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Essays In Love

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It is one of the ironies of love that it is easiest confidently to seduce those to whom we are least attracted. It may be a sign that two people have stopped loving one another (or at least stopped wishing to make the effort that constitutes ninety per cent of love) when they are no longer able to spin differences into jokes. Her lie was symptomatic of a certain pride she took in mocking the romantic, in being unsentimental, matter-of-fact, stoic; yet at heart she was the opposite: idealistic, dreamy, giving, and deeply attached to everything she liked verbally to dismiss as "mushy. And it feels like the only option IS to kill yourself and be done with it and then think about how guilt-wrecked the other party will be for causing you to go to such measures. The book's success has much to do with its beautifully modeled sentences, its wry humor, its unwavering deadpan respect for its reader's intelligence.

I’d first discovered its possibilities when reading Montaigne’s Essays, where the author takes the reader around some highly thought-provoking philosophical ideas, in a tome that is intimate, digressive and charming. We can only be somewhat shocked-how can they be as wonderful as we had hoped when they have the bad taste to approve of someone like us? If I could be that beacon of hope for someone, I hope that I won’t be too caught up in whether my stomach is too big or that I don’t have a six-pack. I felt like a dandelion releasing hundreds of spores into the air - and not knowing if any of them would get through.The Jesus complex was nothing more than a self-defence mechanism, I had not wanted Chloe to leave me, I had loved her more than I had ever loved a woman, but now that she had flown to California, my way of accepting the unbearable loss was to reinvent how valuable she had been in the first place. But if self-love gains the upper hand, both partners may accept that seeing their love reciprocated is not proof of how low the beloved is, but of how lovable they have themselves turned out to be. I would have benefitted SO much from knowing about how love works and that so many of the things I felt weren’t abnormal at all (hell no am I talking to anyone about that stuff). I mean, prior to this book, I thought indulging in such thoughts was a surefire way of diagnosing an unhappy relationship.

Related Tagged Alain de Botton, book reviews, books, essays, I kind of wanted there NOT to be a happy ending because not all relationships work out! And I’m pretty damn certain that all of us could do with hearing how much we are loved simply for being ourselves. I start with self-hatred and blame myself for something not working out–either not being attractive enough or smart enough or just enough in any capacity of the word.This means that the version of me that my school teachers know is VERY different from what my family knows which is different to what my university friends know and so on and so forth. The oasis complex is never a complete delusion: the man in the desert does see something on the horizon. This is the kind of book that we should have read in PSHE rather than watching pointless videos about puberty. Imagine, of all impossible things, a young British Woody Allen with the benefit of a classical education and you have the nameless and exquisitely erudite narrator of Essays in Love.

So, to have it written that even the best relationships don’t have that element of complete vulnerability was heartening. I wonder whether De Botton would have written a very different book today, at the age of 40, than when this was written in his early 20's? I’m also very good at nursing grudges so that and my disappointed idealism are a devastating combination. I just wanted something a bit happier, this is maybe a more truthful look at love, more realistic, less romantic.There’s an essay on how uncomfortable it can be to disagree with a lover’s taste in shoes and a lengthy discussion about the role of guilt in love. This book is for those readers wanting to be instantly immersed in the story and to learn or have someone share some universal experiences we al have in relationships. We fall in love hoping we won't find in another what we know is in ourselves, all the cowardice, weakness, laziness, dishonesty, compromise, and stupidity.

I’ll admit that I’ve thought a lot about death but this book is meant to be a general sort of book about love–at least, that was my understanding. I am more than aware of the numerous red flags that stick out of my back and I’m certain there are more that I’m not even conscious of. It is incredible deep and insightful, and impossible not to see some of yourself and your relationships in their story.I think my problem with this book was my expectation; I thought it would be thoughtful essays on the subject of love. False Notes” and “ Love or Liberalism” for instance, symbolises a choice also in the political arena.

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