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A review by deea_bks
Love, Again by Doris Lessing
5.0
How does one review Lessing’s books so as to make justice to her genius? That I identify a lot of my thoughts in what she wrote is not a secret to me anymore, but this book simply blew me away. If the title might indicate that the story is about a romanticized love affair, well, the book is not about this. In fact, when I read the blurb, the story itself seemed a rather non-appealing one: a 65-year old woman falls in love in her old age and talks about her sorrows and tribulations. After reading it, I congratulate myself for having chosen to do so.
We would all expect that with the onset of old age, our ability to fall in love and our necessity to be loved (I mean erotical love) diminish in intensity. Lessing’s character is surprised to find out it is not really so.
Love seen as suffering… well, many books have probably treated this subject or the subject of unrequited love, but Lessing goes further and talks about how relationships with parents during childhood can mess us up and can condition our whole behavior as adults, can condition our whole understanding of what we need to do in order to be sure we deserve love of a partner in return.
Lessing talks about how differently we can love different people. It is never the same and what we like in different persons does not follow any rational pattern. I found her (friendship) relationship with Stephen very touching. The way she loved the others was interesting (she was strongly attracted to Bill, she loved Henry because he loved her and this made her like herself etc), but the way she connected with Stephen was really touching. The way she felt at ease with him from the very first moment as if she had been knowing him for years or as if he had been her best friend in another lifetime maybe, well, I’ve had that with one person a lifetime ago and it really took me by surprize. They don’t become lovers, but sharing such closeness with someone is also a form of love.
……………………………………………………………………………………………
I added below a list of quotes for myself, to read them when I feel I miss the ideas from this book. I advise you not to go through them if you want to read this book as seeing them out of context before might diminish its charm. If you feel like reading them in spite of my warning, well, you have been warned.
There seems to be a rule that what you condemn will turn up sooner or later, to be lived through.
This room was calm, usually calming, and like the other three rooms in this flat held thirty years of memories. Rooms a long time lived in can be like littered sea shores; hard to know where this or that bit of debris has come from.
When the sun shone in, the room filled with light, shadow, and moving reflections, a place of suggestions and possibilities.
But why do we assume it always means the same thing to everyone-being in love? Perhaps “little inflammations” is accurate enough for a lot of people.
When people tell you about their lives-well, the plot, they don’t tell you much about themselves.
I met this woman. She was an Indian woman. Older than I was. And it was there… we knew each other at once. You have to trust in this kind of thing. If you don’t, you are denying the best part of life.
In short, they behaved as they had to in this ancient business of the French and the English finding each other impossible, to the satisfaction of both. But perhaps each nation’s need always to find the same traits in the other imposes a style, and so it is all perpetuated.
But this place, and this group of people […] were charged with some subtle fascination, like the light that fades from a dream as you wake.
Ah, but you’re my lover, and that cancels the friend.
There are as many shades of being in love as there are graduations of colour on cards in the paint shop.
And what did he mean by saying All my love? (Her mind did inform her that she had done this a thousand years ago, finding everything she felt in a phrase or a word: one did this, when in love.)
But she wrote retrospectively about Paul: thus do we make safe stories about the raw pain of the past.
…she knew that she was housing separate blocks or associations of emotions that were contradictory to the point it seemed impossible they could live together inside one skin. Or head. Or heart.
For people are often in love, and they are usually not in love equally, or even at the same time.
There is a terrible arrogance that goes with physical attractiveness, and far from criticizing it, we even admire it.
She was determined not to raise her eyes to the balcony where she might see Bill: even the possibility he was there was enough to exert a gravitational pull down that side of her body, while her back had become a separate sensory zone.
He liked her, it was clear. Well, she liked him-banal words for mysterious processes. It became a game.
It’s good to love in a moderate degree, but it is not good to love to distraction.
The fact is, there are not so many ‘real’ relationships in a life, few love affairs.
There is a stage in love when the two stare in incredulity: how is it that this quite ordinary person is causing me so much suffering?
How little we do know about what goes on inside our nearest friends, let alone agreeable acquaintances.
Her eyes were all pupil. Drugs enlarge pupils. Like the dark. Or like love.
there is only one thing to do at the vanishing away of a wonder: put a clamp on your heart.
