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If You Can't Be with the Blog You Love, Love the Blog You're With!

No Monz report, so today we feature the literary editor's favorite author, Carson McCullers, and her amazing exegis on the nature of love. (The L.E. is just now getting over the unsettling experience of having Oprah pick his all-time favorite book as one of her book club selections and seeing the entire world reading it everywhere he turned). Astute readers will recognize that the following passage comes from McCullers' masterpiece "The Ballad of the Sad Cafe," a novella which provides this blog with a certain nom de Plum.

>>First of all, love is a joint experience between two persons- but the fact that it is a joint experience does not mean that it is a similar experience to the people involved. There are the lover and the beloved but these two come from different countries. Often the beloved is only a stimulus for all the stored-up love which has lain quiet within the lover for a long time hitherto. And somehow every lover knows this. He feels in his soul that this love is a solitary thing. He comes to know a new, strange loneliness and it is this knowledge which makes him suffer. So there is only one thing for the lover to do. He must house his love within himself as best he can; he must create for himself a whole new inward world- a world intense and strange, complete in himself. Let it be added here that this lover about whom we speak need not necessarily be a young man saving for a wedding ring- this lover can be man, woman, child, or indeed any human creature on this earth.

Now, the beloved can also be of any description. The most outlandish people can be the stimulus for love. A man may be a doddering great-grandfather and still love only a strange girl he saw in the streets of Cheehaw one afternoon two decades past. The preacher may love a fallen woman. The beloved may be treacherous, greasy-headed, and given to evil habits. Yes, and the lover may see this as clearly as anyone else- but that does not affect the evolution of his love one whit. A most mediocre person can be the object of a love which is wild, extravgant, and beautiful as the poison lilies of the swamp. A good man may be the stimulus for a love both violent and debased, or a jabbering madman may bring about in the soul of someone a tender and simple idyll. Therefore, the value and quality of any love is determined solely by the lover himself.

It is for this reason that most of us would rather love than be loved. Almost everyone wants to be the lover. And the curt truth is that, in a deep secret way, the state of being be loved is intolerable to many. The beloved fears and hates the lover, and with the best of reasons. For the lover is forever trying to strip bare his beloved. The lover craves any possible relation with the beloved, even if this experience can cause him only pain. <<