Life in hashtags; an era in which ‘like’ has superseded love …
… Even the symbolic heart has defected, she thought to herself, its alliance with ‘like’ far more prevalent today, in what is incontestably the age of Instagram, that most disquieting of all social media platforms for it garners both instant attention and immediate displays of appreciation by way of catchy hashtags and craftily curated images of vastly embellished realities, the most ‘liked’ being those that exploit intrinsic human narcissism, championing self-love over and above all else …
… worse still, in consort with the tragic demise of romantic love is that of beauty in this world, painfully conspicuous in a brusque contemporary vernacular that is not only dispossessed of the principles of grammar, thereby forbidding the deployment of extended metaphors, but also somewhat crudely molded together out of abbreviations, acronyms and emoticons; moreover, the art one now sees, increasingly inspired by rage, sorrow and fear, prides itself on naked depictions of cruelty and the extinguishment of life, in lieu of the sensitive and muted styles of expression that love breeds … in their desperate quest for an infinite number of ‘likes’, people have succumbed to the worst forms of sensationalism and exhibitionism, encroaching upon the intimacy and subtlety in which both love and dignity thrive …
… Well damn you Stendhal, Proust, Lawrence and the rest of your ilk, she suddenly found herself saying out loud, suffused by an unprecedented sense of frustration at her own failure to navigate the increasingly endangered and thus all the more precious sentiment, that which not only overrides the rigors of logic, but also has the capacity to transport each of its beneficiaries from their restrictive attachments to a tangible reality, into a metaphysical universe freed of the shackles of self-obsession and scientific rationale.
But alas, by consequence of their own miscarriages of the sentiment, resulting in an unshakeable and somewhat contagious disillusionment, the great authors and poets had stripped love of its virtues by effecting full disclosure of its mind altering repercussions, mercurial nature and fugitive quality; like accomplished impressionists, the picture they painted was one of a hostile intruder disguised as a benefactor, whilst others went on to explicate the traumas induced by both unrequited and unconsummated love, failing to underscore the impermanence of such type of pain, and invaluable merits of merely experiencing the sentiment towards another human being. Even if Tennyson wrote,
“Tis better to have loved and lost. Than never to have loved at all”,
the resonance of loss is far more powerful than that of implied gain.
It is not instinctive for human beings to not try to arrest and manoeuvre all that makes them feel good, and the sentiment of love can neither be harnessed nor tamed; one has only to scrutinize the ‘double entendre’ of the word arrest to recognize its shortcomings, for to seize something is perforce to impede it …
… As Marcel Proust once lamented,
“desire makes everything blossom, possession makes everything wither and fade”,
and equally discouraging were the words of English writer and poet DH Lawrence who wrote
“love is the flower of life, and blossoms unexpectedly and without law, and must be plucked where it is found, and enjoyed for the brief hour of its duration”
But even prior to the aforementioned, was 19th century French writer Stendhal, known to have marked the transition from romanticism to realism, and who, in no uncertain terms, declared the object of a person’s love to be no more than a figment of the imagination, a ‘crystallization’ of qualities that are a projection of an ideal, bereft of any foundation in reality.
He then went on to surmise that for love to be truly experienced, there must be both a deliberate discovery of the beloved and complete loss of self in the other, a far too rigid and therefore dissuasive set of criteria, aggravated by undertones of self-sacrifice and unfairly applied to a phenomenon that does not lie within the scope of the dictionary or behavioral psychology, but must instead be governed by philosophy, of which the human being is severely malnourished today; the sentiment of Love was never meant to be over-analyzed, precisely defined or formularized, and suddenly she realized it was hardly a surprise that love had given way to like, the latter far less ethereal and therefore easier to clasp, the element of risk spread out amongst multiple partners with neither moral dilemma nor fear of loss and pain…
…but in the end, as 20th century British Polymath, Bertrand Russell, in whose philosophy she invariably found a great deal of solace, once wrote:
“To fear love is to fear life, and those who fear life are already three parts dead.”