I’d most likely never have a plane meet-cute like Chloe and the narrator because I give off “please don’t ever talk to me unless absolutely necessary” vibes when I’m on a flight lol
But also I’ve just never sat next to a cute guy around my age on a plane… EVER?? so maybe if I ever did, I’d be a bit more friendly
The narrator says he was in love by the time they were waiting for their luggages at baggage claim but that can’t be true. You can’t really “love” someone like 3 hours after meeting them — you are confusing interest/lust/curiosity/attraction with love. Is Chloe the narrator’s ‘manic pixie dream girl’?! He’s such a textbook 금사빠 it’s actually really funny when the airport officer asks if he has anything to declare and he wants to say his love for Chloe lmao calm down now
The narrator “fell out of love” with Chloe because of her taste in SHOES? If someone’s taste in shoes makes you “fall out of love” with them, it was either 1) never truly love, or 2) symbolic of something else, something bigger that is actually worthy of analysis that the person is blind to, and so is blaming the shoes as a substitute. I don’t particularly like the narrator (who tf leaves to buy strawberry jam when the woman makes you breakfast the morning after you have sex?! just have the raspberry jam for god’s sake) but I think de Bottom actually did a great job in making him funny — the narrator goes on to ‘justify’ his shoe-induced fall out of love by comparing it to Baudelaire’s story about how someone’s class privilege/ignorance was a turn off. Really? You really think those two things are equally valid?? lol I rest my case.
It promptly seemed easier to love Chloe without knowing her […] Perhaps the easiest people to fall in love with are those about whom we know nothing.
You can’t love someone without knowing them! The narrator confounds “fantasizing” about someone with loving someone. Or the idea of loving someone with actually loving someone. Not that I have direct experience yet, but I feel like this is common, especially among people my age. In a way, this could just be a sign of naïveté — let’s say it’s an innocent, youthful mistake. But in a way, isn’t it quite dehumanizing to be reduced down to an idea in somebody’s head that mistakenly thinks that they actually love you as a whole human being, when they actually view you as an idea, rather than as a whole human being that inevitably also has flaws? And when the person “falls out of love” because someone “blows her nose aggressively,” what did the woman do wrong besides just be human?
People we love at first sight are as free from conflicting tastes in shoes or literature as the unreleased symphony is free from off-key violins or late flutes. But as soon as the fantasy is played out, the angelic beings who floated through consciousness reveal themselves as material beings, laden with their own mental and physical history.
It’s actually interesting to me that there are people who ‘believe in love at first sight.’ At least in this quote above, the narrator acknowledges the fantasy of it all, when the ‘angelic beings’ ‘reveal themselves as material beings.’ One thing I kind of worry about sometimes about getting older and navigating dating and relationships is that my & everyone else’s ‘mental and physical history’ gets longer and heavier as time goes by, and how that probably makes everything harder, riskier, and scarier.
Love and liberalism (interesting little chapter on the tension between love/care and liberalism/freedom; how loose should the ‘leash’ be?)
It is no coincidence if, semantically speaking, love and interest are almost interchangeable. ‘I love butterflies’ meaning much the same as ‘I am interested in butterflies.’ To love someone is to take a deep interest in them, and by such concern to bring them to a richer sense of what they are doing and saying.
Well, yes, in the English language at least! I’ve always found it interesting how ‘love’ and ‘interest’ are almost interchangeable in English, like the narrator says. This was a pretty foreign concept to me as an English-learner — that it was perfectly normal to use the same word to describe how one feels about ice cream (“I love ice cream!”) as how one feels about their family, for example (“I love my family”). This isn’t exactly the case in Korean, and I wonder what it’s like in other languages.
I was afforded a chance to mature thanks to the insights into my personality that Chloe afforded me. It takes the intimacy of a lover to point out facets of character that others simply don’t bother with.
This, I agree with. You can substitute ‘a lover’ with family or a close, trusted friend.
My parents had not been overtly nasty, yet their stiffness had prevented Chloe from rising above monosyllabicity. It was a reminder that the labelling of others is usually a silent process. Most people do not openly force us into roles, they merely suggest that we adopt them through their reactions to us, and hence surreptitiously prevent us from moving beyond whatever mould they have assigned us.
Reminded me a little bit of when Sean told me that he feels like some of his friends view him as a stereotype.
We might define maturity as the ability to give everyone what they deserve when they deserve it, to separate the emotions that belong and should be restricted to oneself from those that should at once be expressed to their initiators rather than passed on to later and more innocent arrivals.
Something I need to work on sometimes.
We spend our time loving like utilitarians, in the bedroom we are followers of Hobbes and Bentham, not Plato and Kant. We make moral judgments on the basis of preference, not transcendental values.
If the narrator went to Stanford, he 1000% would have been a SLE kid. Like, the worst of the crop, too.
After breaking up with Chloe, the narrator contemplates suicide ‘so that she can know that he cannot live without her’ and he enjoys imagining how she’d react?! This pissed me off. And made me think about the value of trigger warnings in books/media in general.
The most sort of profound thing I noted in this book actually comes from the introduction by Sheila Heti, not from the actual book itself:
…it’s a philosophical novel in which love is shown to be the site of greatest paradox: where we become ourselves and lose ourselves, where we show ourselves to be very mighty and very weak, where we lose everything and gain everything. It is in love that we become most ourselves, and most like everyone else.
I have to read some of her works now because that was beautiful.
I feel like how much I like a book or not (in the case of fiction) is very strongly correlated with how much I like the protagonist. This narrator was annoying as fuck (I would stay away from this cringey SLE kid at all costs) especially toward the end.
