Love Writing

Abstract

Zeldin’s thoughts about love and play can easily be seen as a way of thinking about writing, too. We give ourselves completely to it, we play to lose, we lose ourselves, we use ourselves and our time in our ardour to write, we ache sometimes when some other duty prevents us from performing this primary duty to ourselves:

Conversation between men and women has barely begun Theodore Zeldin, An Intimate History of Humanity

(Minerva 1994).

Playing means giving oneself temporary freedom from duty and necessity, voluntarily taking risks and being excited because one does not know the outcome; ‘pretending’ is self-conscious delight in alternative possibilities, and appreciation of the fact that no victory is final. Is it an accident that the verb to win derives from the Indo-European root wen, to desire, and the verb to lose from the root los, to set free? Can playing at winning and losing be an apprenticeship in freedom? The Spanish to win, ganar, derives from the Gothic ganari, to covet, while perder (to lose) comes from the Latin perdere, which originally meant to give completely. The courtly lover who did not want to possess his ideal, who played to lose, discovered that whereas business and war were prosaically about possession, in love it was play that mattered most. Being willing to play is one of the conditions of creativity. Love, far from being a distraction from creativity, is a branch of it.

Ibid., p. 89