THIS ABOVE ALL
Meaning of love
Khushwant Singh

Last month a book entitled Absolute Khushwant (Penguin-Viking) was launched. It consisted of answers given by me to questions put to me by Humra Quraishi and Diya Hazra. One of the questions was about my views on lust and love. My answer was that lust was elementary and lasted from infancy to dotage. Love was a glass put on it and could turn to hate, or get adulterated with companionship and inter-dependance. My friend Surbir Chhatwal, who was the Indian High Commissioner in Canada and Chairman of the Union Public Service Commission, sent me an extract of the views of Nobel Laureate Somerset Maugham, eminent novelist and short-story writer, on the subject.

Maugham is long-winded but agrees with me. This is what he had to say: "Love has two meanings. Love, pure and simple, sexual love, and loving kindness. I do not think that even Plato distinguished them with exactness. He seems to me to ascribe the exultation, the sense of power, the feeling of heightened vitality which accompany sexual love to that other love, which he calls the heavenly love, and which I should prefer to call loving kindness.

The power of love, when it seizes us, seems so mighty that we persuade ourselves that it will last forever

"Love passes. Love dies. The great tragedy of life is not that men perish, but that they cease to love. Not the least of the evils of life, and one for which there is small help, is that someone whom you love, no longer loves you. When La Rochefoucauld discovered that between two lovers there is one who loves, and one who lets himself be loved, he put in an epigram that discord prevents men from achieving in love, perfect happiness. However much people may resent the fact, and however angrily deny it, there can surely be no doubt that love depends on certain secretions of the sexual glands.

"In the immense majority, these do not continue indefinitely to be excited by the same object, and with advancing years they atrophy. People are very hypocritical in this matter and will not face the truth. They so deceive themselves that they can accept it with complacency when their love dwindles into what they describe as a solid and enduring affection. As if affection had anything to do with love!

"Affection is created by habit, a community of interests, convenience and the desire of companionship. It is a comfort rather than an exhilaration. Change is a part of life. There is also a change in the atmosphere we breathe, and is it likely that the strongest but one of all our instincts should be free from the law? We are not the same persons this year as last; nor are those we love. It is a happy chance if we, changing, continue to love a changed person. It is only because the power of love, when it seizes us, seems so mighty that we persuade ourselves that it will last forever. When it subsides, we are ashamed, and we blame ourselves for our weakness, whereas we should accept our change of heart as a natural effect of our humanity.

"The experience of mankind has led people to regard love with mingled feelings. They have become suspicious of it. They have as often cursed as praised it. The soul of man, struggling to be free, has, except for brief moments, looked upon the self-surrender that it claims as a fall from grace. The happiness it brings may be the greatest of which man is capable, but it is seldom, seldom unalloyed.

"Love writes a story that generally has a sad ending. Many have resented its power and angrily prayed to be delivered from its burden. They have hugged their chains, but knowing they were chains, hated them too. Love is not always blind, and there are a few things that cause greater wretchedness than to love with all your heart someone who you know is unworthy of love.

"But loving kindness is not coloured with that transitoriness, which is the irremediable defect of love. It is true that it is not entirely devoid of the sexual element. It is like dancing. One dances for the pleasure of the rhythmic movement, and it is not necessary that one should wish to go to bed with one’s partner; but it is a pleasant exercise only if to do so would not be disgusting.

"In loving kindness, the sexual instinct is sublimated, but it lends the emotion something of its own warm and vitalising energy. Loving kindness is the better part of goodness. It lends grace to the sterner qualities of which this consists, and makes it a little less difficult to practice those minor virtues of self-control and self-restraint, patience, discipline and tolerance, which are the passive and not very exhilarating elements of goodness.

"Goodness is the only value that seems in this world of appearances to have any claim to be an end in itself. Virtue is its own reward."

Then and now

What difference has come in the meaning of NRI over the years?

Ans: In the past it meant "Not Required Indian." Now it stands for "Now Required Indian."

(Courtesy: KJS Ahluwalia, Amritsar)

Not again

Banto: "Dear, may I tell you one thing? But promise me, you will not beat me."

Banta: "OK".

Banto: "I am pregnant."

Banta: "Oh, it is a good news, but why do you think I will beat you?"

Banto: "When I was in college, I told the same thing to my father, and he had beaten me."

(Contributed by JP Singh Kaka, Bhopal)