While I will always be a hopeless Romantic and dream that somewhere I will find my soulmate, Valentine's Day really just serves to rub it in that I am STILL single. Still. Even when I had a major relationship, my boyfriend/fiancee hated Valentine's Day and did everything possible to avoid it. So I've never had flowers, or a date, or a Valentine's Day gift from my love (and he said he didn't want a gift from me - what a party pooper). I've become a grumpy cynic, but in a tiny corner of my heart I want a sappy, lovey Valentine's Day!
One of my favorite love poems:
Come live with me and be my Love,
And we will all the pleasures prove
That hills and valleys, dales and field,
Or woods or steepy mountain yield.
And we will sit upon the rocks,
And see the shepherds feed their flocks,
By shallow rivers, to whose falls
Melodious birds sing madrigals.
...
The shepherd swains shall dance and sing
For thy delight each May morning:
If these delights thy mind may move,
Then live with me and be my Love.
--Christopher Marlowe,
The Passionate Shepherd to His LoveAnd from one of my favorite books:
"I can listen no longer in silence. I must speak to you by such means as are within my reach. You pierce my soul. I am half agony, half hope. Tell me not that I am too late, that such precious feelings are gone for ever. I offer myself to you again with a heart even more your own, than when you almost broke it eight years and a half ago. Dare not say that man forgets sooner than woman, that his love has an earlier death. I have loved none but you. Unjust I may have been, weak and resentful I have been, but never inconstant. You alone have brought me to Bath. For you alone I think and plan. -- Have you not seen this? Can you fail to have understood my wishes? -- I had not waited even these ten days, could I have read your feelings, as I think you must have penetrated mine. I can hardly write. I am every instant hearing something which overpowers me. You sink your voice, but I can distinguish the tones of that voice, when they would be lost on others. -- Too good, too excellent creature! You do us justice indeed. You do believe that there is true attachment and constancy among men. Believe it to be most fervent, most undeviating in
F.W.
I must go, uncertain of my fate; but I shall return hither, or follow your party, as soon as possible. A word, a look will be enough to decide whether I enter your father's house this evening, or never.
--Jane Austen,
Persuasion, letter from Captain Wentworth to Anne Eliot
*Sigh* There are too many days when I think no one will ever think those things about me.
And then there is
Love is a Mix Tape - which I read through entirely too fast to savor and will have to read again. The entire book is a love letter to music and how much that music meant to Rob and his wife Renee. It doesn't read like a standard memoir (X did this, then that. I hated her for it and drank too much, etc) - each mix tape at the beginning of a chapter moves forward through time to a specific event or theme. Rob's first attempt at DJ-ing his school dance, a tape made for doing the dishes, for sleeping, for making out, for fighting, for making up, for their wedding, and even mix tapes to introduce his life after Renee (except one has Hanson on it - ick, ick, ick, ick).
And the more I think about it, love really is like a mix tape. There are dance tracks, really sloppy, mushy rock ballad tracks, moshy tracks, acid rock tracks, ocean waves, Prince (he can make the temperature rise at the North Pole), one-hit wonders, unchained melodies, and paens to love lost. The rhythm changes. Style, tempo, key. As much as love can make or break you, think how boring it would be if it were like listening to the same song for the rest of your life.
Current book-in-progress: Anything Jane Austen (my solace when I am lonely).
Current knitted item: Shawl. About 20 rows left.
David Levithan created The Lover's Dictionary to tell the story of the relationship between an unnamed man and woman. Words are defined with moments from the couple's relationship and arranged in alphabetical order. This makes the story of the relationship move backward and forward but Levithan left a few tiny forward-moving clues within the alphabetical entries. Certain entries build slowly to create the picture of a scene within the other definitions and meanings of words or phrases.
