The foothills of our heart

Some of my friends would have relished catching me at it -- I, who have been disdainful of souvenirs for years, was buying one. I never buy souvenirs for myself; as far as I am concerned, they just collect dust when I bring them home. They become net liabilities, demanding extra housework. As for buying souvenirs for others, that too I rarely do, firstly because if they were not on the trip, it would mean very little to them, secondly because with my frequency of travelling, I would go broke if I ever made a habit of bringing gifts back for friends and family.

But here I was in this little lane, bargaining in Putonghua over a small bottle no bigger than my palm, trying to get it down to under 40 yuan. The little bottle was painted on the inside, in this case with a tiger on the prowl, done with considerable vivacity, yet with fine detail. Even so, I would normally have just looked at it a while, thought well of it and moved on. Except that I had been thinking of him, remembered his birthday, and by sheer impulse, wanted to buy him something.

Ah, another little sign of love, you might say, you know, that affliction that makes us do things totally different from head and habit. A condition that sometimes is indistinguishable from insanity.

Well, no. I'm sure not. I am not in love with him. Nor am I infatuated with him, after all, I have known him for years. So then, what does one call it?

'Affection' is the closest I can think of, except that it sounds terribly dated. Genteel ladies in Jane Austen's novels indulge in affection. We, we in our day and age, we're either in love or out of love. All or nothing. Turbo or flat. But when you think about it, it may well be another tyranny of our modern culture.

Our songs, our cinema and our magazines go on incessantly about love. Falling in love, falling out of love, pining for love, dying for love. The hero gets the girl. The other guy left empty handed is pitiable. We have a great obsession with passionate love, anything less is nowhere as worthy of comment. It's as if in the terrain that is our life, everything is one big boring plain, except for a huge volcano, all fire and tempest, the centre of our attention day and night, an all-absorbing singularity.

I sometimes wonder if that is a fair description of how we actually go about our lives. Sure, at some time or another, all of us fall madly in love. It's an experience not to be missed. The summit is way up there in the clouds, where you can't see reality. It changes you forever. Some people love just once, and then unfortunately, their heart is broken, and they never quite love again. Others fall madly in love repeatedly, serially. Yet others have just one great love that last for the rest of their lives. But does it stand in isolation? Do we not at the same time have sentiment for others to various degrees? It's not quite love, but what do we call it? And why does our popular culture ignore it?

The 'what is it?' I think you know. All of us have soft-spots for a few other people. We always have a ready smile for them. We more eagerly accept their invitations than others. We even think of them spontaneously from time to time, and feel good about it, and when necessary, we will go out of our way, we really put ourselves out, surprising even our more rational selves, to help them.

That's the front end. The more embarrassing back end is that, for some of us at least, we may have loaned money to them, even though they weren't such good credit risks if one had been objective. Or that we had showered them with gifts, or with so much extra attention that things got misinterpreted, ending up as mixed signals, overstating our real (and honestly, very limited) intentions. And then we had to backtrack and clear the air.

The same things happen when we begin dating someone, and you could say that this 'affection' which I describe, is nothing more than the initial stages of falling in love. You'd be right. Sometimes it is. But -- well, I don't know about you -- there are characters in my life who continue to have a hold on my heart for years and years. I know there is no likelihood of falling in love with them: too different in temperament, too far away, no common interests, no common language! -- but somehow they remain special, and even a fleeting thought of them warms the chest like a smooth liqueur.

They don't preclude a great central love, but neither can they be excluded from my heart. They are like foothills each with its own right to be there even when at the centre of one's life, there is another high massif, the real thing.

You may not agree with me that our popular culture ignores these more subtle relationships, and imposes the tyranny of true-love-and-nothing-else. You could say that the main love story gets central billing simply because it is a far more absorbing subject. I don't know how to prove my view: that by my observation, while the subtler relationships are addressed in more serious literature and fringe films, they are very rarely dealt with in more commercial material. Even if you don't agree with me, just ride with me for a while, and take it that our modern culture, especially our pop and TV culture, largely ignores these possibilities. I just want you to hear me hazard my guesses as to why.

I have two guesses.

One -- our modern culture is very strongly pro-pairbond. It does not easily entertain more complex webs of relationships. Historically, the pairbond has not always been the supreme form of relationships, but our modern culture sets it up as the norm. Hence it is quite uncomfortable addressing other possibilities, like half-love, old flames or less-than-totally-platonic affection.

Two -- our modern culture tends to be rather juvenile. Passionate love, all-embracing yet all-excluding, may be a very juvenile thing. Our culture celebrates that. On the other hand, it may take a bit of living, and a bit of mellowing, to accumulate a circle of half-loves, like the way souvenirs gradually fill a shelf. Our juvenile culture may have little patience for such mature whimsies.

Well, I've said it. What do you think? Do we each have our little painted bottles, either given or received, that stand as tokens to a little sweetness in our lives?

© Yawning Bread 

Footnotes

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Addenda

See also the article Halfway to eternity