The Course of Love. A novel pdfdrive com

A well-loved child is set a challenging precedent. By its very nature, parental
love works to conceal the effort which went into generating it. It shields the
recipient from the donor’s complexity and sadness—and from an awareness of
how many other interests, friends, and concerns the parent has sacrificed in the
name of love. With infinite generosity, it places the small person at the very
center of the cosmos for a time—to give it strength for the day he or she will,
with agonizing surprise, have to grasp the true scale, and awkward solitude, of
the grown-up world.
On a typical evening in Edinburgh, when Rabih and Kirsten have finally settled
Esther, when her well-ironed cloth is by her chin, she is snug in her onesie, and
all is quiet on the baby monitor in the bedroom, these two infinitely patient and
kind carers retreat to their quarters, reach for the TV or the left-over Sunday
magazines, and swiftly lapse into a pattern of behavior which might rather shock
the child were she miraculously capable of observing and comprehending the
interactions. For in the place of the soft, indulgent language Rabih and Kirsten
have been using with their child for many hours, there is often just bitterness,
vengeance, and carping. The effort of love has exhausted them. They have
nothing left to give to one another. The tired child inside each of them is furious
at how long it has been neglected and is in pieces.
It isn’t surprising if, as adults, when we first start to form relationships, we
should devotedly go off in search of someone who can give us the all-
encompassing, selfless love that we may once have known in childhood. Nor
would it be surprising if we were to feel frustrated and in the end extremely
bitter at how difficult it seems to be to find—at how seldom people know how to
help us as they should. We may rage and blame others for their inability to intuit

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our needs, we may fitfully move from one relationship to another, we may blame
an entire sex for its shallowness—until the day we end our quixotic searches and
reach a semblance of mature detachment, realizing that the only release from
our longing may be to stop demanding a perfect love and noting its many
absences at every turn, and instead start to give love away (perhaps to a small
person) with oblivious abandon without jealously calculating the chances of it
ever returning.

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Sweetness
Three years after Esther’s arrival, William is born. He has a cheeky, winsome
nature from the first. His parents will always remain convinced that only a few
hours after leaving the womb, with apparent knowingness, he winked at them
from his crib. By the time he’s four, there will be few hearts he leaves entirely
cold. There is sweetness in the questions he asks, the games he plays, and the
repeated offers he makes to marry his sister.
Childhood sweetness: the immature part of goodness as seen through the prism
of adult experience, which is to say, from the far side of a substantial amount of
suffering, renunciation, and discipline.
We label as “sweet” childrens’ open displays of hope, trust, spontaneity,
wonder, and simplicity—qualities which are under severe threat but are deeply
longed for in the ordinary run of grown-up life. The sweetness of children
reminds us of how much we have had to sacrifice on the path to maturity; the
sweet is a vital part of ourselves—in exile.
Rabih misses his children with particular intensity when he’s at work. In a
setting marked by constant tension and professional maneuvering, the very idea
of their trust and vulnerability seems poignant. He finds it almost heartbreaking
to remember that there is a place not far away from his office where people
know how to care properly about one another and where a person’s tears and
confusion, let alone lunch menu and sleeping position, can be of such deep
concern to another human.