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who knows how to make love stay?
26 Sep 2006 10:30 amOne of the stories in Peter Høeg's collection Tales of the Night has replaced Murder Mysteries as my new favourite short story. It's called An Experiment in the Constancy of Love and it's like it was entirely written with me in mind. It's about a female physicist who develops a theory of love and sets out to test it scientifically and I can't even explain how many buttons of mine it hits. Even the little grubby personal ones that I didn't even know I had, like suspecting that the feeling of utter displacement in one's own time is what keeps one figuratively frozen. And the fact that most things can fall under rigid scientific control, but right at the pinnacle of discovery there will be something sublime and inexplicable, and it will hurt. It will destroy your foundations and rip your world away but you will understand, in that moment, more than you ever have before.
The story is concerned, ultimately, with what Tom Robbins would call the single most important question of all time: how to make love stay.
It's perfect. It's perfect. It actually reminds me a little of Doctor Who, which you might think weird, but the relationship between the protagonist and her subject is very close, in many ways, to a gender-reversed version of the things I find intriguing about the Doctor and Rose's relationship. Time travel as a way of breaking emotional barriers; determined attachment on one side and created distance on the other; finding new aspects of yourself through the actions of someone that you have underestimated.
Outside it was pitch-black night, and with the cogent scientific mind's covert delight in mysterious parallels and synchronisms Charlotte noted that the storm which the young Jean-Luc had heard blowing up two hundred years before, and preserved for posterity in his diary, was once more beating against the windows and making the willow branches whiplash menacingly over the monument bearing Rousseau's sensitive features.
(JI. LOOK. *flails*)
I am seriously considering typing the whole thing up and posting it, if my fingers can stand it, because it's the kind of thing one wants to spill out onto others.
The story is concerned, ultimately, with what Tom Robbins would call the single most important question of all time: how to make love stay.
It's perfect. It's perfect. It actually reminds me a little of Doctor Who, which you might think weird, but the relationship between the protagonist and her subject is very close, in many ways, to a gender-reversed version of the things I find intriguing about the Doctor and Rose's relationship. Time travel as a way of breaking emotional barriers; determined attachment on one side and created distance on the other; finding new aspects of yourself through the actions of someone that you have underestimated.
Outside it was pitch-black night, and with the cogent scientific mind's covert delight in mysterious parallels and synchronisms Charlotte noted that the storm which the young Jean-Luc had heard blowing up two hundred years before, and preserved for posterity in his diary, was once more beating against the windows and making the willow branches whiplash menacingly over the monument bearing Rousseau's sensitive features.
(JI. LOOK. *flails*)
I am seriously considering typing the whole thing up and posting it, if my fingers can stand it, because it's the kind of thing one wants to spill out onto others.
