Love, Life, and Literature.

On Saturday, September 5th, I had the unforgettable pleasure of marrying my best friend, Carly.

Amidst a global pandemic, two venue changes, and the restrictions on social gatherings, Carly and I followed our hearts and decided not to postpone our big day.

We did, however, have to make it much smaller than we had initially planned, which was both a blessing and a curse. We missed so many people that day, and we are both aware and thankful that everyone understands how difficult that decision was for us.

To us, our wedding day was an attempt to maintain some form of normalcy in this time of confusion and uncertainty. Who knows how long Covid-19 will continue to linger without a vaccine? How long will these restrictions be in place? Would waiting a year have made a difference? These were the questions we asked ourselves, and ultimately encouraged us to go ahead with our day.

Regina also happened to be boasting a stretch of zero positive cases and schools were opening that week, so that helped affirm our decision. When the day arrived, Nature too nodded in our favour by breaking her own stretch of chilly fall-like days by providing us with one final picturesque, summer afternoon.

The entire day was perfect.

But i’ll try and stick with the theme of this blog and share some of my favourite quotes and bits of wisdom about love and marriage that I’ve found. Trust me, when you’ve been married as long as I have, you can’t help but feel like an authority on the subject.

As I said in my vows, and I’ll repeat here, Carly has given me one of the most special gifts that any lover of literature could ask for; a sort of key to decipher the abstraction and meaning that plays beneath the surface of these authors words when they write about love.

Because of Carly, their words unravel as I replace the subjects of their poetry with her image. When I do, I feel like I’m able to fall in love with her all over again through someone else’s eyes.

One such set of eyes belongs to a character in Tolstoy’s novel, War and Peace, who so adequately captures my spirit more so than any other person, fiction or not, that I have ever encountered.

Pierre Bezukhov is also regarded by many to be a reflection of Tolstoy himself. And I don’t know whether my attachment to Pierre is due to the ability of a master to manipulated his reader with sentiments and narratives into thinking and feeling a certain way, or if mine and Pierre’s characters are genuinely similar.

Regardless, it would be naive and selfish of me to assume Pierre and his didactic marriage with his wife Natasha cannot be gainfully emulated and absorbed by those who find no similarities to the protagonist.

“After seven years of married life, Pierre felt a joyful, firm consciousness that he was not a bad man, and he felt it because he saw himself reflected in his wife. In himself he felt all the good and the bad mixed together and obscuring each other. But only what was truly good was reflected in his wife; all that was not entirely good was rejected. And this reflection came not by way of logical thinking, but otherwise – as a mysterious, unmeditated reflection.”

Leo Tolstoy

Tolstoy continues below with the theme of the absence of logic and reason in regards to love. Relationships can be messy things and the emotions that drive them are often irrational. But that is what makes them so special. It’s the deep, meaningful prejudice in the favour of another person, which allows us to think with our hearts instead of our minds, that makes love so powerful.

“Natasha, left alone with her husband, also talked as only a wife and husband can talk, that is, grasping thoughts and conveying them to each other with extraordinary clarity and quickness, in a way contrary to all the rules of logic, without recourse to opinions, conclusions, and deductions, but in a totally special way. . . As everything in a dream is false, senseless, and contradictory, except for the feeling that guides the dream, so is this sort of communication, contrary to all the laws of reason, it was not the words that were consistent and clear, but only the feelings that guided them.”

Leo Tolstoy

This last quote reminds me of Shakespeare. It seems to me that to be a great writer all one needs to do is extrapolate on the wisdom inherent in so many of his profound and pithy words.

“To hear with one’s eyes belongs to love’s rare wit.”

Shakespeare

Pierre is a fascinating character who spends the entire novel searching for some kind of meaning in his life. In the beginning of the book, he inherits a large fortune from his father and he enters society as a desirable but awkward, immature man governed primarily by emotion and carnal pleasures.

