculous when it is for a person quite unlike us, unrelated to us, and sometimes in the estimation of our friends, quite unworthy of us. It is of course reassuring that some of us commit the solecism of bestowing their love on a person deemed unequal by the world. They display a wise realization that the worth of their attitude has nothing to do with the worth of the person. You don't have to become lovable for me to love you. More important, you can't be, for you are already fully worthy of love. It just remains for me to discover that.

The only quality you need

While you may have special qualities, you don't need any of them for me to love you. If you are loved, you may recognize the enormity of the miracle, and wonder: What is there in me for you to care so specially for me? You may suppose the caring to be based on a mistaken assumption of quality. You may then try to acquire the quality or pretend its possession. To the extent we all try to be worthy of the worthwhile, there is nothing wrong in the effort to gain qualities we lack. Even the feigning of a quality has much to recommend it. As in a celebrated Max Beerbohm story, where the knave seduces the beauty by wearing a fair mask and, when he tries later to confess and remove the mask, finds that his face has indeed become fair in long contact with the mask, we often internalize what we admire and pretend to be. The more important point is that you need nothing for me to love you. If there is a quality you need, you already have it: it is to be human.

We must not underestimate the significance of the human dimension. We frequently say, "I love that book," or "She really loves her dog." We are often deeply attached to objects and animals. We seem to fall in love with a film or a car. We love a pet that has been with us for years and grieve its passing. Yet, however deep the attachment and however intense our pain over its ending, we know its difference from a human relationship. A car or a computer, or even a cat, cannot respond the way a person does. Things get their importance exclusively from the meaning we invest in them. A book that means a lot to you may mean nothing to me. Tolstoy is great because many find his books important and meaningful to them. Books by themselves are inert objects; their enhancement comes from our willing recognition of their significance in our life.

A pet is somewhat different. It responds to our caresses, and expresses its affection. Yet it is not all that different. That we always tend to talk of a dog's loyalty and a cat's intelligence gives away the truth that we see pets as an extension of ourselves. The loyal dog recognizes and stays with me; it is a part of me or my existence. The intelligent cat is a pleasure because you don't really expect a response and are pleased that there is some response at all. Loving a person, or falling in love with a person, is different. You expect a response. That response is an essential part of the affair. You are by no means sure you will get the response you like. That unpredictability is a very important part of the matter. You cherish the loyalty you get, or any other quality you consider important, precisely because you can't predict that either. You hope for it, you dream of it, you are thrilled if it comes to pass. No matter what happens, you know of your love.

The other person is both important and not important. The person is important because without him or her there is nobody to love or fall in love with. The particularity of the person is crucial. I love you, none else, even if another looks, talks and acts like you. I treasure your uniqueness, and will not abandon it for anyone else. I will be inconsolable without you. Also, looked at another way, the person is not important, because the critical process of love is taking place within me. It does not depend on how you look, talk and act. I treasure the way you do, and don't want it any other way, but a second's thought will show that way is as much my creation as yours. You are what you are, and that is precious to me in a way that I have made special. That specialness is uniquely my handiwork.

The matter of response

Am I then saying that your response does not matter and my love is unilateral? Isn't it then the same as loving a thing or a pet? It is not the same because of both the nature of your response and the nature of my response to your response. When I love you, you can turn back and say, "Sorry, I don't find it in my heart to love you." It is as probable a response as, "Wonderful! I love you too." You are a totally free agent. You can choose how you respond to my love. If you are not totally free, and there is the slightest restraint on your freedom to respond to me the way you want, I have, or someone else has, reduced you to the state of a pet. Your response then may be pleasing, but it would have nothing to do with love. Someone has then conditioned your response into meaninglessness. I may pretend to myself that I have won your love, but I am dealing in a counterfeit product of no value.

Being a free agent, if you choose not to requite my love, I have to agonizingly work out my reactions. As I watch my dreams of immediate happiness collapse, I go through a process of painful resolution. If I am in love with you, I realize that I cannot have what I had earnestly desired. The mutuality I craved cannot be. Reluctantly and regretfully, perhaps over a long period of mourning, I learn to accept the end of the affair. The wound takes time to heal, and my life is never again the same. Impatient, hurting, I may try to hasten the healing process, by forcing distractions on myself: more work, greater family involvement, a casual affair. These are no better than distractions that can momentarily fill the void, but the sense of emptiness returns with a searing force. I need time to recover, and genuine congeniality from friends to help the healing.

