FOR RELEASE: Feb. 26, 1998
Contact: Paul Cody Office: (607) 255-9737 Internet: [email protected] Compuserve: Bill Steele, 72650,565 http://www.news.cornell.edu
ITHACA, N.Y. -- The Book of Love (Norton 1998), an anthology of writings about love, edited by writer Diane Ackerman and novelist Jeanne Mackin, takes on that ancient and heart-stoppingly contemporary question, what is love?
"It feels like hunger pains, and we use the same word. Pang," writes Ackerman in her introduction. "Perhaps this is why Cupid is depicted with a quiver of arrows, because love feels at times like being pierced in the chest. It is a wholesome violence. People search for love as if it were a city lost beneath the desert dunes, where pleasure is the law, and streets are lined with brocade cushions, and the sun never sets."
Ackerman, an Ithaca-based poet, essayist and naturalist, is the author of 15 books, including A Natural History of Love, A Natural History of the Senses and, most recently, A Slender Thread, about her year working with a suicide-prevention hotline in Ithaca. She has hosted a PBS series and has been widely published, in The New Yorker as well as numerous other publications. She also is co-leader of the Cornell University English Department's Mind and Memory course this semester.
The selections in The Book of Love include more than 200 of the world's finest writings about love, arranged by genre -- fiction, poetry, essays, memoirs and letters by the world's most renowned writers, poets and philosophers from Sophocles and Plato to e.e. cummings and Joyce Carol Oates. And though romantic love dominates the book, there are selections, too, about kids and their toys, parents and children, people and animals.
"My sweet girl," writes poet John Keats to Fanny Brawne, "when shall we pass a day alone? I have had a thousand kisses, for which with my whole soul I thank love -- but if you should deny me the thousand and first -- t'would put me to the proof how great a misery I could live through. If you should ever carry your threat yesterday into execution -- believe me 'tis not my pride, my vanity or any petty passion would torment me -- really 'twould hurt my heart -- I could not bear it."
The Book of Love includes selections from such Cornell writers and faculty members as James McConkey, a novelist and the Goldwin Smith Professor Emeritus of English Literature; Lamar Herrin, novelist and professor of English; Roald Hoffmann, the Nobel Prize-winning chemist, poet and the Frank H.T. Rhodes Professor of Humane Letters; and Phyllis Janowitz, poet and professor of English, whose anthology poem "Fisherman's Wife" ends, "I coughed and shook the water from/my ears, painted two bloody moons/on my cheeks -- you, gasping, a great/blotchy fish, wanted only to stay/at the bottom, steeped in that brackish/pond, me, hooked in your arms, sun snaking/the surface, no shadows between us."
"Diane and I did this because of the challenge," said Mackin, a Cornell Media Services staff writer whose most recent novel is Dreams of Empire. "Could we cover as much ground -- different cultures, different eras, different attitudes about love -- and still come up with a coherent book? I think we did. The book is about the multiplicity, the infinite variety of love, but also the fact that all love shares a common impulse."
A tomb inscription from Ancient Egypt begins, "I breathe the sweet breath which comes forth from Thy mouth. I behold Thy beauty every day. It is my desire that I may hear Thy sweet voice, even on the north wind, that my limbs may be rejuvenated with life through love of Thee. Give me Thy hands, holding Thy spirit, that I may receive it and may live by it. Call Thou upon my name unto eternity, and it shall never fail."
"Love is not to be run from, hidden from, or disdained," writes Mackin in her introduction. "It is always there, waiting to take us by surprise, to delight us, enrage us, enchant us, dismay us and, finally, inevitably, define us. We are how we love."
Even the famous recluse, Emily Dickinson, was hit by an arrow -- and responded with an achingly beautiful love letter to "Master." "Could you come to New England this summer? Would you come to Amherst -- Would you like to come -- Master? Would it do harm -- yet we both fear God? Would Daisy disappoint you -- no -- she wouldn't -- Sir -- it were comfort forever -- just to look in your face, while you looked in mine -- then I could play in the woods -- till Dark -- till you take me where sundown cannot find us -- and the true keep coming -- till the town is full. (Will you tell me if you will?)"
The Book of Love reminds us of what it is to be 19 or 42 or 77 years old and so inflamed that it's hard to sleep or eat or see the moon and stars without thinking they glow for one reason only -- for that ubiquitous, elusive human thing called love.
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