The Course of Love. A novel pdfdrive com

Few in this world are ever simply nasty; those who hurt us are themselves in
pain. The appropriate response is hence never cynicism nor aggression but, at
the rare moments one can manage it, always love.
Kirsten’s mother is in hospital. She has been there for two weeks. It started off

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as something innocuous having to do with her kidneys; now the prognosis is
suddenly far graver. Normally so strong, Kirsten is ashen and lost.
They went up to see her on Sunday. She was extremely frail and spoke softly
and only to make simple requests: a glass of water, the lamp tilted so there
would be a little less light in her eyes. At one point she took Rabih’s hand in hers
and gave him a smile: “Look after her, will you,” she said, and then, with the old
sharpness, “If she lets you.” A forgiveness, of sorts.
He knows that he never found favor in Mrs. McLelland’s eyes. At first he
resented it; now, as a parent himself, he can sympathize. He isn’t looking
forward to Esther’s husband, either. How could a parent ever truly approve?
How could they possibly be expected, after eighteen or so years of answering to
a child’s every need, to react enthusiastically to a new and competing source of
love? How could anyone sincerely perform the requisite emotional somersault
and not suspect in their heart—and let on as much, through a succession of more
or less sour remarks—that their child had mistakenly fallen into the clutches of
someone fundamentally unsuited to the complex and unique task of
administering to them?
Kirsten cries uncontrollably after their visit in Raigmore Hospital. She sends
the children to play with their friends; right now she can’t be a parent—the one
who tries never to frighten others by revealing their pain; she needs to be a child
again for a while. She can’t overcome the horror of her mother looking sallow
and emaciated against the institutional blue sheets. How could this be
happening? She is at some level still deeply attached to her impressions, formed
in her fifth or sixth year, of her mother as someone strong, capable, and in
charge. Kirsten was the little one who could be scooped up into the air and told
what needed to happen next. She craved this authority in the years after her
father left. The two McLelland women knew how to stick together; they were a
team, involved in the best kind of sedition. Now Kirsten is in the corridor
quizzing an alarmingly young doctor about how many months there will be left.
The world has been upended.
We start off in childhood believing parents might have access to a superior kind
of knowledge and experience. They look, for a while, astonishingly competent.
Our exaggerated esteem is touching but also intensely problematic, for it sets
them up as the ultimate objects of blame when we gradually discover that they
are flawed, sometimes unkind, in areas ignorant and utterly unable to save us
from certain troubles. It can take a while, until the fourth decade or the final
hospital scenes, for a more forgiving stance to emerge. Their new condition,
frail and frightened, reveals in a compellingly physical way something which has

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always been true psychologically: that they are uncertain vulnerable creatures
motivated more by anxiety, fear, a clumsy love, and unconscious compulsions
than by godlike wisdom and moral clarity—and cannot, therefore, forever be
held responsible for either their own shortcomings or our many
disappointments.
In those moods when Rabih can at long last break free of his ego, it isn’t just one
or two people he feels he can forgive more easily. It may even be, at an extreme,
that no human being any longer lies outside the circle of his sympathy.
He sees goodness in unexpected places. He is moved by the benevolence of
the office administrator, a widow in her mid-fifties whose son has just gone off
to university in Leeds. She is cheerful and strong, an extraordinary
accomplishment which she extends over every hour of every working day. She
takes care to ask all the staff how they are. She remembers birthdays and fills in
idle minutes with reflections that are always encouraging and tender. As a
younger man he wouldn’t have taken any notice of such a minor demonstration
of grace, but by now he has been humbled enough by life to know to stoop down
and pick up the smaller blessings wherever they come. He has without trying,
and without pride, become a little nicer.
He is readier to be generous, too, from a sense of how much he needs the
charity of others. When others are vindictive, he is more interested in mitigating
circumstances, and in any bits of the truth that cast a less moralistic light on
viciousness and bad behavior. Cynicism is too easy, and it gets you nowhere.
He becomes aware, for the first time in his life, of the beauty of flowers. He
remembers harboring a near hatred of them as an adolescent. It seemed absurd
that anyone should take joy in something so small and so temporary when there
were surely greater, more permanent things on which to pin ambitions. He
himself wanted glory and intensity. To be detained by a flower was a symbol of
a dangerous resignation. Now he is beginning to get the point. The love of
flowers is a consequence of modesty and an accommodation with
disappointment. Some things need to go permanently wrong before we can start
to admire the stem of a rose or the petals of a bluebell. But once we realize that
the larger dreams are always compromised in some way, with what gratitude we
may turn to these minuscule islands of serene perfection and delight.
Held up against certain ideals of success, his life has been a deep
disappointment. But he can also see that it is, in the end, no great achievement
simply to fixate on failure. There is valor in being able to identify a forgiving,
hopeful perspective on one’s life, in knowing how to be a friend to oneself,
because one has a responsibility to others to endure.

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Sometimes he has a hot bath in the middle of the night and takes stock of his
body under the bright light. Aging is a bit like looking tired, but in a way that no
amount of sleep will repair. Every year it will get a little worse. Today’s so-
called bad photograph will be next year’s good one. Nature’s kind trick is to
make everything happen so slowly that we don’t get as scared as we should. One
day his hands will be liver spotted, like those of the elderly uncles he knew in his
childhood. Everything that has happened to others will happen to him, too. No
one gets away.
He is a collection of tissues and cells delicately and intricately conjoined and
brought to life for only an instant. It will take just one sharp collision or a fall to
render them inanimate again. All the seriousness of his plans depends on a
steady flow of blood to his brain through a vulnerable network of capillaries.
Should any of these suffer even the tiniest of failures, the tenuous sense he has
begun to make of life will at once be erased. He is just a fortuitous constellation
of atoms which have chosen to resist entropy for a few moments within cosmic
eternity. He wonders which of his organs will fail first.
He is only a visitor who has managed to confuse his self with the world. He
had assumed he was yet another stable object, like the city of Edinburgh or a tree
or a book, whereas he is more like a shadow or a sound.
Death will be nothing too bad, he supposes: the constituent parts of him will
be redistributed and returned. Life has been long already, and it will, at a point
whose outlines he now intuits, be time to release and give others a go.
One evening, returning home through the dark streets, he spots a florist’s
shop. He must have passed it many, many times, and yet he’s never taken any
notice of it before. The front window is brightly illuminated and filled with a
variety of blooms. He steps in, and an elderly woman smiles warmly at him. His
eye is drawn to the first native flowers of a tentative spring: snowdrops. He
watches the woman’s hands wrap the little bunch in fine white tissue.
“For someone nice, I think?” She smiles at him.
“My wife,” he replies.
“Lucky woman,” she says as she hands him the bundle and his change. He
hopes to get home and, on this occasion, prove the florist right.

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