If I love you, the pain is still intense but lacks the edge of finality. That you cannot or will not love me does not stop me from loving you. It is my choice. I can choose to continue loving you. If you do not want it, I have no right to inflict on you demonstrations of my love. Your choice is important there. My life and its priorities are however my choice. I can keep loving you. It is only human to cherish the belief that your mind may change. It is equally human to think that my steadfastness may be a factor in your change of mind. Whatever my reasons, I may continue to love you. I may love you even when I am convinced that you will never respond to my love. My steadfastness derives from nothing else but my decision to love you.

This kind of love may seem especially qualified to draw the appellation of derangement. It seems insensible to continue loving a person when the person has no intention of loving in return. Yet it is this insensibility about which poets sing and legends flourish. There is popular wisdom in recognizing its sense. Love that is unavailing and yet undaunted is really what we think about when we talk of love. It is the concept of love most of us carry within us. It is a simple and strong concept. Very simply it states: I love. Period.

That statement says two things. First, it says, "I love you, and I will love you no matter what." In other words, I choose to make an area of my life free from all trade. The world may believe in fair exchange; I may do all else in my life on the principle of barter; in this one sphere I decide to be defiantly unbusinesslike. I reserve the sphere for unqualified regard; no strings, no conditions. I just don't care to calculate the payoff on this relationship. I want it anyway. How can one justify an attitude so impervious to logic and judgment? The answer seldom strikes us as long as we look at it from the angle of the lover. It is easier to see the logic if we consider the object of the love. All of us want to be loved irrespective of our merit. We know we are found wanting from time to time, and we don't want love predicated on our merit. We want to be loved regardless of our lovability, as we are loved by our mothers. That is why when we dream of love, we dream of an unconditional love that continues irrespective of merit and therefore can continue without end.

Second, it says, "I love you, and it is a beautiful thing in my life." Here we need to reverse our viewpoint, and see from the angle of the lover rather than the beloved. It is pleasant to be loved: we bask in the warmth of attention, affection and admiration. It is so pleasant in fact that it occupies our entire attention, and we cannot conceive that anyone can give so much pleasure without asking some of it in return. Surely loving is made easier if we are loved in return, which is doubtless why love is requited as often as it is. By loving you I provide the strongest stimulus for you to love me. I model the behavior; I provide an advance reward; I draw attention to a link; I emphasize areas of common interest, if not values; not the least, I provide unimpeachable proof of my good taste. If you block the stimulus and do not reciprocate my love, it seems a reasonable assumption that I will discontinue my love to deprive you of the pleasure you denied me. The assumption is based on an inability to see that loving itself, aside from being loved, has a significant reward associated with it.

I love you, and even without a response from you, it transfigures me. People who know me notice it and say, "He is not the same person any more." I do my work, but it is not at the forefront of my mind; I have my recreation and my leisure-time interests, but they become secondary; my friendships are important and yet I seem to need less of them. I have a general sense of distraction, combined with a heightened awareness of things I may have missed before, as if my perspective has changed. It has. I cannot love or fall in love without putting a special priority on my beloved. That downgrades other priorities. What is happening outside is a reflection of what is happening within me. My scheme of values has changed. It has not changed as a result of an intellectual persuasion; it is an experiential shift. I have experienced a different order of values to be more significant to me. That enhanced significance, a greater sense of meaning to what I am doing, is my reward. Whether you respond to my love or not, that reward is real. My life is more beautiful.

