January 16, 2005

• Omnia Vincit Amor

  
  

  Love Conquers All.  We think that's a romantic triumphant phrase.  Or else we cynically believe that it isn't true.  But I ran across a passage in a book I've been reading that has given me an entirely different way of looking at the phrase.  I'm so tempted to copy that passage here because it's beautifully written but ... okay, I'll type part of it ... hang on while I grab the book ...

  
  

  "Love Conquers All
     In seventh grade, at a small souvenir stand in New York, I bought a silver bracelet with that inscription for a girl named Jenny Harlow.  I thought it was, in one stroke, a portrait of the young man she wanted to date: cosmopolitan, with its Manhatten pedigree; romantic with it's poetic-sounding motto; and classy, with it's understated shine.  I left the bracelet in Jenny's locker on Valentine's Day, then waited all day long for a response, thinking she was sure to know who'd left it.
     Cosmopolitan, romantic, and classy, unfortunately, didn't form a trail of breadcrumbs leading directly back to me.  An eighth grader named Julius Murphy must've had that combination of virtues in much greater supply than I did, because it was Julius who got a kiss from Jenny Harlow at the end of the day, while I was left with nothing but a dark suspicion that the family vacation in New York had been for naught.
     The whole experience. like so much of childhood, was built on misunderstanding.  It woudn't occur to me until much later that the bracelet wasn't made in New York, any more than it was made of silver.  But that very Valentine's night, my father explained the particular misinterpretation he found most telling, which was that the poetic-sounding motto wasn't quite as romantic as Julius, Jenny, and I thought. 
     "You may have gotten the wrong impression from Chaucer," he began, with the smile of paternal wisdom.  "There's more to 'love conquers all' than just the Prioress's brooch."
     I sensed that this was going to be a lot like the conversation we'd had about babies and storks a few years before: well intentioned, but based on a serious misunderstanding about what I'd been learning in school.
     A long explanation followed, about Virgil's tenth eclogue and omnia vincit amor, with digressions about Sithonian snows and Ethiopian sheep, all of which mattered a lot less to me than why Jenny Harlow didn't think I was romantic, and why I'd found such a useless way of blowing twelve dollars.  If love conquered all, I decided, then love had never met Julius Murphy. 
     But my father was a wise man in his way, and when he saw he wasn't getting through to me, he opened a book and showed me a picture that made his point for him. 

  
  

  

  
  

     "Agostino Carracci made this engraving, called "Love Conquers All," he said, "What do you see?"
     On the right side of the picture were two naked women.  On the left side a baby boy was beating up a much larger and more muscular satyr.
     "I don't know," I said, unsure which side of the picture I was supposed to be learning from."
     "That," my father said, pointing to the boy, "is Love."
     He let it sink in.
     "He's not supposed to be on your side.  You fight with him; you try to undo what he does to others.  But he's too powerful.  No matter how much we suffer, Virgil says, our hardships cannot move him."

  
  

  ...This world is a Jenny Harlow, I think; we're all just fishermen telling stories about the one that got away.  But to this day, I'm not sure how Chaucer's Prioress interpreted Virgil, or now Virgil interpreted love.  All that stays with me is the picture my father showed me, the part he never said a word about, where the two naked women are watching Love bully the satyr.  I've always wondered why Carracci put two women in that engraving when he only needed one.  Somewhere in that is the moral I took from the story: in the geometry of love, everything is triangular.  For every Tom and Jenny, there is a Julius; for every Katie and Tom there is a Francesco Colonna; and the tongue of desire is forked, kissing two but loving one.  Love draws lines between us like an astronomer plotting a constellation from stars, joining points into patterns that have no basis in nature.  The butt of every triangle is the heart of another, until the roof of reality is a tessellation of love affairs.  Taken together, they have the pattern of netting; and behind them I think, is Love.  Love is the only perfect fisherman, the one who casts the broadest net, which no fish can escape.  His reward is to sit alone in the tavern of life, forever a boy among men, hoping someday to tell stories about the one that got away."

  
  

  from The Rule of Four a novel by Ian Caldwell and Dustin Thomason

  
  

  So what do YOU think?  Is this the nature of Love?  I have thoughts on the subject that I'll be coming back to share over the next several days.  Please, pull up a chair, have a cup of tea, and join me in the discussion. 

  • 10:24 am
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