February 6, 2007

Dear Colleague:

    How do I know I am in love? Tolstoy is the authority I consulted. When he was thirteen or fourteen, Tolstoy thought he was in love. But he retracted the thought later because the object of his love was a fat chambermaid. Surely that could not be love, he argued. It was pure lust—the voluptuousness of plunging into a mountain of warm female flesh. Astonishingly, Tolstoy went on to say that he had never been in love with women. He had, however, very often been in love with men. "My first love was the two Pushkins, then the second—Seburov, then the third Zybin and Dyakov, the fourth Oblonsky, Blosfield, Islavin, then Gautier and many others." By love, Tolstoy apparently never thought of anything sexual. Not sexual, yet intense. The symptom, for Tolstoy, was "the fear of offending or not pleasing the object of one's love; simply fear." Consider Gautier. "Although I had absolutely no relation with him except for buying books, I used to be thrown into a fever when he entered the room." As for Islavin, "My love for Islavin spoilt the whole eight months of my life in Petersburg for me. Although not consciously, I never bothered about anything else except how to please him" (Tolstoy's Diaries, ed. & transl. by R. F. Christian, Harper Collins, 1994, p. 32).

    To be in love is to have this overwhelming desire to please. That's Tolstoy's view. But he was not alone. A man of like temperament was the Welsh writer John Cowper Powys. To show how far he could go to please another, Powys wrote: "I can recall how, as I lingered with my friends one evening over our meal, in that Corpus dining-hall under the richly escutcheoned windows, feeling a wave of spontaneous warmth towards one of the most striking and noble looking of these young men; and in my anxiety lest he should break up this felicitous moment--for he had begun displaying signs of restlessness—I offered to rush off to his rooms and fetch anything on earth he was in need of. 'My tooth-pick!' he cried savagely; and I was already on my feet, and it had to be explained to me by someone else that he was only jesting. On my soul, I was on my feet, ready to fetch that chap's tooth-pick..." (Autobiography, Colgate University Press, 1994, pp. 196-197).

    Tolstoy was a "manly man," as the governor of California might say. Powys was never known to be effeminate. Yet both had more than a touch of the feminine in them. For all the changes in the world, women today are still more likely to try to please men than men women. Tolstoy meant "please" in a special sense, that special sense being the desire to get inside the beloved's world, find out what he or she likes, and then consider it the greatest pleasure and the highest privilege to satisfy it. Most men are far too egotistical to want to do that; and it might also be that they lack that kind of sympathetic imagination. Women do have that kind of imagination. Why? Well, throughout the ages and even now they have primary responsibility for raising babies and very young children. To do so well, they must constantly make the effort to enter the very different worlds of the inarticulate young. What is mother love but that ability to lose herself in her child's world, improve it in every way she can, and be rewarded by  a contented gurgle or a dimpled smile? How many of us men have fallen in love in Tolstoy's sense? Precious few, I believe. Our idea of love, at best, is to do for her what we think she would or should like.

Best wishes,

Yi-Fu