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Vincent Kardos
English 101: Critical Reasoning
Essay Two: Definition of Love
15 November 2009
Describe what Love is!
“What is Love?” One may ask themselves, when they should be asking, “where does love come from?” Love must be the ability to “love” love itself, is it not? One must know where love originates and examine why in order to know what love is. Whether subconscious, hidden, or fully exposed, love is without a word of splendor, it is splendor in spirit; after all, much like true happiness, it is the journey that makes one happy, not the result. Mark one’s own love of the universe and it will compensate dull times, lest one hates the universe. Hate can spur love for another as well; not absolute love, but a more irenic palpable version. One is unmistakable in knowing that almost everyone has a different kind of love expression but from what things may love derive from? Romance? Lust? Hate?
Romantic love is like the kind of innocent blissful ignorance blemished from a moment of being forever spoilt by another, unknowingly becoming the kind of addiction that goes along with an addictive personality. Much like a poem of yearning expression for something enquired, like Susan Minot’s whiny narration in the poem of Lust, speaking as if “You’re gone. That their blank look tells you that the girl they were fucking is not there anymore. You seem to have disappeared” (262). Or the story of the wishful wife and husband in Girls in their Summer Dresses, by Irwin Shaw, who plead for equality in a destabilized relationship (352-357); both stories always questioning and always wanting more, a more romantic love. Speaking “truly” is the unequaled meaning in comprehension of the scenario, easily represented in the movie Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, with Joel’s forgotten longing to be sought out by the girl named Clementine. Clementine may end up finding Joel, but the journey of seeking the one looking to be sought is the true romance. Love can be a very hoarse thing when thought of by the broken or divided, the crushed and debilitated, or the loved then lost, but romantic love is the extension of evidence that one must keep on living and never give up for another. The clarity of pursuit becomes that much clearer when romance becomes the dominant. A whole army, poised for utter destruction, cannot defeat the undying rebel that is romantic love for another. Romantic love will always prevail, imbue the pursuer, and live forever. When and if captured, one has succumbed to the revelry, and the lust.
Lust. The felicitous instinct humans have retained from primal relatives without care for the primal relatives themselves. Maybe lust is described best as a truculent emotion towards someone or something as if they are a temporary object at any given moment of one’s immediate infatuation. In Sealed with a Kiss the writer, Jim Shahin, recalls his galumphing success of his first kiss (98). He incites experiences of what he called romantic love of the girl he kissed, saying, “I wrote poems and mailed them to her. I even daydreamed about marrying her.” but by October this feeling was gone and the girl was nothing but an object of accomplishing his first awkward kiss. Jim experienced the fugacious milieu of summertime lust. This kind of agog titillation is expertly conveyed by Oscar Wilde’s poem, Silentium Amoris, where he reveals to himself in an anatomical fashion, “So my too stormy passions work me wrong. And for excess of Love my Love is dumb.” “Else it were better we should part, and go, Thou to some lips of sweeter melody, And I to nurse the barren memory Of unkissed kisses, and songs unsung.” In his poem Wilde confides in himself what is obvious – lust – and moves on carefully and securely; although sadly and with unactualized dreams, but moving on nonetheless without a whim of hate.
Hate is by definition the opposite of love. This idea poses a surprising threat in one’s mind, one that is capital in punishment. Teresa McGinnis in What We Talk About When We Talk About Love had received so much hateful beatings from a relationship with her ex-husband, which essentialized her feelings towards him with that of love (Carver 138). Love like this is like a hose you find yourself drowning yourself with. This is not unheard of as many people are beaten to the point of feeling cared for, possibly through gratefulness or maybe a sick sensation; either way I do not personally agree with people who practice or partake in this kind of love but I do understand where love like this may come from. Before I attended college as much as I do now I had a crazed abysmal hate for the world I resided in; the world did not appeal to me as an ideal place for one to live. After years of maundering this mental and physical torture I envisioned what a perfect world would be like, what a world one like me should be able to live in without hate. Thus burgeoned a passionate love for the future. I am now on that path towards a determined future, one I can ameliorate for everyone. This is my kind of love.
As one can see, the derivatives ultimately determine the love presented. When Joel and Clementine found themselves to be an unmatchable couple near the end of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, they still understood love can continue as long as they were “okay” with each other’s problems. They were truly in love, taking into account everything that composed that love, a few being romance, lust, and hate. When one asks themselves “What is love?” They may find love through self discovery. You cannot just ask anyone, you must know from your own experience, and ask thyself. As Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind ended the lyrics were played, “everybody’s got to learn sometime” (Campbell track 9).
