Excerpts from Scott Spencer's "A Ship Made of Paper" on love

For a while I have taken a very Aristotelian approach on studying the subject of love, relationships, etc. (among other things) Aristotle would systematically try to collect every known example or bit of information about a subject, take the best parts from the collection and hopefully develop some new insights in the process. At the very least he would end up with a really good conceptual understanding of the subject. One of the most notable areas he did this in was politics, where he collected and analyzed the constitutions from dozens of Greek city states and in the end used what he learned to write a treatise on politics. Many of his contributions are the foundations of modern liberal democracy and markets. But he also did this when considering ethics, and the nature of friendship, the purpose of life, etc. He never did this about love, but his treatise on friendship is very similar. He might very well have but many of his writings are lost and most of what remains comes from lecture notes. (I am a great admirer of Aristotle, despite his faults he was probably the greatest person to have ever lived, single handedly making more of a difference in the world than any other individual has yet)

So with that in mind, I have been taking a long hard look at relationships, love, and their philosophical basis.

To start with I want to give you some excerpts from Scott Spencer’s “A Ship Made of Paper” During my phase of really paying close attention to this subject I happened to catch an interview with this individual on NPR. “A Ship Made of Paper” is sort of a commentary on modern relationships told through the story of Daniel and Kate (a different Kate ;) ) and Daniel’s infatuation with another women, Iris. It is set in the modern day and Daniel and Kate (who are white) have been in a relationship for some time and Daniel falls in love with Iris (who is black and married; the racial tension of the relationships is a subtext of the story unimportant to this discussion but is a significant part of the story) The story follows Daniels courtship, coming to terms with his affection for Iris, wanting to leave Kate, Kate trying to talk him out of it, and then eventually Daniel and Iris getting together.

The characters represent different conceptions of the modern narratives of love. I consider Scott Spencer to be a good representation of the absolute or mystical narratives of love, and his stories convey it well (another, Endless Love, is quite fascinating, there is a good movie made on one of his books called “Waking the Dead”) Those narratives, or definitions, or conceptualizations, whatever we want to call them, are what I have been greatly interested in and working on identifying. Daniel falls madly in love with Iris even though he barely knows her. Iris, flattered by Daniel’s adoration and in an uninspired purely pragmatic relationship, starts to feel similar for Daniel. Kate represents a much more practical and rational view on the subject with some of her criticisms of society’s preaching about love as if it were a god.

Whenever I read a book I mark and later transcribe the salient points or interesting lines from it. These are all from “A Ship Made of Paper” Let me give some excerpts now. (not all dealing only with Love)

From "A Ship made of Paper" by Scott Spencer

Beauty for my eyes
"Yet this desire, this overwhelming need to look at her-who he is convinced is not only beautiful but beautiful in a way that only he can fully appreciate, a beauty somehow designed especially for his eyes"

The author describing some of Daniel’s feelings toward Iris.

"The sky is dark blue and the autumn sun is warm and steady, as if promising that winter will never arrive. A slow breeze moves down the street, carrying the perfume of the slowly drying leaves, a nearby field’s last mowing, the river. What can the world do to you with its beauty? Can it life you up on its shoulders, as if you were a hero, can it whoopsie daisy you up into its arms as if you were a child? Can it goad your timid heart, urge you on to finally seize what you most shamefully desire? Yes, yes, al that and more. The world can crush you with its beauty"

Just a line I liked from the book, I think it captures well some of the innate beauty of the world.

Melville
"In the soul of a man, there is one insular Tahiti, full of peace and joy, but encompassed by all the horror of the half lived life"

This line is from ‘Moby Dick’ and was quoted by Kate to Daniel. After a miserable double date with Kate and Daniel (while still together) and Iris and her husband, Hampton, Kate quotes this to Daniel and the says “Did you have a little peek at Tahiti and now you have to go home to your half lived life?” This is a good line and a good thing to think about. The original goes like this;

“Consider all this; and then turn to this green, gentle, and most docile earth; consider them both, the sea and the land; and do you not find a strange analogy to something in yourself? For as this appalling ocean surrounds the verdant land, so in the soul of man there lies one insular Tahiti, full of peace and joy, but encompassed by all the horrors of the half known life. God keep thee! Push not off from that isle, thou canst never return!”

An excellent allegorical commentary on wondering about paths not traveled in life and the consequences of choices taken. When talking about relationships this is indicative of how very important it is to be aware of the foundation of one’s relationships. If the basis is purely beauty, there will always be someone else more beautiful and one’s affections will keep getting pulled and shifted. If the basis is talent, there will always be someone more talented, if money, there will always be someone with more money.

