Essays In Love

Product Information

I’d first discovered its possibilities when reading Montaigne’s Essays, where the author takes the reader around some highly thought-provoking philosophical ideas, in a tome that is intimate, digressive and charming.

And if you start off hating them, there's always the chance you'll end up thinking they're all right. For my part, I know I’d probably succumb to a stereotype threat and if for some bizarre reason all the people I have known in my life were in a room together, I would probably beg the ground to swallow me whole because I would be switching from mask to mask in a matter of microseconds.When you realise that you’re starting to move on, I think it can be a little sad that this person doesn’t have as strong an effect on you anymore. Alain de Botton has this uncanny ability to spit out everything that my brain is thinking in beautiful and candid writing minus any fluff. The narrator is distraught and contemplates suicide, then thinks that Chloe just didn’t get him and that he will always be the outsider. Then I find reasons to hate that person and think about how they failed to understand me, this super spEciAl and diFfeReNT person. De Botton discusses the role of beauty in a relationship and how we tend to see our lovers as beautiful even if others may not necessarily agree.

As in a novel, there are characters and realistic settings, but these are blended in with a host of more abstract ideas. I think when relationships don’t turn out the way you want them to, it’s so easy to go back into your shell and wallow. The Jesus complex was nothing more than a self-defence mechanism, I had not wanted Chloe to leave me, I had loved her more than I had ever loved a woman, but now that she had flown to California, my way of accepting the unbearable loss was to reinvent how valuable she had been in the first place.There’s less of a chance to make a fool of yourself (or at least be aware of how foolish you sound) because you didn’t intend on furthering that relationship anyway. The sulker is a complicated creature, giving off messages of deep ambivalence, crying out for help and attention, while at the same time rejecting it should it be offered, wanting to be understood without needing to speak. The most attractive are not those who allow us to kiss them at once [we soon feel ungrateful] or those who never allow us to kiss them [we soon forget them], but those who coyly lead us between the two extremes. I wonder whether De Botton would have written a very different book today, at the age of 40, than when this was written in his early 20's? I start with self-hatred and blame myself for something not working out–either not being attractive enough or smart enough or just enough in any capacity of the word.