Gaining love

You are the most important thing in my life, and of course I want you to love me. I would do anything to induce you to love me. Anything? I would persuade you; I would be on my best behavior; I would do the best for you I can. I will not misrepresent anything, least of all myself. There is nothing wrong in my trying to improve myself. It is perfectly natural that I should try to be better than I am -- and then let you see me. I want you to see me at my best, and for that to happen I am trying to be my best. I even try to look my best, wear my best clothes, and if you are with me, go to the best restaurants. I am not pretending, for I do feel like doing the best for you. I still want you to love me, not a stranger who looks like me and whose behavior is very different from mine. I would rather that my quirks don't put you off, and you have the patience to look at me and my strengths. I can retain the hope that when you know me better, you will love me.
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If I love you and you don't love me in return, the whole world seems to turn on the question: How do I gain your love? It is a legitimate question, to which sadly there is no answer. I can only present you the possibility of loving me, for example by making you aware of my existence; even this has to be within limits, for if I thrust myself in front of you often I may only make myself offensively intrusive. There is no certain way to augment my lovability, beyond normal decency and spontaneity. If I change in a certain way, I make myself perhaps more appealing to some, but I may make myself less appealing to some others. More important, I tread into the perilous turf where superficial or specious modification masquerades as deep, genuine change. I have then stopped loving and prepared to deceive the person I love.

This whole question, of gaining the love of the person I love, is very different from the other question that is far more widespread and essentially false: How do I get loved? Most see the main issue of love as being loved. So their main concern becomes their own lovability. If love is good and desirable, and they want it, they have to wait till someone turns up to love them. As they see it, they expand the possibility and hasten the process when they take steps to enhance their lovability. Hence the extensive resort to finishing schools, beauty parlors, clothes designers, gifted jewelers. Hundreds stand robed, bejeweled, manicured and beautified in manifold ways, waiting to be loved. Only the right person has to appear, to make the dream a reality.

Sadly, for no other situation is it more appropriate to recall Oscar Wilde's suggestion that getting your heart's desire can be as great a tragedy as not getting it. When you are that anxious for the right person, the chance is that you will keep meeting the wrong person. The reason is that your anxiety will lend an appearance of rightness to the most wrong person. The bigger problem is that when everybody waits around to be loved, nobody is doing the loving. The main issue of love is not being loved, but loving. Love implies a focus on another, which few of us seem easily able to manage. It implies correspondingly a relegation or subordination of oneself, which too is alien to most of us. We need to learn to love.

To say that is to set oneself squarely against the traditional view of love as a totally spontaneous expression, only cramped by an effort to "learn." Many will rebel at the implication there is something to learn about love or that they need to learn it. Yet the sad truth is that there is great dearth of love as we dream of it. We talk of it in a casual way; we read of it in best-seller novels and tabloid headlines; we see it, we think, constantly on television and theater screens. We rarely experience it. Or we experience it fleetingly - which is the same thing as saying we don't experience it. We don't have love because we don't love. And we don't love because we don't have the capacity to love. We have the potential capacity -- we could have loved -- but the not the actual capacity to love another person. We don't know how to love. If love just happened, like measles or allergy, if we could love as easily as moving the little finger, there would be abundant love around us. There isn't.

The person who plays piano spontaneously is a person who has assuredly spent years learning it. Learning is not contrary to spontaneity, but often a basis for it. You need to learn the roads before you can drive spontaneously and effortlessly. If you haven't devoted some time to learning your way, you will get lost and make detours, and your driving will be more labored because of repeated enquiries and corrections. Love to be spontaneous demands a basis of discipline that seldom comes naturally to us and needs to be learned.

The need to learn

There are four things we need to learn. The first is interest without intrusion. If I love you I am interested in you. I want to know all about you. I want to know about you as you are: what you like, what you do, what is important to you, who you care for, what you look for, what matters to you. I have a voracious appetite for all that exists in your life. Chesterton said the lover is the greatest detective of all. Every trifle in your life is of immense moment to me. Love has even its special geography and history. Everywhere that you go is significant to me. Your past matters to me. I want to know all that has ever happened to you, anywhere.

In pursuing this interest, I have to learn not to intrude. If you love me, you too want to know all about me. I share all that is in my life with joy and abandon. We share our life and together we build a base of mutual knowledge. We disclose happily. We do so however in our way, in our time. I am apt to rush the process and venture into the dark hinterland of your hesitation. The terrain of your unknown is both my challenge and temptation. To love you is to learn to stop at that point and turn away from the temptation. Your life is sacrosanct and inviolate. I must therefore discipline myself to stand at the borderline and wait. The day you want me to know I will know, not before. You pace yourself, and I must learn to accept the pace.

