So take me and break me…

     Today in 17th and 18th Century Dramatic Lit we read Tony Kushner’s adaptation of Pierre corneille’s The Theatrical Illusion, retitled simply The Illusion.  For anyone who enjoys surprises, read one or both of these. 

     I want to adress one passage in particular.  It struck me because it is a father speaking to his daughter and his words are so utterly eviscerating that I could not pass up the opportunity to share…

GERONTE: Love, love, what does love mean?
Nothing!  Anything can be called love,
Any ugly emotion-Love, that illusion,
That hydra-headed gargoyle into whose foul maw
Everyone tumbles, giddily, each
With the same insipid look
Of sheeplike expectation.
Love, that sarcophagus,
Love that disease
That demonic, black misery
That catastrophe. love.-Do I love you?
Oh yes.  My daughter.  Oh yes I do,
But not like your pauper does, tender and moist,
Not with sweet wet kisses
Tasting faintly of decay…
I love you Isabelle,
With a heart of ice, drained and dry,
Bred of denial, restraint, and control,
A love whose flesh has been boiled off-
A clean cold hard white bonelike love.
I am the Law.  Come shiver in my arms.
No? You prefer, of course, your paramour,
His lawless extravagance, his oily heat.

     Wow…is that a burn or what?  This is one angry father and his words evoke a powerful sorrow in me for this daughter.  She disobeyed him, fell for a poor servant rather than the man he had chosen for her.  And this is what he calls love for her.  Love like poison….love like…well honestly love like hatred.  Such intense and awe-inspiring emotion seems hardly possible in these apathetic days where to make a strong statement is really to stand out.  I want to make a strong statement, to believe in something to FEEL something so strongly that the words are like acid or honey when they bubble up inside me.  Loving passionately is eaasier to fake than hatred…because words like this cannot emerge from a hateless heart.

     I’m not saying I want to hate…but at the same time I’ve never hated anyone or anything.  Consumption is a fear when it comes to any strong emotion.  If I could I would actually love this passionately, but the saying "once burned, twice shy" seems suddenly more true than ever.

     To anyone who has ever lost their first love…could you ever love the same again?  Could you throw caution to the wind, caution built on that first break, and just love freely and without holding back?  Or is there always that little bit of reservation…

     When we love the first time, we don’t know any better and so we toss our hearts onto the funeral pyre without ever looking twice…and it gets eaten away and returned as ash.  The new heart that grows, grows slowly, built on the impressions of the first.  Can the second heart ever be as big as the first?  Can it ever be so wreckless as passionate?

     I wonder what to expect.