I like to make the analogy of building a house on some property, one could search forever for the right property to build on, there might always be something with a better view, or a better deal, or with better schools. But at some point someone must take the plunge and pick some land to start building. If they have built something significant but later find a really good deal on some property they like much more, it might be worth it to abandon everything existing that has been built. But the more you build, the more there is between two people in a relationship, the less chance there is of someone else exceeding those things and drawing you away. To abandon all that a couple have built together will require a really damn good island or lot, so the more two people have built together the less likely they are to be pulled apart. But the foundation of the relationship must be solidly based on respect, admiration, and complimentary values, not arbitrary whims, fanciful notions, or hedonism.

Kate on asserting that Iris and Hampton’s marriage won’t last

“He’s on edge all the time, looking for little slights against his dignity. She wants to live in a world where a little spilled water is just an accident, not an incident”

This is just a decent line hinting at some possible fundamental incompatibilities between people.

Kate’s reprieve to Daniel
" 'You know', Kate says, pouring herself more wine, less judiciously this time, "People think that love is what’s best in each of us, our capacity to love, our need for love. They think love is like God, and they worship their own feelings of love, which is really just narcissism masquerading as spirituality. You understand? If we say that God is love, then we can say that love is God, and that gives us the right to all these chaotic, needy, lusting, insane feelings inside of ourselves. We can call it love, and from there it’s just a hop, skip, and a jump to calling it God. But here's a thought. What if God isn’t love? And love isn’t God? What if all those emotions we call love turn out to be what's really worst in us, what if its all the firings of the foulest, most primitive part of the back brain, what if its just as savage and selfish as rage, greed, or lust?"

"Love has become some insane substitute for religion; I think that’s what's happened. And in this country it’s pounded in on us at all times, every radio station, every TV station, all the magazines, all the ads, everywhere, it’s like living in a theocracy, it’s like living in Jordan and people are shouting out lines from the Koran from the top of every mosque. Love, Love, Love, but what they're really saying is: Take what you want and the hell with everything else...Love is like a crystal ball, you gaze into its cracked heart and you see what you want to see. It's really scary. It feels like the whole culture has gone insane"

This is a part I like quite a bit. One of the narratives of love is the absolute narrative, that love is everything, conquers all, and is the purpose of life, etc. Love is screamed at us from billboards, movies, TV, songs, it’s all over the place. Love for it’s own sake is extremely unhealthy, people fall in love with being in love and they use it to justify all sorts of crazy things. They fall in love with needing someone and base the relationship on the need instead of the person and the qualities that should make someone love a person.

"Intuition? What is that, we intuit what we want to intuit. We never intuit things that are against our interests and desires. Maybe intuition is just one of the many ways we have of elevating desire, making something mystical rather than base"

This is just another good thing to keep in mind stemming from Kate’s practical-ness. We intuit things based on our assessment of the situation and our values. It is important to acknowledge that we are able to recognize things that we might not be conscious of the reasons why we recognize it, that is how our mind works as a distributed pattern recognition system, it can be quite good at it so give some value to gut reactions, they are not mystical but can still be quite valuable. But it is important not to over value these reactions and know their limitations.

“I really feel as if I found a kindred spirit in you. And this isn’t intuition, or some mystical crapola about our being cosmic twins, or that it was written in the stars, because, lets face it, that’s not how life is, life’s a bunch of accidents, senseless. We improvise, we keep it together. But with you, it’s more.”

A life

Daniel had tossed a notebook of love poems into a river and his infatuation with Iris reminds him of what he felt back then, and he realizes he was just going through the motions of life.

”Side arming that notebook into the river did not mean that from then on he lived in some anguished exile from romance; he was not like a priest who loses his faith and then becomes a drunk or a fornicator. He did not feel bitterness, he did not feel any loss. He simply knew better and it was over. Those feelings were like his milk teeth; his bite was sturdier after that. And in place of all that inchoate desire, he went on to other pursuits: public service, respectability, sex, money. His brief childish dream of love was over, and went on. He had relationships. He had a life, by which people seemed to mean a certain accumulation of days and experience, all mortared into some kind of shapeless shape by an adult gravitas.”

The ghostly girl
“That phantom female, that ghostly girl…all those creatures of his longing, all those spirits of love and desire whom he thought he had exorcised with the power of plain old common sense, put in their place at the back of class by irony, experience, and practicality, they had survived after all, they had not been cast out, they had merely shrunk back, they had hibernated, and now they are awake, they are swirling around and around, and they fused into a single women.”

