It's only taken me the better part of twenty-five years, but I finally bought myself a copy of Wuthering Heights and actually read it. It's a book that's been on my list of things to read for, literally, getting on for a quarter of a century but despite several near-misses I'd never actually taken the plunge and cracked open the covers.
Interesting book.
I read Jane Eyre a few years ago and so I was expecting much the same, given it was written by Charlotte's sister. I though Emily would have much the same world-view and anyway having seen a few film adaptations of Wuthering heights I thought I knew what the story was. So much for pre-conceptions. I've read a few dark stories in my time. In fact, I like my stories to have an element of darkness to them. Wuthering Heights, on the other hand, was to dark fiction what the Terminator is to the teletubbies.
First, and I apologize to those of you who have read Wuthering Heights for my foolishness, I was under the impression it was a love story. Ah, silly, naive Lictor. A more damning indictment of love I have yet to read. With the exception of the very end of the story, which involved characters that have already suffered horribly anyway, there's no one in the book whose love isn't damaging, stifling or in some way corrupting of others.
Second, it's so unrelenting. The main characters are almost all totally unredeemable. Cathy and Heathcliff are so destructively obsessive that an entire generation is blighted by their self-centered, monomaniacal desire.
The book is a long, dark journey into some very black corners of emotions traditionally characterized in a more wholesome, positive way. Emily Bronte herself seems to have led a life almost equally bleak, at least as far as romantic love is concerned.
All in all, it's enough to give you pause. "Love" is a word generally overused and covering such a multitude of emotions, from the prosaic to the extraordinary, that it's almost without meaning.
I can love a dog. I can love my friends. I can love Spaghetti with sauce. I can love my mother. I can love my country. I can love my children. I can love my wife. I can love myself (no giggling.) I can love God.
Every instance is different. Some of the examples, however common, are simply the results of poor use of vocabulary. (I'd argue no one "loves" spaghetti in any meaningful way. Well, no one outside of a lunatic asylum.) Can I love a dog? Maybe, I suppose, but not in any way like I love my wife. (Please, don't. I know it's tempting to make that joke, but just don't. Thank you.)
And love, as Cathy and Heathcliff so ably demonstrate, is far from always a good thing. For them, it was a force of nature so powerful it utterly destroyed them and everyone around them.
Real, profound love is so absolute that it exists beyond the confines of self. To truly love something is to accept that it's value is greater even than that which we hold for ourselves. It is to loose the shackles of self and be cast bodily into the tempest. To love is to die to the self.
Or at least, that's what I'm positing.
I wonder what the rest of my Cant colleagues think love is?
Hmm?
Consider the gauntlet down. Tell me about love. Any kind of love.
(Oh and by the way, Wuthering Heights is a damn fine book and I recommend it highly. Just don't expect to be whistling a happy tune after you read it.)