Читать книгу Enjoy, Comprehend, Love. Entering the Spaces of Conscious Love - Yury Tomin - Страница 9

Stendhal is often noted as one of the classifiers of various types of love. In fact, his main discovery is the identification of seven stages or periods in the dynamics of the development of love. Regarding the four types of Stendhal’s love (love-passion, love-attraction, love-lust, love-vanity) he himself says that “it is quite possible to admit eight or ten varieties of it. <…> But differences in the nomenclature do not change anything in further reasoning.” Nevertheless, it should be noted that in this discordant classification there are two vivid opposites: love-passion as a manifestation of spontaneous love, irresistibly involving in its irrepressible cycle of passions, and love-attraction as an expression of formal reasonable love.

Love-attraction, where the formats of a love connection are set by the norms and rules prevailing in a certain social stratum, and its inevitable entourage is known in advance to both parties of the relationship, where there is nothing unforeseen for a “person of good origin,” may be “more elegant than true love.” However, it has one fatal flaw – this is “poor love.”

Stendhal clearly gives preference to love-passion and, despite its unforeseen and mysterious nature, as a result of a purposeful search for “some general law to establish various stages of love,” he discovers the regular phases of its ascent, and reveals the deep processes taking place at these stages.

One of the practical consequences of his undertaken “detailed and careful description of all the feelings that make up the passion called love” Stendhal considered the possibility of healing from love.

Let’s take a closer look at the seven periods of true love according to Stendhal.

1. Admiration.

Fixation of attention occurs. It focuses on an attractive object, and it is not just an attractive object, but a perfect image. There is an attractive opportunity to get closer to the object of admiration.

2. Imagination.

A person thinks: “What a pleasure to kiss her, to receive a kiss from her!” etc. Fantasies of rapprochement flourish. The imagination paints colorful pictures of a new passionately desired state – intimacy with the object of love.

3. Hope.

Fantasy ignites emotions and permeates the body. Signs of passion can no longer be hidden. Naked – they are defenseless, and nevertheless, there is no point in suppressing or hiding them, but one has only to hope that they will be noticed and reciprocated. At this stage, one of the fatal forks of love arises.

Stendhal is convinced: “In order to get the greatest possible physical pleasure, a woman should give herself at this very moment.” But the flip side of this medal of pleasure is that if a woman surrenders too quickly, then long-term love is unlikely, since the “second crystallization” does not occur. This pattern of Stendhal coincides with the popular wisdom, which recommends that a girl not jump too quickly into bed, but wait until love matures in a man. In turn, two hundred years later, neuroscientists also found, to their surprise, confirmation of this maxim as a result of studies on the concentration of attachment hormones produced in the brain of a man in love.

4. Love germinates.

If the hope was not in vain and met a reciprocal feeling, then it becomes love. It cannot be confused with anything – it is an insatiable pleasure from the closeness of a loved one, felt by all senses.

5. The first crystallization begins.

Crystallization is Stendhal’s chosen metaphorical term for the “special activity of the mind” that connects all the pleasures experienced by lovers, as well as the beauty and perfection of the world, with the virtues of the love object (regardless of whether they are real or imagined). As Stendhal says: “Everything beautiful and high in the world comes into the beauty of a loved one.”

The very nature of pleasure works for crystallization. If you ask yourself how you can increase, enhance the pleasures of a specific object of love you already have, then, following Stendhal, we can assume that it is necessary to discover more and more new virtues in the object of your love or to associate new “beauty of the world” with it.

And here fantasies and love dreams come to the rescue, which, in fact, are endless.

It should be noted that the main meaning of the metaphor of crystallization is not in the densification and hardening of certain amorphous entities, but in the transformation of things to such an extent that they are “impossible to recognize.” Moreover, it can be the transformation of quite ordinary-looking things into beautiful ones: “In the Salzburg salt mines, a branch of a tree that has been exposed during the winter is thrown into the deserted depths of these mines; two or three months later it is removed from there, covered with shiny crystals; even the smallest twigs, no larger than the foot of a titmouse, are adorned with countless mobile and dazzling diamonds; the old branch is impossible to recognize.” Similarly, in the imagination of a lover, an ordinary woman becomes an exceptional being.

