The Course of Love. A novel pdfdrive com

Maturity means acknowledging that Romantic love might only constitute a
narrow and perhaps rather mean-minded aspect of emotional life, one
principally focused on a quest to find love rather than to give it, to be loved
rather than to love.
Children may end up being the unexpected teachers of people many times
their age, to whom they offer—through their exhaustive dependence, egoism,
and vulnerability—an advanced education in a wholly new sort of love, one in
which reciprocation is never jealously demanded or fractiously regretted and in
which the true goal is nothing less than the transcendence of oneself for the sake
of another.
The morning after the birth, the nurses discharge the new family without
guidance or advice, save for one leaflet about colic and another about
immunizations. The average home appliance comes with more detailed

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instructions than a baby, society maintaining a touching belief that there is
nothing much that one generation can, in the end, reasonably tell another about
life.
Children teach us that love is, in its purest form, a kind of service. The word has
grown freighted with negative connotations.
An individualistic, self-gratifying
culture cannot easily equate contentment with being at someone else’s call.
We
are used to loving others in return for what they can do for us, for their capacity
to entertain, charm, or soothe us.
Yet babies can do precisely nothing. There is,
as slightly older children sometimes conclude with serious discomfiture, no
“point” to them; that is their point. They teach us to give without expecting
anything in return, simply because they need help badly—and we are in a
position to provide it.
We are inducted into a love based not on an admiration
for strength but on a compassion for weakness, a vulnerability common to every
member of the species and one which has been and will eventually again be our
own. Because it is always tempting to overemphasize autonomy and
independence, these helpless creatures are here to remind us that no one is, in
the end, “self-made”: we are all heavily in someone’s debt.
We realize that life
depends, quite literally, on our capacity for love.
We learn, too, that being another’s servant is not humiliating—quite the
opposite, for it sets us free from the wearying responsibility of continuously
catering to our own twisted, insatiable natures. We learn the relief and privilege
of being granted something more important to live for than ourselves.
They wipe her little bottom, time and time again, and wonder why they never
really understood clearly before that this really is what one human has to do for
another. They warm bottles for her in the middle of the night; they are
overwhelmed with relief if she sleeps for more than an hour at a stretch; they
worry about, and argue over, the timing of her burps. All of this she will later
forget and they will be unable or unwilling to convey to her. Gratitude will come
to them only indirectly, through the knowledge that she herself will, one day,
have a sufficient sense of inner well-being to want to do this for somebody else.
Her sheer incompetence is awe-inspiring. Everything must be learnt: how to
curl fingers around a cup, how to swallow a piece of banana, how to move a
hand across the rug to grasp a key. Nothing comes easily. A morning’s work
might include stacking up bricks and knocking them down, banging a fork
against the table, dropping stones into a puddle, pulling a book about Hindu
temple architecture off a shelf, seeing what Mama’s finger might taste like.
Everything is amazing—once.

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Neither Kirsten nor Rabih has ever known such a mixture of love and
boredom. They are used to basing their friendships on shared temperaments and
interests. But Esther is, confusingly, simultaneously the most boring person they
have ever met and the one they find themselves loving the most. Rarely have
love and psychological compatibility drifted so far apart—and yet it doesn’t
matter in the slightest. Perhaps all that emphasis on having “something in
common” with others is overdone: Rabih and Kirsten have a new sense of how
little is in truth required to form a bond with another human being. Anyone who
urgently needs us deserves, in the true book of love, to be our friend.
Literature has seldom dwelt long in the playroom and the nursery, and perhaps
for good reason. In older novels, wet nurses swiftly bear infants away so that the
action can resume. In the living room in Newbattle Terrace, for months nothing
much happens in the outward sense. The hours appear to be empty, but in truth
everything is in them. Esther will forget their details entirely when she finally
awakens as a coherent consciousness from the long night of early childhood. But
their enduring legacy will be a primary sense of ease with and trust in the world.
The fundamentals of Esther’s childhood will be stored not so much in events as
in sensory memories: of being held close to someone’s chest, of certain slants of
light at particular times of day, of smells, types of biscuits, textures of carpet, the
distant, incomprehensible, soothing sound of her parents’ voices in the car
during long nighttime drives, and an underlying feeling that she has a right to
exist and reasons to go on hoping.