In True Love by Szymborska, the concept of romantic love is treated cynically. She talks about the kind of love that most people search for and hope to find someday as something that is unnecessary. My belief is that she is scared and/or jealous of this type of love. She sees it as something that can hurt her if she were to let herself give into it. It is something to be avoided and ignored...."True love. Is it really necessary? Tact and common sense tell us to pass over it in silence, like a scandal in Life's highest circles." Her comparison of love to a scandal is interesting to me because it suggests something that is morally wrong. While I may agree with the overall idea that love does not make life better and happier I don't think that it is wrong to want to view love as making the world a better place.
It is true that love is not necessary but I believe that it is natural for us to want to make our lives better. Most people are not happy with what they have. They want to find the kind of love that is shown in movies or written about in novels, however, that kind of love does not last forever. In reality, love may start out like that but after a while love is what most people live with, friendship.
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I can see the cynicism in Szymborska's text and I agree that the tone of that passage is jealous and scared, but when I first read it, it did not seem that way to me. When I first read that passage I took it as meaning that sometimes loves trumps everything else in life. When Szymbroska says, "it's hard to even guess how far things would go. If people start to follow their example. What could religion and poverty count on?" Sometimes people become so obsessed - for lack of a better word - with the emotion that they are feeling that everything else seems to come second in life.
ReplyDeleteIn relation to, “is love necessary,” I agree that it is natural to try and look for something more, but not necessarily better – it is possible that Szymbroska was trying to teach us just that. That this "glow" and "ultimate happiness" one tends to feel when being in love is not necessary because it really should not be making things better - it should not be making us happy (of course love will make add to said happiness, but it should not be the sole thing that comprises it) - we should try and make ourselves happy and not wait around for someone else to try and do it.