6. Doubt is born.

The happiness experienced in love is so incredible that a worm of doubt penetrates into consciousness: is the reciprocal feeling genuine, how strong are the foundations of this happiness, and there is a fear of losing it.

7. Second crystallization.

The search and subsequent self-convincing resolution of doubts, among which the main one is the question “But does she love me?” constitute the second crystallization.

The second crystallization is characterized by a high intensity of feelings and thoughts – the stakes are prohibitively high. Here it is necessary to discard, or rather, painfully experience the doubts that love is mutual since all nature cries out that the object of love is irreplaceable, that only she alone in the whole world will give the lover the gratification so much needed (behind this hedonic word, of course, deeper meanings are crowded).

Thereon, the mind of the lover does not immediately calm down. He continues to meticulously inspect the beliefs that have developed as a result of the discovery of the beloved’s perfections, signs of reciprocal feelings, and the grounds (“greatest evidence”) of mutual love. And woe to the one who discovers a mistake, “wrong conclusion” – clusters of crystals are destroyed, love is questioned.

Stendhal’s thoughts about love, the identification of its laws, can, without a doubt, be called a discovery ahead of its time. Both before and after Stendhal, love was perceived and will be perceived mainly on the basis of its external signs only as an obsession, mania, clouding of reason, accompanied by more or less “tickling feelings.” Compare, for example, these love verses divided by two and a half thousand years:

Stendhal saw in love a complex interaction of the delight of passion, confusion of feelings, and torment of the mind, and also described the patterns of their crystallization into love. He was convinced that “every love that happens to be observed on earth is born, lives and dies or rises to immortality, following the same laws.”

How much meditation on Stendhal’s laws of love, as he hoped for it, can help in the healing of mental suffering – it is up to everyone to decide for himself. At least from a walk through the periods of love with Stendhal, one should take on a further journey for pondering the riddle of the second crystallization. At the same time, the question should not be simplified so as not to fall into the trap of Mephistopheles’ provocative casuistry:

and, not realizing that behind the pause of an affair, there may be a preparation of the soul for love, like Faust, do not blurt out: “Without that, I have appetite.”

Doubts and the need for a second crystallization can suddenly arise out of nothingness repeatedly throughout the life of a lover.

On the very day of the wedding, a strange feeling came over Levin. “Fear and doubt found him, doubt in everything.” He rushes to the bride in order to receive firsthand the answer to his terrible doubts: “I think that you cannot love me. Why can you love me?” Levin is hardly considered a naive person, but, having received Kitty’s answer that “she loves him because she entirely understands him because she knows that he must love and that everything he loves is all right,” he calms down – “and it seemed to him quite clear.”

It is also quite clear that when Levin, walking through life, will open new horizons, change hobbies and acquire new meanings, he may again have questions: is he loved now and for what? Will he ask his wife again or will he read the answers in her eyes and gestures? Will Kitty, in other circumstances, be able to give him explicit or implicit assurances that “she understands him all,” or will this happy family become “unhappy in its own way,” as Leo Tolstoy shrewdly defined this possibility in the novel Anna Karenina?

Concluding the consideration of Stendhal’s discoveries, it should be noted that, although he does not have a direct description of the transformation processes of the lover himself, it can be assumed that they are in one form or another implicit and present in a tacit form at all stages of love. It is unlikely that the process of crystallization that takes place between him and his beloved can be carried out in the consciousness of the unchanging Self of the lover, who is in his shell both before and after meeting with the object of love.

The first five periods of love according to Stendhal can be easily guessed in an elegant poem by Valery Bryusov:

Stages of the origin and crystallization of love