Parody of Love
By Derwin Pereira
A man once published a long and winding poem entitled “Love is enough”. A university student gave it perhaps the shortest review ever: “It is not”. The astringency at the heart of that scathing review points to a certain quality of love: its tendency to be parodied. From protestations – “I shall love you forever”, which vanish in five summers of marriage – to advertising which fetishises perishable commodities as eternal expressions of true belonging, love often seems to exist as a parody of itself. At my age, the question that perplexes me is: “Is love worth it, then?”
My answer: “Yes, and no.” “Yes” if you believe that love completes you by uniting your existence with that of a person who is worthy of your love. To be worthy means nothing more (and nothing less) than that person looking at you, and only you, for self-completion. Love is a solution to loneliness that leads you to befriend not only your partner or spouse but all loveless creatures on Earth eventually. Sexual love is only a small part of the corpus of love. At its fullest, love embraces the human place in the divine scheme of things. It is spiritual.
That was my “yes” answer. My “no” answer has to do with people who trivialise love by equating it with lust, sex, economic gratification – or, at the opposite end of the scale, with negating their place in the world by giving it up all to chase eternity here and now. Love is not worth it if it includes that kind of person. Selfishness and selflessness are equally destructive of love. Do not love a person who has nothing to offer you but things. Do not love a person who has nothing to give you but his or her absence.
What about me? For me, love is not enough. But nothing is enough without love. Nothing.
