In honor of Valentine’s Day, and the feelings of love it engenders, I’ve decided to devote this post to the notion of love as portrayed in love stories. A well crafted love story transcends time, touching our hearts generations after it has been written. My favorites are the classic tales of star-crossed lovers, such as Romeo & Juliet, Orpheus and Eurydice, Abigail and John Adams, Marie & Paul Curie, Napoleon and Josephine, as well as the story of Tristan and Isolde’s taboo love affair.
The writers of classic stories emphasize love as a life altering and shaping experience, with the potential to heal or cause harm. While the plot may lean toward the melodramatic, I think these stories portray love’s nuances more fully than contemporary works. For example, in the classic story of Romeo & Juliet, Shakespeare presents the dangerous elements of love, addressing the turbulence of passion in images of violence, death, religion, and family in an impressionistic rush that leads to the story’s tragic conclusion.
I love the Greek myth about Orpheus and Eurydice, the couple separated on their wedding day when Eurydice is killed and is taken to the underworld. A bereft Orpheus secures permission to bring her back to life under one condition: That he lead her through the dark tunnels of Hell without looking back to see if she is following him. But, as soon as Orpheus sees the light at the end of the tunnel (so to speak), he glances back at Eurydice. She suddenly disappears, with a final “goodbye,” leaving behind a gasping and horrified Orpheus.
The theme of this story, the potential for love’s loss when one fails to understand its power, underscores the faith we must have in love’s ability to live on in our hearts. In fact, some believe that love’s survival depends on our willingness to surrender to and trust its strength.
Contemporary love stories seem to convey the message that love exists in limited supply, an idea that contemporary author, Deepak Chopra argues against in The Path to Love: Renewing the Power of Spirit in Your life. Chopra’s central claim is that spirituality is at the basis of all forms of love. This essence, he argues, infuses our hearts with love for one another, for family, friends and for God. I love Chopra for tying together spiritual and romantic love, because it affirms my feelings that spiritual love precedes romantic love. If we cannot love one another at the level of spirit, we are limited in our ability to share any other kind of love.
When we have expanded our perception of love and begin to share love on different levels, Chopra maintains that we’ll begin to love so deeply. we’ll turn into love–a natural state for human beings. He writes that compassion–the highest level of love, becomes possible only when we understand our worthiness, our level of perfection in the eyes of God. Loving with compassion frees us from imposing conditions or expectations on our loved ones.
Maybe the reason the classic love stories still tug at our hearts is, they reveal love’s essence, without simplifying it into a so-called Hallmark moment. At some level, I believe we want to learn to trust in love and my contribution to this effort is this post in support of love’s enduring power to sustain us as human beings.
