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| LOCKS representing true love forever on Paris bridges |
At the heart of love à la française lies the idea of
freedom. To love truly is to want the other free, and this
includes the freedom to walk away. Love is not about
possession or property. Love is no prison where two
people are each other’s slaves. Love is not a commodity,
either. Love is not capitalist, it is revolutionary. If
anything, true love shows you the way to selflessness.
So please tell me where is the grey, boring, monotonous
thought of "cheating" coming from?
The French Know
Yet, instead of sharing the naïve joy of the world’s
Romeos and Juliets, some Parisians have felt
increasingly irritated. Walking on those bridges
has become almost insufferable for them. The pain
doesn’t come only from the fact that some bridges,
like Pont de l’Archevêché and Pont des Arts, now
feel as if they could collapse under the weight of
tourists’ undying love but also from the idea
that a lock could represent love. Such an
idea is abhorrent to many French people.
“The fools! They haven’t understood a thing about love, have they?”
.......Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir famously never married and
never lived together and, although a couple in the absolute sense of the term,
they had lasting and meaningful relationships with strings of brilliant minds
and pretty faces. They deemed jealousy bourgeois and
banal.
In his recent book, “In Praise of Love,” the French
philosopher Alain Badiou
reminds us that love implies
constant risk. There is no safe,
everlasting love. The idea
that you can lock two people’s
love once and for all, and toss
the key, is a puerile fantasy.
For Mr. Badiou, love is
inherently hazardous, always
on the brink of failure and
above all vulnerable. Embrace its fragility, wish your
beloved
to be free and you might just, only just, have a chance to
retain his or her undying gratitude, and love. But don’t
ever
dream of locks and throwing keys overboard,
especially not
in Paris.
DeLillo's Elise in Cosmopolis:
No he (Cronenberg) didn't keep the relationship between Elise and Packer the same as in the book:
What is money to a poet, she says, love the world and trace it in a line of verse. Without Elise there's no love of the world. No Elise makes the movie as detached as Eric is in it. Cosmopolis the book is a verse. Cosmopolis the movie is not, it's a movie.
Instead of words from the book, Cronenberg says he gives an actor's face.
This post is for Elise's face missing in the movie when Eric realizes he loves her and she slips away.
This post is for Elise's face missing in the movie when Eric realizes he loves her and she slips away.
For Elise, the face of love. The kind of love which sprungs out mysteriously in unexpected places; which enables, is not selfish, makes one do foolish things and wear turbans, which supports and understands without asking, which gives and makes one free to be a gull at dawn, anything and everything one can be. Which makes one an overman. Even if everything and anything one is, is dead in the end. Precisely because that which one ultimately is in the end is dead .
Amor fati, nothing altered, nothing alterable.
Cronenberg thought this part was a fantasy because Cronenberg thinks love is a fantasy.
In The Bluest Eye, Toni Morrison writes (and I have quoted this many times), “Love is never any better than the lover. Wicked people love wickedly, violent people love violently, weak people love weakly, stupid people love stupidly. There is no gift for the beloved. The lover alone possesses his gift of love.”
In Mourning Diary, Roland Barthes writes (he is speaking of emotional intelligence), “…intelligence is everything that permits us to live superlatively with another person.”
This is where knowing how to treat someone well and wanting to treat someone well converge.
From Masha Tupitsyn:
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Be kind to each other even when you disagree.