Family members spend a lifetime teaching us the basic safety precautions of life: look to the left and right before crossing the street, don’t fall in love too early or too much, save pennies for rainy days and stay away from deals that aren’t fair and the people who offer them to you. Priests, nuns and nosy co-workers – our spiritual consultants having lived life far more righteously than we have – spend as much time at pulpits and office cubicles warning us against worldly pleasures that seduce us into ruining our lives now and in the afterlife. In the world is a concerted, highly organized and not mention, unceasing effort to impress upon us the importance of living life sensibly and piously and actually all for good reason. Life doesn’t have to be complicated. Study well in the early years of your life, find an honest job after learning all you need and marry a hard working man who would be happy to have you. This is the easiest most sensible course of action, and one which we have no reason not to take.
Still, we hear a story about two star-crossed sweethearts, who speak of love through a crack in the wall, run away into the night, and stain the earth with their blood because life is absolutely unimaginable apart and we say that right there is true love knowing full well that taking one’s own life is – as a matter of clinical fact— a clear sign of psychological disorder.
We listen to Kate Beckinsale in her adorable English accent saying that in that one moment beneath the pale moonlight, it was as if the world existed only for her and John Cusack, who unlike 97% of the average male (who are straight) believe in destiny. And as the story unfolds, the universe does in fact conspire to bring them together. Everywhere else in the world, there is hunger and strife with no apparent intervention from the universe: people have very little to feed their children, a freedom fighter’s wife weeps amidst air raids and gunshots as enemy planes charge the sky, and the leaders of the world fancy themselves larger than the nations they serve. Still, here comes Kate Beckinsale with the audacity to claim that the universe existed for her and a soul mate and we cry.
Because every movie is our life. Every line sums up our soul. Every song is our very own soundtrack. We sing “I can’t take the distance” to someone just right around the corner probably buying a pack of cigarettes and will be back in a few minutes. We say we can relate to songs of love unnoticed, written by seventeen year-old super celebrities, which, at 30, should really be more embarrassing than romantic.
But the romantic within us will argue this disbelief in true love, destiny, love at first sight and the whole lot is a product— not of sheer good sense — but of cynicism and bitterness. On account of a two-week love affair, we will continue to declare with dreamy eyes that “we just know.” This, in spite of the fact that we have also “known” a couple of times in the past and it is entirely possible that two weeks later we’ll come around saying we're not all that sure after all. We’ll be back with a different person in tow one day and we’ll “know” again.
And because we just “know,” it matters less that we’re hell-bound, broke, near death, mocked, or ostracized. So much less.
It really is beyond comprehension how – without even the slightest intervention of the universe and despite all efforts towards our enlightenment – we allow good sense to lose to this ridiculousness all the time. It triumphs even in places where we least expect it to, darker places in the world where people have little for their children and enemy planes charge the sky. All we really need, it seems, is a little bit of that pale moonlight.
Happy Valentines.