Yet fear or, if you like, caution did not prevent that process familiar to everyone submerged in the why of something. Clues accumulate and fall into place. You pick up a book apparently at random, and it falls open on a page where what you are thinking about is explored. You overhear a conversation: they are talking about what preoccupies you. You switch on the radio - there it is..
He was occupied deep within himself, he was busy with an inner landscape, and did not have the energy for the outside world.
By early summer Sarah’s anguish had lessened to the point that she would say it had gone. That is to say, what remained was mild low spirits of a kind she could match easily with this or that bad patch in her life, but they were as far removed from the country of grief as they were distant from happiness. She stood in a landscape like that before the sun comes up, one suffused with a quiet, flat, truthful light where people, buildings, trees, stand about waiting to become defined by shadow and sunlight. (after falling out of love)
For if she was removed from grief, she was removed too (her emotions insisted) from the intimacy which is like putting your hand into another hand, while currents of love flow between them.
But Sarah was silently telling the child: Quite soon a door will slam shut inside you because what you are feeling is unendurable. The door will stand there shut all your life: if you are lucky, it will never open, and you’ll not ever know about the landscape you inhabited-for how long? But child time is not adult time. You are living in an eternity of loneliness and grief, and it is truly a hell, because the point of hell is that there is no hope. You don’t know that the door will slam shut, you believe that this is what life is and must be: you will always be disliked, and you will have to watch her love that little creature you love so much because you think that if you love what she loves, she will love you. But one day you’ll know it doesn’t matter what you do and how hard you try, it is no use. And at that moment the door will slam and you will be free.
The point of hell is that there is no hope.
The Calamity had overwhelmed her:but could anything be absolutely bad that had led to so much new understanding?
We would all expect that with the onset of old age, our ability to fall in love and our necessity to be loved (I mean erotical love) diminish in intensity. Lessing’s character is surprised to find out it is not really so.
"But how often is shock no more than a moment of half-expected revelation?"She falls in love after 20 years of normality (and normality is defined as the lack of foolishness and irrationality one feels when falling in love). She doesn’t fall in love with just one person, but with different persons, one of whom is outrageously younger than her. She falls in love with them in different ways and as irrational as these feelings might seem, she cannot suppress them, nor the longing, and the feelings of shame she constantly has don’t diminish the intensity of the craving or the lust.
Love seen as suffering… well, many books have probably treated this subject or the subject of unrequited love, but Lessing goes further and talks about how relationships with parents during childhood can mess us up and can condition our whole behavior as adults, can condition our whole understanding of what we need to do in order to be sure we deserve love of a partner in return
Spoiler
(there is a scene she added at the end of the book with a little girl whose mom strongly dislikes her and adores her brother which I think is autobiographical and explains a lot the actions of the main character and the attitude towards her brother’s childLessing talks about how differently we can love different people. It is never the same and what we like in different persons does not follow any rational pattern. I found her (friendship) relationship with Stephen very touching. The way she loved the others was interesting (she was strongly attracted to Bill, she loved Henry because he loved her and this made her like herself etc), but the way she connected with Stephen was really touching. The way she felt at ease with him from the very first moment as if she had been knowing him for years or as if he had been her best friend in another lifetime maybe, well, I’ve had that with one person a lifetime ago and it really took me by surprize. They don’t become lovers, but sharing such closeness with someone is also a form of love.
"But they could not doubt that when they were together they were in a pleasantness, an ease, an air different from quotidian life. A charmed place where anything could be said.”But, as Lessing’s character highlights in the end, if we haven’t lived these kinds of experiences she writes about, everything Lessing writes in this book might just seem words on a page. This book might not strike any sensitive chord in our souls and might not speak to us if we haven’t experienced similar feelings in our lives. After all, when one is reading a book and resonating with it, it is because the characters are vicariously enacting moments/ideas the reader is somehow familiar with. The characters of this book spoke to me in so many different ways that I am amazed with Lessing’s sharp mind once again.
"To whom was she writing these messages like letters in bottles entrusted to the sea? No one would read them. And if someone did, the words would make sense only if this someone had experienced this pain, this grief. For as she herself looked at the words pain, grief, anguish, and so forth, they were words on a page and she had to fill them with the emotions they represented."I haven’t by far touched the rich supply of ideas of this book, nor do I present it in a complete or consistent way in this review and I seem to be unable to do this in an orderly fashion with any of Lessing’s books. This is a book I will read again, for sure, sooner rather than later.
