The recently republished classic novel about university scientists, The Stoner, has gained unexpected popularity. We hasten to share the definition of love and happiness taken from it.
“In the forty-third year of his life, William Stoner learned what many people know much earlier: that the person you love him is not equal to the person you will love him in the end, that love is not a goal, but a process by which a person trying to get to know the person.
They were both very shy and got to know each other slowly, timidly; then approached, clung to each other. Then they retreated, moved away, not wanting to be imposed, to be a burden. But day by day the layers of protective restraint peeled off one by one, and eventually, like many very shy people, they opened up to each other completely, without fear or embarrassment.
In his early youth, Stoner imagined love as some kind of absolute state of being, available to those who were lucky; as he grew older, he began to think of it as the heaven of false religion, which a reasonable person can look at either with good-natured disbelief, or with mildly familiar contempt, or with embarrassment and nostalgic sadness. Now, in middle age, he began to understand that love is neither a divine grace nor an illusion; he saw in it a human act of becoming, a state which every minute and day by day is created and perfected by will, mind and heart.
Read more:
- How do we know it’s love?
Those hours that he used to sit in his office, looking out the window at the landscape, which either glowed or dimmed under his empty gaze, he now spent with Katherine. Every day, early in the morning, he would come to the office, sit there impatiently for ten or fifteen minutes, and then, unable to find peace, would walk across the campus to the library, where he wandered among the shelves for another ten or fifteen minutes. And finally, as if it were some kind of game with himself, he would end the delay to which he had given himself, slip out of the library through the side door and go to Katherine.
She had a long, graceful, tender-furious body; when he touched her, her flesh seemed to give life to his clumsy hand. Sometimes he began to look at her body as a cherished treasure; he let his blunt, rough fingers play with the moist, pinkish skin of her thighs and belly, marveling at the refined simplicity with which her small, firm breasts had been carved. It occurred to him one day that the body of another person had always been something unknown to him before; and it also occurred to me that this was precisely why he always somehow separated the alien “I” from the body in which this “I” lived. And at last it occurred to him—with the finality of solid knowledge—that he had never really known anyone close to anyone, that he had neither complete trust nor truly warm affection for anyone.
D. Williams “Stoner” (AST: Corpus, 2015).