My expectations for V-Day are probably a bit on the low side, but I think it's safe to say that in general, you do better with impractical gifts on Valentine's day. They don't have to be expensive. Pick a handful of dandelions on the way, or present me with - I don't know - maybe a nice leaf or stone you collected on a hiking trip.
In honor of the day, though, I'll share with you some words that have always rung true to me about love and romance.
The Wisdom of Stanislaw Lem
Stanislaw Lem is one of my all-time favorite authors. I like his life story as well - he was born in Lvov, Poland in 1921, trained as a doctor, but worked as a mechanic and was in the Resistance during WWII. (I read somewhere that he used to "fix" Nazi vehicles when they were brought in for repairs so they looked like they were fixed but were in fact guaranteed to break down again. I like to think that is true.)
He wrote a book called The Cyberiad, in which the heroes -- who are both friends and rivals, always trying to outdo each other -- embark on a series of adventures, seeking fame and fortune. In one story, one friend designs a machine that will create poetry. When (after some initial troubles) it becoms clear that the machine is in fact functional, his rival tries to show him up by setting the machine an impossible task: to create a "love poem, lyrical, pastoral, and expressed in the language of pure mathematics. Tensor algebra mainly, with a little topology and higher calculus, if need be. But with feeling, you understand, and in the cybernetic spirit!"
The machine succeeds, brilliantly. Here are two excerpts:
On loss:
Cancel me not - for what then shall remain?
Abscissas, some mantissas, modules, modes,
A root or two, a torus, and a node:
The inverse of my verse, a null domain.
On longing and passion:
I see the eigenvalue in thine eye,
I hear the tender tensor in thy sigh.
Bernoulli would have been content to die,
Had he but known such a-squared cosine(2 phi)!
The Wisdom of Shakespeare
And, of course, there is always Sonnet 116 (which I memorized for a friend's wedding in 2000 by studying it on my daily subway commute ... and have never forgotten):
Let me not to the marriage of true minds--Shakespeare
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O no! it is an ever-fixed mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.
Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle's compass come:
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.
'Nuff said.
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