Daniel is wrestling between those different narratives of love, between the practical and the absolute.

She slows him down
“She slows him down, in ways he needs slowing down, helps him to see the fragile, transitory beauty of the world. He has sat with her in complete silence…watching the fire for an hour, two hours, enjoying a stillness and simplicity he could never have imagined without her.”

Hampton, Iris’ husband is reflecting on what he likes about Iris.

Time can not be recaptured
“The sight of the old man fills Daniel’s heart with urgency: time passes, bodies decay, every day spent without love is lost forever, the time cannot be recaptured or made up for”

This is a wonderful line capturing the value of moments and life. Daniel recognizes that every second he spends away from his love is lost forever and in watching the old man realizes how finite it is.

“It’s maddening to be constantly on the lookout for her”

I simply like this line because it captured what I was going through at the time, being very much in love with a girl who was less and less part of my life, I was certainly constantly on the lookout for her and it was quite maddening.

Daniel and Kate in therapy
“Daniel feels he is being lured into what a man in his position must never do: looking into the heart of the person he is leaving…He can not offer her hope, nor solace. If Kate is here to…heal her wounds, then he should not be here. He is the cause of her pain, he is the source, that churning in her stomach, he put it there, that sense of exclusion and exile-it comes from him. But what can he do? He can not be for himself and for her, too. Their interests are in collision. There is no middle ground. What he wants is what is tearing Kate apart”

This is a really good excerpt highlighting the importance of selfish-ness, a word that has way too many negative connotations attached to it now. We only have on life to live and we are right in living it with ourselves as it’s center. Daniel can not be for Kate and for himself, one of them will suffer that torment and anguish. If she or society demands he not put it on her then it is necessarily demanding he torture himself. Being involved in a relationship like that is poisoning and extremely unhealthy. I am sure each of us have been in similar situations, not being happy but not being strong enough to leave, worried about hurting the other person. But I think too many people put up with too many hurtful things in relationships. A proper, and not to mention absolutely wonderful relationship, is one where neither party sacrifices any part of themselves to the relationship, instead it is a unification of both of their individual desires. I have had only one relationship since I have made a strong effort to integrate this into my own philosophy and it was been absolutely exhilarating, far more beautiful, stimulating, and enriching for both of us than all my previous relationships combined. I have tried to integrate strongly into my life being deeply respectful of individuality. I often feel I respect some people’s individuality more than they themselves do, sadly.

Wasting a heart

“Have you ever felt the kind of love for me…that you’d rather die than live without? I don’t think you ever have, and I think it’s a sad life, and a waste of a heart”

Here Daniel elaborates on his feeling of love for Iris. Daniel, embracing absolute love wholly, values that love and that other person now more than his own existence. I think this is very unhealthy and is the kind of unhealthyness that can often come from this narrative of love. Loving for it’s own sake, embracing all the small deviations that come from daily experiences and embellishing and amplifying them. For someone to say “I love you” they must first be able to say ‘I’ To love someone more than your own existence negates the very concept of love, because it is you that must love them.

Have you ever
”Have you ever made love for six hours barely stopping? Have you ever had nine orgasms in a night? Have you ever seen me weep form the sight of your beauty?...Have you ever known me to be helpless with passion? …Have you ever been willing to give up everything for another person?”

Again Daniel is relishing in this love. I think many of these things he says here are beautiful and can really capture some of the feelings of a good loving relationship, but he goes too far. Throughout this book the author never really seems to have Daniel consider the reasons why he loves Iris, the only thing he ever seems to relates is the way she makes him feel. Without a clear cause for those feelings, Daniel’s love is in danger of drifting with any whim because it is not based on any solid foundations.

Misc
“Like many men with clear goals, Hampton was impatient, quick to anger”

Just a line I liked to help remind myself not to be so quick to anger when something is obstructing any goal I am working hard toward.

- Michael

Hello Mark, I wanted to take a minute to make some comments on your post on faith..

As a strong Atheist I would generally agree with your statement about atheists being sad, the conclusion is obvious. Death is a very terrible thing and only an Atheist can truly appreciate it’s significance, and it *should* be depressing and upsetting. It as an absolutely and utterly terrible thing. There is nothing wrong with being sad at things that should make you said. There is everything wrong with not being sad about things that should make you sad. The fact that the rest of the population feels better by deluding themselves is no rational attack against atheism. You are saying ‘if something bothers you, just don’t believe in it, then you will be happy’ That is certainly not logical, that is philosophical solipsism.

