yen quoting hannah arendt: 'the common prejudice that love is as common as ‘romance’ may be due to the fact that we all learned about it first through poetry. but the poets fool us; they are the only ones to whom love is not only a crucial, but an indispensable experience, which entitles them to mistake it for a universal one.’ aside from the usual poetry on pedestal, poets special sensitive seers business, how do we know we're in love though, or if that's the so-called "romance"? or put it another way, how do we ever know that we love someone and that we are loved? nohrnberg says the reason the first time you fall in love is like no other time has to do with brain tissues not developping. something about a particular kind of brain tissue that stops you from being overemotional and oversensitive not developing fully till you're about 20, so that when you fall in love as an adult it's never feels as good or intense as when you're an adolescent. and yen tells me that we start losing our memory from the time we're about 20 , only we only realise this at about 40 cos we have so many memories we don't realise they're gone. that just strikes me as being very funny somehow. so, let's see, it would seem that on the one hand, when you're 20 you'll start forgetting what it's like to love in a emotion-heightened all-on-fire way, but on the otherhand you now have all this tissue in your brain that prevents you from being able to make more memories of the same sort. hahah. or of course we could turn it around and say, nah, the adolescent stuff doesn't count as love, in which case, that's not really much better either: on the one hand while you can remember every detail you can't love properly yet, but then by the time you're 20 you will start forgetting even as you're loving. this sort of turns neruda upside down. love is so short, but, oh for heaven's sake, haven't you forgotten yet? it's true though, somehow, forgetting is long. this reminds me of something else i was reading though, an essay i zapped to send yen, only it didn't fit the envelope, about how we're not really loving or learning anything new, but really remembering something we already knew from a past life. and that the sanskirt word, durdhara, the author says, means both irresistable and difficult to remember. isn't that fantastic? elusive and desirable at the same time, and passion so intense that it erases the memory. a little like dreams maybe. you have no memory of it, though whatever made you wake up was real enough - what you felt then was vivid and powerful enough. you really did live it. actually, that also makes me think of the japanese word for to study, which looks like the chinese for to do reluctantly. so all learning and remembering have to do with resistance and unwillingness? we can love, because we always have been able to, we knew how to in our past lives and now we only have to remember it. but remembering hurts too, so better by far you should forget and smile? i'll take the remembering though, any day.