The second thing I have to learn is caring without coercing. I care for you, and am concerned about all that happens to you. I exult in the good events and sympathize in events that are disappointing or hurtful. I want good things to happen to you. When they do, I share your happiness; when they don't, I share your sadness. My estimate of the events may well differ from yours, but I am eager to understand and share your reaction to them. I may consider an event favorable to you, but if you believe the contrary, I care for you enough to understand your disappointment. My caring transcends my reason. In a transposition of Pascal's phrase, my heart understands the reasons, your reasons, that my reason does not.

Such caring is harder than pulling back a daring child from the street full of hazardous traffic or a distraught, self-destructive adult from the narrow ledge of a towering building. It is much harder to care and not to intervene, and to know when, or beyond what point, not to intervene. It is hardest when you identify so much with the other person that you feel every hurt the person endures. Because you care, you feel impelled to intervene when you believe your beloved is making a mistake, missing out on something good or running into a dangerous corner. Despite the benevolent intention, the intervention is then coercive. Love involves caring to the extent of agonizing, if not in silence at least in acceptance, and yet recognizing the uncompromisable integrity of the other person.
The third thing to learn is sharing without sheltering. Love denotes the glorious pleasure of limitless sharing. So much we experience in life, and so little can we share with others. Then comes love, and opens the floodgates. I want to tell you all that transpires in my life, day to day. Every little incident in your life, and its personal meaning today and changing significance tomorrow, becomes of consuming interest to me. By sharing, we build a common basis, not only for understanding and relationship, but also for mutual help in weathering problems. I love you and therefore want to help you cope with and resolve problems that you face.

The way I can do that is to listen to your problems, and help you explore and understand them. They are your problems, and my best contribution is to increase your ability to deal with them. Because I love you, I will be tempted to make them my problem, solve them myself, and spare you the effort and possible tension. If I do that, I have, in half-conscious hubris, taken over a segment of your life. However well-intended, it is an illicit appropriation that denies you an opportunity to solve the problem your own way and learn from it, and also to develop your problem-solving capacity. I may solve your immediate problem quickly and even ideally, but I have potentially created the larger problem of dependence. The nurturing of dependence is the opposite of love, for love strengthens and not weakens the person loved.

A fourth and final thing to learn is pointing without possessing. Love adds something to what exists; it is not substitution, let alone subtraction. At least it adds you to my life, or a different kind of concern about you. You are now central to my concerns. I identify with you. It is normal that I think about, your life, and what surrounds it. I can see possibilities, and I want you to see them with me. I point the options to you, each of which opens up new lines of growth, new kinds of life. I must, because I feel responsible for you. You too, with the same sense of responsibility, point out options that you perceive in my life.
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Pointing however is all I can do, including persuading, arguing, contradicting, urging all the reasons for and against an option I can muster. I can never presume to choose the option for you. I must never arrogate the right to set the direction. Then I not only deny your right, I negate you. I obliterate the person I pretend to love. In effect, like the demon Legion, I possess you. I must therefore let you err if you so choose, even if I can clearly see the error in advance, for the alternative is worse. In the first case you live an erroneous life and suffer its consequences, and I suffer vicariously; in the second case you cease to live as a person, for I have possessed you and preempted your choice. In a painful choice of this kind, I am entitled to be concerned about you, but I am not entitled to let my concern restrict your freedom of action. The prescription of the Upanishadas for a different occasion applies to love with great force: Treat your beloved like a guest -- always with affection and never with a sense of possession.

The quest for love
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If I am in love with you and want to graduate to loving you, where do I begin? I begin with the strong linking pin of a transcendence. I have taken the first step to go beyond myself and occupy myself with your interests and benefits, and more important, with you. I have forced other parts of my life, which have so far occupied the center stage, to take a back seat. Now I review my relationship with you and ask myself: Can it stand independent of your response, strong and invulnerable? Can it endure for ever, drawing its sustenance less from a pleasurable feeling than from a deliberate act of will? Can it survive, caring, sharing, interested and helpful, on the strength of an internal reward that enriches my life?

When I move in the direction of a relationship that can do these, I am in the quest of love I have always dreamed about. The quest is punctuated with hurts and heartbreaks, and great disillusionment. At the end the dream may not even be fulfilled. Yet the quest itself is more significant than the desolation of loveless existence. For love matters, more than all else in life.
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(1990) 

 
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