Additionally suggesting that one should believe in god merely because it makes them *feel* better is extremely irrational and arbitrary. Which god? To what extent? What else should I believe just because it makes me feel better? That someone loves me who really doesn’t? Also I don’t think someone living in an oppressive theocratic regime would feel the same way.

As an atheist there are certain things that make me very sad, but I disagree with your assessment about everything else, to the person of faith, everything is known and explained, to the atheist there are still many questions out there and everything is fascinating. The very fact that death does not make people of faith very sad is the primary reason why philosophical death is accepted and those who wish to overcome it are considered evil, selfish, or vile. It is the reason why it has perpetuated. People of faith, and who believe in god, are on an eternal prozac, justified in whatever illusion they fancy that can make them feel better. Their son dies, well, it was god’s will and he works in mysterious ways (ways conveniently absolutely indistinguishable from not working at all) Their mother dies, well she is off in a better place, knitting away for all of eternity, watching that Yankees game from heaven, etc. That is madness.

Of course nearly any atheist you ask will assert that the world is a more colorful place by being an atheist, and a theist will assert the opposite. Whatever those strongly held beliefs are they tend to amplify someone’s existing outlook on life.

I value reality over absolutely everything else, I will not make any effort to get by through evasions or self delusions, because once somebody philosophically accepts willingly deluding themselves it becomes easier and easier every step of the way, until they outright reject reality and favor new agey ‘my thoughts shape the universe’ nonsense. Thoughts which alone have not the power to alter the course of a single speck of dust in the entire universe.

You said : “The athiest, whose god is science, is now denying the science behind faith. How's that for logical? “

There is no science behind faith, you are only speaking of the feelings one associates with faith. Even if you did weigh all people who feel better by believing vs all that feel better by not believing and one comes in at more, that is an extremely utilitarian argument and ignores the idea of whether it is right or wrong to believe in something that is clearly irrational just because it makes more people happy. And faith is not paragon of happiness, consider the doctrine of original sin asserts all humans are guilty by merely existing. The faith has traditionally been used as merely another means to brutally oppress people.

Faith, in principle, is the opposite of reason, it is knowledge acquired by divine introspection completely irrespective of the real universe. Reason is knowledge acquired by observation, hypothesis, experimentation and conceptual integration. Faith makes people much more accepting of the very idea of death, and thus serves to perpetuate the philosophical acceptance of death as (take your pick) natural, the way of things, the end of your turn, gods plan, etc.

When he said “They live longer, are healthier, are happier and more content, have a stronger family base and even better sex lives” I would say that may very well be true, especially for people who live habitual lives. But the men who have made the world more enjoyable, made our lives longer, and our wealth greater, did it by progressively accepting reason over faith. And the only reason these irrational people get to live long lives at all is because of all the work and effort accomplished by those who negate faith and use reason to identify real problems and real solutions to those problems.

You said “The fact that all humans KNOW in their unconscious that death is imminent, is what drags down an athiest's attitude. How can you be happy when you know that death is coming”

Which is why, as an atheist, I feel compelled to do everything I can to combat death. And it is also why a theist generally feels absolutely no compulsion to do anything about death. It is the very reason why practically nothing has been done to combat death. By philosophically ignoring a problem you never make any headway in overcoming it. Men never prevented starvation by believing that merely opening ones mouth will cause food to fall from the sky. As another example, my cat is not unhappy about dying, and he could be considered an a-theist. Should one relegate the very concept of consciousness in order to no longer be afraid of dying? That is the Buddhist teaching, after all. Death *should* make you unhappy, it is the destruction of your highest value, your own existence. It is absolutely irrational to not be unhappy about dying.

You said “Atheism could be realistic, but it destroys your living, breathing moments. It destroys life, and when that is gone there is nothing after it. Where as faith makes life worth living, but it might give you a false sense of security.”

Obviously a conclusion I very strongly disagree with. Being an atheist made me realize how truly precious life is, consider the fundamentalists who have no qualms about murdering believing they are sending their victims to a better place. An atheist would never hold any such opinion. Being an atheist emphasizes the importance of every single moment I am alive, of every single breath and heartbeat. Of every touch and embrace. Theism, and believing that there is an afterlife, is what, objectively, destroys life. Not atheism.

This atheist, upon making that leap, loved life that much more and found precious moments where none were before and value were before only existed emptiness.

Michael