……………………………………………………………………………………………
I added below a list of quotes for myself, to read them when I feel I miss the ideas from this book. I advise you not to go through them if you want to read this book as seeing them out of context before might diminish its charm. If you feel like reading them in spite of my warning, well, you have been warned.
There seems to be a rule that what you condemn will turn up sooner or later, to be lived through.
This room was calm, usually calming, and like the other three rooms in this flat held thirty years of memories. Rooms a long time lived in can be like littered sea shores; hard to know where this or that bit of debris has come from.
When the sun shone in, the room filled with light, shadow, and moving reflections, a place of suggestions and possibilities.
But why do we assume it always means the same thing to everyone-being in love? Perhaps “little inflammations” is accurate enough for a lot of people.
When people tell you about their lives-well, the plot, they don’t tell you much about themselves.
I met this woman. She was an Indian woman. Older than I was. And it was there… we knew each other at once. You have to trust in this kind of thing. If you don’t, you are denying the best part of life.
In short, they behaved as they had to in this ancient business of the French and the English finding each other impossible, to the satisfaction of both. But perhaps each nation’s need always to find the same traits in the other imposes a style, and so it is all perpetuated.
But this place, and this group of people […] were charged with some subtle fascination, like the light that fades from a dream as you wake.
Ah, but you’re my lover, and that cancels the friend.
There are as many shades of being in love as there are graduations of colour on cards in the paint shop.
And what did he mean by saying All my love? (Her mind did inform her that she had done this a thousand years ago, finding everything she felt in a phrase or a word: one did this, when in love.)
But she wrote retrospectively about Paul: thus do we make safe stories about the raw pain of the past.
…she knew that she was housing separate blocks or associations of emotions that were contradictory to the point it seemed impossible they could live together inside one skin. Or head. Or heart.
For people are often in love, and they are usually not in love equally, or even at the same time.
There is a terrible arrogance that goes with physical attractiveness, and far from criticizing it, we even admire it.
She was determined not to raise her eyes to the balcony where she might see Bill: even the possibility he was there was enough to exert a gravitational pull down that side of her body, while her back had become a separate sensory zone.
He liked her, it was clear. Well, she liked him-banal words for mysterious processes. It became a game.
It’s good to love in a moderate degree, but it is not good to love to distraction.
The fact is, there are not so many ‘real’ relationships in a life, few love affairs.
There is a stage in love when the two stare in incredulity: how is it that this quite ordinary person is causing me so much suffering?
How little we do know about what goes on inside our nearest friends, let alone agreeable acquaintances.
Her eyes were all pupil. Drugs enlarge pupils. Like the dark. Or like love.
there is only one thing to do at the vanishing away of a wonder: put a clamp on your heart.
Yet fear or, if you like, caution did not prevent that process familiar to everyone submerged in the why of something. Clues accumulate and fall into place. You pick up a book apparently at random, and it falls open on a page where what you are thinking about is explored. You overhear a conversation: they are talking about what preoccupies you. You switch on the radio - there it is..
He was occupied deep within himself, he was busy with an inner landscape, and did not have the energy for the outside world.
By early summer Sarah’s anguish had lessened to the point that she would say it had gone. That is to say, what remained was mild low spirits of a kind she could match easily with this or that bad patch in her life, but they were as far removed from the country of grief as they were distant from happiness. She stood in a landscape like that before the sun comes up, one suffused with a quiet, flat, truthful light where people, buildings, trees, stand about waiting to become defined by shadow and sunlight. (after falling out of love)
For if she was removed from grief, she was removed too (her emotions insisted) from the intimacy which is like putting your hand into another hand, while currents of love flow between them.
But Sarah was silently telling the child: Quite soon a door will slam shut inside you because what you are feeling is unendurable. The door will stand there shut all your life: if you are lucky, it will never open, and you’ll not ever know about the landscape you inhabited-for how long? But child time is not adult time. You are living in an eternity of loneliness and grief, and it is truly a hell, because the point of hell is that there is no hope. You don’t know that the door will slam shut, you believe that this is what life is and must be: you will always be disliked, and you will have to watch her love that little creature you love so much because you think that if you love what she loves, she will love you. But one day you’ll know it doesn’t matter what you do and how hard you try, it is no use. And at that moment the door will slam and you will be free.
The point of hell is that there is no hope.
The Calamity had overwhelmed her:but could anything be absolutely bad that had led to so much new understanding?