“You guys have been together eighteen months and you love each other. It shows all over you. You glow with it. But you both loved other people before you met each other. You’ve both been married before, just like us. And you probably loved other people before that too, even. Terri and I have been together five years, been married for four. And the terrible thing, the terrible thing is, but the good thing, too, the saving grace, you might say, is that if something happened to one of us—excuse me for saying this—but if something happened to one of us tomorrow, I think the other one, the other person, would grieve for a while, you know, but then the surviving party would go out and love again, have someone else soon enough. All this, all of this love we’re talking about, it would just be a memory. Maybe not even a memory. Am I wrong? Am I way off base? Because I want you to set me straight if you think I’m wrong. I want to know. I mean, I don’t know anything, and I’m the first one to admit it.”
*
These are lines from Raymond Carver’s What We Talk About, When We Talk About Love, a short story. Mel McGinnis, one character, is speaking to another couple and his own wife at a table, where they are sitting to drink (Is he drunk yet? It really doesn’t matter.).
*
Human conduct, it seems to me, is like routes we take every day, routes we do not wish to draw a map for.
[Excerpt from Raymond Carver’s story from: http://www.newyorker.com/online/2007/12/24/071224on_onlineonly_carver?currentPage=all
March 26, 2009 – 12:48 am]
Two good Persian translations of Raymond Carver's story can be found in:
1. کارور، ریموند. کلیسای جامع و چند داستان دیگر. ترجمه ی فرزانه طاهری. چاپ پنجم. تهران: انتشارات نیلوفر: 1386
2. کارور، ریموند. وقتی از عشق حرف می زنیم: برگزیده ی داستان های ریموند کارور. ترجمه ی پریسا سلیمان زاده – زیبا گنجی.تهران: انتشارات مروارید: 1384
8 comments:
I believe LOVE is one of the most complicated and discussable issues which occupies man's mind and captures his feeling and thought. You know why?!... Since man is a complicated being for whom you cannot draw any map or set a rule... That's the key to these lines.
Even in total awareness of love when love needs true definition, you still long to experience a new taste of life and surpass THAT love. In this process you come across new notions of the issue and achieve the understanding. You may alter one with another, or forget one to remember another, or even reject the love once you believed it to be a true love after the break up... But you may one day understand true love and appreciate it forever in reality or memories or even in dreams, THAT love lasts forever inside you.
Anyway all are justified as part of human nature.
So "love and leave" is incredible in its own sense as part of life.
I do agree with your last lines of human conduct.!
P.S. Thanks for the new post, I like it alot. :-)
When we speak of life what do we speak of?
Life, to be simple, is being. One being born in a family and grows up in a house becomes a man or woman. Any man/woman is a world full of thoughts, feelings, desires, impulses, and if you ask me full of lust for living. And then may come a strong feeling called love. The most appreciated, graceful, and divine emotion one may find. Aphrodite (the god of love and pleasure) whispers in the ears of a mortal to become immortal through LOVE.
Now you say, when we speak of love, do we speak of life (at first) or love? First comes life, being, and then comes love. But some people during their life, sunk in the oceans of stories, forget their life (and being) for the sake of love. Love is a feeling which belongs to life of a person to lift him up to heavens where Aphrodite sings and dances. Love is not a feeling to down grade you to death.
One may ask about a desperate lover who missed his/her beloved for any reason. What happens to that "love". If you ask Socrates, he would say that love is "a great spirit and like all spirits he is intermediate between the divine and the mortal." Love is a one-way road to infinity, to heavens, and doesn’t "GO" anywhere. It stays right in the place it shaped, inside the heart.
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Thank you,
Bill Austin
Where does love go when it's broken apart? Good question. In the best cases, it reshapes itself into a new image that it can adore and perhaps magnify. Maybe all life is about magnification and extension of love until we are able to love without boundaries?Thanks for sharing your thoughts on life.
Btw it's my first visit. I write from Puerto Rico and found your blog through the B of the Day Awards.
<3
Well I suppose the concept of LOVE, as we discuss here, is something spiritual. Yet we deal with FACTS since we LIVE. Now, when we talk about a previous relation between to people, we talk about memories, about feelings. But life doesn't stop there. It just goes on and we DO follow it or simply leave it.
Those who dare to continue, I think, would rather get going, looking forward (keeping old memories for sure) than stick to past.
Love, after all, is not something replaceable. But can be renewed in my opinion or even reconsidered in certain conditions.
* * *
P.S. My blogs are, by the way, updated! Take a look.
http://www.Bloggedsina.blogspot.com
http://www.Trimmedsina.blogspot.com
Reminds me of a line I read somewhere. I do not remember where, unfortunately.
"Zaman ba eshgh faramoosh mishavad va eshgh ba zaman."
Post e khatere angizi bud. ;-)
Hello again.
It's coming in the air
and going in the same way.
It remains in the say
and vanishes right away.
!!
:-)
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