We follow him as he fights a duel, gets into politics, marries a woman who only wants his money, thinks he is destined to assassinate Napoleon, joins the Freemasons, and gets captured by the French Army, all the while attempting to make sense of everything happening around him. The following quote might be a bit off topic, but it’s indicative of Pierre’s search for meaning and his subsequent realizations.

“They say sufferings are our misfortunes. But if I was asked if I’d stay as I was before I was taken prisoner or go through it all again, I’d say for god’s sake let me be a prisoner again. When our lives are knocked off course we imagine everything in them is lost. It is only the start of something new and good. As long as there is life there is happiness. There is a great deal, a great deal still to come.

Leo Tolstoy

At the end of the novel, Pierre learns to appreciate the joy of living and that true happiness comes from within. The answers to his spiritual and moral questions are eventually revealed to him through his marriage to Natasha and the children they have together. He learns that:

“The questions of how to get as much pleasure as possible from a dinner, did not exist then, as they do not exist now, for people whom the purpose of a dinner is nourishment and the purpose of marriage is family.”

Leo Tolstoy

This idea of family is something another favourite author of mine has inspired in me. This is from Kurt Vonnegut:

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“OK, now let’s have some fun. Let’s talk about sex. Let’s talk about women. Freud said he didn’t know what women wanted. I know what women want. They want a whole lot of people to talk to. What do they want to talk about? They want to talk about everything.

What do men want? They want a lot of pals, and they wish people wouldn’t get so mad at them.

Why are so many people getting divorced today? It’s because most of us don’t have extended families anymore. It used to be that when a man and a woman got married, the bride got a lot more people to talk to about everything. The groom got a lot more pals to tell dumb jokes to.

A few Americans, but very few, still have extended families. The Navahos. The Kennedys.

But most of us, if we get married nowadays, are just one more person for the other person. The groom gets one more pal, but it’s a woman. The woman gets one more person to talk to about everything, but it’s a man.

When a couple has an argument, they may think it’s about money or power or sex, or how to raise the kids, or whatever. What they’re really saying to each other, though, without realizing it, is this:
“You are not enough people!”

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In a fashion that only Vonnegut could have written, he reminds us of the importance of family. And not just family, but of friends.

There is the old axiom: “It takes a village to raise a child.” I think long lasting marriages follow the same logic.

Every single person that Carly and I know has, in some way or another, provided us with life’s unique variety of happiness. Through support, companionship, friendship, or just a pal to tell dumb jokes to, they have been the foundations that successful relationships are built upon.

Our family and friends have always been there to provide us with helping hands, thoughtful discussions, and sound advice.

They’ve gifted our relationship with the enriched soil that continues to nourish us with growth and inspires our hopeful intention of returning our warm affection in similar duties.

We want to thank everyone for being a perfectly adequate amount of people.

“With his heart overflowing with love Pierre loved people for no reason at all, and then had no trouble discovering many a sound reason that made them worth loving”

Leo Tolstoy

The next handful of quotes are some that Carly and I had written on our tables at our wedding reception.

“I love her, and that’s the beginning and end of everything.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald

This quote is especially meaningful to me because it links Stoic philosophy to one of my favourite authors of all time. It reminds me that even if you were to lose everything, there will always be something that life can never take away from you: Your ability to love and be loved.

 “It is a curious thought, but it is only when you see people looking ridiculous that you realize just how much you love them. “

Agatha Christie

There is something about being vulnerable that brings out our most sincere manifestations of love. Vulnerability is a gateway to understanding and honesty. Too often we lie to ourselves and our partners about how we really feel which will only push us further apart.

“To get the full value of a joy, you must have someone to divide it with.”

Mark Twain

Joy is amplified when its divided, whereas suffering is diminished when its shared. And because of that, there is nothing painful that you can ever experience that won’t be made less so by the presence of someone you love.

“What do we live for, if it is not to make life less difficult for each other?”

George Eliot

Thanks for reading, and as usual, here’s Emerson.

 “Love is a perfume you cannot pour onto others without getting a few drops on yourself. “ 

Ralph Waldo Emerson