Essays In Love

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IN Essays in love, De Botton wrote about the philosophy of love in the form of a fiction. Through the ordinary story of two young people, who met on an airplane from Paris to London and fell in love soon after, De Botton went into extraordinary depth in analysing the nuances, the emotional swings, the sweet and sour we all identify in a relationship. Sunday Times Rich List". Thesundaytimes.co.uk. 1999. Archived from the original on 31 December 2010 . Retrieved 7 February 2014. , 1999 Sunday Times Rich List now behind a paywall Oh god, what a slimy, patronising, pseudo-intellectual “romantic” De Botton was. The fact this book was published at all, let alone accoladed, says everything about how society dismisses the immature, condescending treatment of women by men. Philosopher king: Alain de Botton finds glamour and drama in the world". The Independent. 27 March 2009 . Retrieved 18 February 2023.

But the plot is not the whole story by any means. The chapters have headings like ‘Romantic Fatalism’, ‘Romantic Terrorism’, ‘Intermittences of the Heart’. The book is a psycho-philosophical treatise on love, the paragraphs numbered and ironically illustrated with diagrams; the first one is a mathematical calculation of the chances of Chloe and the narrator being seated side by side on the plane, the last a graph of her orgasmic contractions. There are quotations from and references to Plato, Kant, John Stuart Mill, Groucho Marx, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, Pascal, La Rochefoucauld, Stendhal, Goethe, Freud, Barthes, and finally Dr Peggy Nearly, a Californian psychoanalyst whose do-it-yourself manual, The Bleeding Heart, was published in 1987. Botton invents a consultation between Dr Nearly and Madame Bovary in which the good doctor urges Flaubert’s heroine to choose more suitable lovers and to make an effort to look after yourself, to go over your childhood, then perhaps you’ll learn that you don’t deserve all this pain. It’s only because you grew up in a dysfunctional family. Why did he want to write about work? "Partly I think as a kind of intellectual challenge because I think that work doesn't appear in books as much as it should, or in novels anyway - people fall in love and have sex and that's all they ever do, they never go to the office. Or they're a writer or a psychoanalyst or something. And in television dramas, they're always doctors or lawyers - there's quite a standard vision of what work is. But work is so much more varied than that. I think my book is in praise of the enormous ingenuity that human beings bring to the job of being busy."

About the author

Flaccid fallacies". guardian. London, UK. 25 March 2000. Archived from the original on 23 April 2009 . Retrieved 20 March 2009. De Botton's new book consists of obvious, hopeless or contradictory advice culled from great thinkers on how to overcome certain problems of existence.

A central solution to these patterns is to normalize a new and more accurate picture of emotional functioning: to make it clear just how predictable it is to be in need of reassurance, and at the same time, how understandable it is to be reluctant to reveal one’s dependence. We should create room for regular moments, perhaps as often as every few hours, when we can feel unembarrassed and legitimate about asking for confirmation. “I really need you. Do you still want me?” should be the most normal of enquiries.The book maybe a difficult read for many but hopefully it can help people to better understand the complex forces at work in relationships. If two people in love, who both desperately want a relationship to work, but can't and, in fact, end up hurting each other and destroying the relationship; what hope is there for international diplomacy? De Botton used to write articles for several English newspapers and from 1998 to 2000 wrote a regular column for The Independent on Sunday. Lecturing, television and radio [ edit ] There are charts and pictures and diagrams, and some of it is too cute and forced, but overall it is indeed a clever little book. And it's fun. And almost too quotable. I don't rush to mark up many of my books, but this one had me struggling to find a pen multiple times.