Perhaps you thought all the Brideshead Revisited posting was over. Not quite; I have one or two more passages that I want to mention and/or discuss (which in this case seems unnecessary). This is Charles and Cordelia; she has just finished telling him what’s become of Sebastian. Charles:
“Have you told Julia this about Sebastian?”
“The substance of it; not quite as I told you. She never loved him, you know, as we do.”
“Do.” The word reproached me; there was no past tense in Cordelia’s verb “to love.”
Update: I said above that this quotation didn’t really need any discussion, but I changed my mind. It’s an interesting question: we speak of love “dying,” usually meaning romantic love. But does it? Can it? Does love have a past tense?
I’m speaking of all kinds of love, not romantic love particularly. And with respect to romantic love I mean actual love, not infatuation, or even of a longer-lasting erotic intoxication that’s perhaps deeper than infatuation but hasn’t matured into the deep bond of love—we all know that these can arrive unexpectedly and disappear quickly without a trace. (And how sad for people who get married in that brief interval.)
It’s worth thinking about: defining love in the most ordinary way—having affection for someone and caring what happens to him or her—and looking all the way back to my earliest memories, from family to playmates and schoolmates, onward to lovers, spouse, friends, co-workers, adult relationships of all kinds, is there anyone I once loved but no longer do? Anyone to whom I feel a settled hostility where there once was affection? Anyone to whose fate I am now completely indifferent?
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