Sources:
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Dir. Michel Gondry. Focus Features, 2004.
Wilde, Oscar.”Silentium Amoris.” Famous Poets And Poems . com. 5 November 2009.
Campbell, Beck. “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind Original Soundtrack.”
Hollywood Records, 2004.
Silentium Amoris
by Oscar Wilde
As often-times the too resplendent sun
Hurries the pallid and reluctant moon
Back to her sombre cave, ere she hath won
A single ballad from the nightingale,
So doth thy Beauty make my lips to fail,
And all my sweetest singing out of tune.And as at dawn across the level mead
On wings impetuous some wind will come,
And with its too harsh kisses break the reed
Which was its only instrument of song,
So my too stormy passions work me wrong,
And for excess of Love my Love is dumb.But surely unto Thee mine eyes did show
Why I am silent, and my lute unstrung;
Else it were better we should part, and go,
Thou to some lips of sweeter melody,
And I to nurse the barren memory
Of unkissed kisses, and songs never sung.
“You might wear clothing made in Indonesia, drive a Japanese car fueled by Saudi Arabian oil, watch a British program on a South Korean television set, and eat Mexican food while being served by a Salvadorian… To be living in this century and to not know the world is a shameful indictment of our education system.”
- Marc Mancini, Travel Professional
Here is my list of Gaming Podcasts:
Drunken Gamers Radio — First and foremostly: the best listening I do during the week.
A Life Well Wasted — Introduced to me by the Drunken Gamers, A Life Well Wasted podcast touched upon near spiritual resolution of playing video games. Go ahead, give it a shot.
Rebel FM — From the rubble comes a new order: Rebel FM.
Listen UP — 1UP’s Listen UP podcast is a voice for Garnet Lee and his cronies.
Podcast Beyond — I do a great deal of Playstation gaming which reflects upon my weekly listening. IGN.com’s Podcast Beyond is a podcast about Sony’s Playstation and it’s games.
Massively Speaking — All things MMO, brought to you by Massively.com.
Home of Columbus, Hitler, Plato, and others of the vast influential people in history, Europe is a height of our world’s most critical potentials. Take my example of Nazis. When writing a screen-write or perhaps designing a video game, one can never go wrong with making the bastard scum Nazis hateable. This is taken from the good vs. evil in WWII, arguably with Nazis being the assumable evil. Nazis procure so much of the worlds potential (and still do) for creating stories, thanks to their very real place in history for being the bad guys. Say a video game was made (thanks to the Drunken Gamers), Hitler being the boss of the game of course, with mini-bosses such as Himmler, and with Nazis being so easily identifiable as the antagonist, so real, a game like this would be cake and more cake. With such an endless potential to tap into in Europe, who wouldn’t want to at least visit?
I’m an American EuroAsian living in Southern California in a place called Orange County. My life has almost entirely resided here with exception to small vacations and my brief one year residence in Kentucky. America has developed and endured some of the greediest, loathsome characters in the entire world. I’ve noticed at a bottom level of American society, which I frequently get tangled into, people generally do not care for one another. This despicable truth can be witnessed by almost anybody, most especially in California. I’ve begone crude times facing nature in ways like this and without being able to adapt or needing to adapt, like a normal socialite should, I want out. Europe is my scapegoat, not in the actual sense of a scapegoat or for the fruitless meaning one may get out of it, but for the better.
I aM Not Weird…I aM Not Strange….I aM “Different”
Introductions are usually meant to tell a healthy amount of information about one person to another. There has always got to be a way to break the ice and move onto greater chat and personality. When I plan to talk to someone new I immediately ask about job and school status just to get things out of the way. This reveals the juicy parts , ready to be plucked by following questions. To every which person, this is the part where anything goes, as the ‘get out of jail free card’ has been used up with this new person. My example of myself, I surround myself with gamer blood and I’ll admit my partial intentions when meeting new people is to find if the person is a gamer or not. The typical American gamer is 35, overweight, and near broke. If I meet someone with one of these three qualities, I am most likely to not talk about gaming. New games are always changing and for the competitive gamer, staying up to date is (ehem..) a daily ritual of possible financial proportions where no mere man can accomplish. This ritual includes being able to do some online research and computer know-how. With this in mind, I am able to select this new person I just met as a friend. And together, we can rule cyberspace!
I’m hungry.
Chefs are culinary experts. Just about anyone can give a chef an assortment of random ingredients and with a little bit of additive (such as flour or vinegar), the chef can make you a three course dinner. Trust me on this one, I have tested a five star hotel chef from Ghana to making me dinner with nothing but sausage and cheese. He adequately shut my mouth.
