Latest in the "what is love?" series
Jan. 1st, 2003 11:49 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cosmolinguistLet me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove.
Oh no! It is an ever-fixèd mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken.
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose worth's unknown, though his height be taken.
Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle's compass come.
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out, even to the edge of doom.
If this be error, and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.
Shakespeare, of course.
I was never a "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day" kind of girl. But I can dig this constancy of love, I like that. I find it cooler that he can say his mistress's eyes are nothing like ths sun and she's not poetic at all but he loves her anyway.
I memorized this sonnet in high school. Not because I had to--I didn't even read it in school--just because I liked it. (I typed it from what I remember, so if it's not perfect, too bad.) And I caught myself thinking of it tonight. Especially "Love is not love /Which alters when it alteration finds..." That's what we call a negative definition: saying what something is not.
Perhaps the thought was occasioned by the movie I was watching, The Cider House Rules.
In it, Tobey Maguire and Charlize Theron fall in love while her boy is off in World War II, and so they've set themselves up for trouble. When it inevitably arrives, she tells the future Spider-Man she still loves him. It's not good enough, of course, and since things end how we all know they're going to, why bother saying she loves him? Why bother worrying about this extraneous love?
Well, because it's there, of course. Just because you know (or think you know, which in this case is the same thing) that you belong with someone and you love them and you'll end up with them, that doesn't mean you can't love anybody else. That's what I say.
"Doesn't it?" Will Shakespeare would ask me. "Love is not love which alters when it alteration finds."
So did Charlize doom herself to a loveless existence by going after Tobey Maguire ("I'm bad at being alone," she said...something I fear I can relate to), wrecking her first love, and then going back to that guy, wrecking what she had with Tobey? Alterations all over the place. Or did she prove that love is that which does not alter by sticking with her original guy?
Those who are kind would opt for the second view, I think. But either way it's bad if you're Tobey Maguire.
No wonder I didn't pay as much attention to the end of the movie as I had up to that point.
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove.
Oh no! It is an ever-fixèd mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken.
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose worth's unknown, though his height be taken.
Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle's compass come.
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out, even to the edge of doom.
If this be error, and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.
Shakespeare, of course.
I was never a "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day" kind of girl. But I can dig this constancy of love, I like that. I find it cooler that he can say his mistress's eyes are nothing like ths sun and she's not poetic at all but he loves her anyway.
I memorized this sonnet in high school. Not because I had to--I didn't even read it in school--just because I liked it. (I typed it from what I remember, so if it's not perfect, too bad.) And I caught myself thinking of it tonight. Especially "Love is not love /Which alters when it alteration finds..." That's what we call a negative definition: saying what something is not.
Perhaps the thought was occasioned by the movie I was watching, The Cider House Rules.
In it, Tobey Maguire and Charlize Theron fall in love while her boy is off in World War II, and so they've set themselves up for trouble. When it inevitably arrives, she tells the future Spider-Man she still loves him. It's not good enough, of course, and since things end how we all know they're going to, why bother saying she loves him? Why bother worrying about this extraneous love?
Well, because it's there, of course. Just because you know (or think you know, which in this case is the same thing) that you belong with someone and you love them and you'll end up with them, that doesn't mean you can't love anybody else. That's what I say.
"Doesn't it?" Will Shakespeare would ask me. "Love is not love which alters when it alteration finds."
So did Charlize doom herself to a loveless existence by going after Tobey Maguire ("I'm bad at being alone," she said...something I fear I can relate to), wrecking her first love, and then going back to that guy, wrecking what she had with Tobey? Alterations all over the place. Or did she prove that love is that which does not alter by sticking with her original guy?
Those who are kind would opt for the second view, I think. But either way it's bad if you're Tobey Maguire.
No wonder I didn't pay as much attention to the end of the movie as I had up to that point.
(no subject)
Date: 2003-01-01 10:41 pm (UTC)You seem to have a good view of love, I mean, it makes sense AND is achievable, at least to a point, for most people.
-SJ
(no subject)
Date: 2003-01-01 10:43 pm (UTC)I guess I would be happy if I achieved such love...