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    A Vindication of Love: Reclaiming Romance for the Twenty-first Century
    Unavailable
    A Vindication of Love: Reclaiming Romance for the Twenty-first Century
    Unavailable
    A Vindication of Love: Reclaiming Romance for the Twenty-first Century
    Ebook357 pages6 hours

    A Vindication of Love: Reclaiming Romance for the Twenty-first Century

    By Cristina Nehring

    3.5/5

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    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    "A fierce and lively book. . . .This is one of those rare books that could make people think about their intimate lives in a new way." — New York Times Book Review

    “A rousing defense of imprudent ardor and romantic excess. . . . It’s difficult to deny that [Nehring] is on to something.” — Wall Street Journal

    A thinking person’s “guide” that makes the case for love in an age both cynical about and fearful of strong passion. Bold and challenging, A Vindication of Love has inspired praise and controversy, and brilliantly reinvigorated the romance debate. A perfect choice for readers of Alain de Botton’s How Proust Can Change Your Life and Pierre Bayard’s How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins
    Release dateJun 16, 2009
    ISBN9780061886584
    Unavailable
    A Vindication of Love: Reclaiming Romance for the Twenty-first Century

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    • 4/5
      A Vindication of LoveChristina NehringThis is an impassioned piece of social commentary, arguing for the return of intense and passionate loving between men and women, love that takes risks. The author argues that feminism, and the need for safety and predictability has squeezed the romance out of relations between the sexes. The feminists argue that creativity and passion in love are not fit subjects for a woman and serve only to keep her subservient to men. The author presents many literary and historical models of loves that were daring, and un-apologetic. Her command of literature finds many gems, and her writing style is clear and brisk. It is refreshing to have a definite point of view, argued forcefullyQuotes:“It never troubles the sun,” wrote Ralph Waldo Emerson in one of his later essays, “that some of his rays fall wide and vain into ungrateful space, and only a small part on the reflecting planet. Let your greatness educate the cold and crude companion. If he is unequal, he will presently pass away; but thou, thou art enlarged by thy own shining.”What Socrates is saying above all else in Symposium is that love makes us think. Love makes us explore. Love makes us blaze through new subjects and new cultures; it makes us hatch new visions.Youth and beauty is a form of power‚ as anyone knows who has read a Philip Roth novel in which the decrepit celebrity intellectual is awestruck by an unknown young shiksa whom he perceives as omnipotent; as anyone knows who has ever loved a person of lesser years or greater physical attractiveness.German poet Rainer Maria Rilke: ‘In all things except love, nature herself enjoins men to collect themselves‚ while in the heightening of love, the impulse is to give oneself wholly away.” The problem is that ‚ “When a person abandons himself, he is no longer anything, and when two people both give themselves up in order to come close to each other, there is no longer any ground beneath them and their being together is a continual falling.”Emerson challenges us to choose what it is we most wish to befriend in our companions‚ for we cannot have everything. “Are you’” he demands, “the friend of your friend’s buttons, or of his thought? To a great heart, he will be a stranger in a thousand particulars, that he may come near in the holiest ground.”“There are some theories which are much weakened by the unfortunate presence of facts”“It is impossible,” declared the Countess of Champagne in the thirteenth century, “for true love to exert its powers between two people married to each other.”“For one human being to love another: that is perhaps the most difficult of our tasks, the ultimate, the work for which all other work is but preparation.” Rainer Maria RilkeIt was your manner of telling me about [the doctor] Pagello‚ of his caring for you and your affection for him‚ and the frankness with which you let me read your heart. Always treat me so; it makes me proud. My dear, the woman who speaks thus of her new lover to the one she has just left, and who still loves her, accords him the greatest proof of esteem that a man may receive from a woman.