Love can take many shapes and forms. There are many different kinds of love between human beings. Though it is often overlooked, intentionally or not, loss comes hand in hand with love; it is the second face of love that no one wants to see or experience. With love comes the potential to lose it as well. Nicole Krauss’s book, The History of Love, is really about loss.
Leo Gursky, the author of the book within Krauss’s book, has many losses to deal with. He has lost his one love, Alma Mereminsky; his son, Isaac; his book, part of his heart, and himself. Leo Gursky fell in love with Alma Mereminsky when he was only ten years old. They grew up together in love, but a day came when Alma took the opportunity to move to America. When Leo finally made it to America, Alma was committed to another man, and the “boy who promised he’d never fall in love with another girl as long as he lived kept his promise… He couldn’t help it” (Krauss 13). Leo lived a wishful, but distant, life; he remained obsessed with his hopeless love until the day he died. At the peak of his love for Alma as a young man, Leo also experienced the loss of his family due to the holocaust. Leo Gursky had an undying love for Alma and an interpersonal love for his family, both of which became lost and hopeless when he was a young man.
When he was initially in love with Alma, Leo wrote about the only thing he knew about: his love. In doing so, he unintentionally set himself up for loss in the future. Leo left his book with a friend, Zvi Litvinoff, before the two parted ways. Many years later, “the only copy was lost in flood” and was seemingly lost forever (Krauss 121-122). The book was his love for Alma in words; only adding to the emptiness and loss that he copes with ...
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...s the day Leo’s soul and mind started deteriorating. From then on, Leo would never be the same; his life would start to be filled with a vast loneliness as his dearest possessions and connections were lost one by one.
Leo Gursky loved many things, but that is not what The History of Love explores. “To lose you have to have had” (Krauss 120). Leo loved and had Alma, his family, son, book, heart, and himself, but over the course of the book and his life, Leo loses each and every one of those. His love covers up the real truth of the book; how one handles loss defines their mental strength and sense of self. One can work long and hard to build up and maintain love, but in what can seem to be a blink of an eye, all of it can be gone. When an individual is drowning in loss, it is a true test of their mental strength and perseverance; one of which Leo Gursky did not pass.
There is a quote that is “All love is my love of love and love is not all loving” by David Bowie, I feel like this could relate to characters in “Harrison Bergeron” and Anthem because love is portrayed differently and the journey of discovering love could have been difficult. In “Harrison Bergeron” it was more taken in the future and the problem was trying to keep everyone equal when it came to everything. In Anthem the dystopia was trying to go back to when there was not a numerous amount of information to also keep everyone equal. “Harrison Bergeron” by Kurt Vonnegut Jr. and Anthem by Ayn Rand are both pieces of dystopian literature, their portrayal
Throughout the lives of most people on the planet, there comes a time when there may be a loss of love, hope or remembrance in our lives. These troublesome times in our lives can be the hardest things we go through. Without love or hope, what is there to live for? Some see that the loss of hope and love means the end, these people being pessimistic, while others can see that even though they feel at a loss of love and hope that one day again they will feel love and have that sense of hope, these people are optimistic. These feelings that all of us had, have been around since the dawn of many. Throughout the centuries, the expression of these feelings has made their ways into literature, novels, plays, poems, and recently movies. The qualities of love, hope, and remembrance can be seen in Emily Bronte’s and Thomas Hardy’s poems of “Remembrance” “Darkling Thrush” and “Ah, Are you Digging on my Grave?”
Before Mrs. Ames and the mother realize the restrictions of their old lives, their worlds have been full of disillusionment and ignorance. Mrs. Ames, for example, is oppressed by her husband’s silence and the search for love and tenderness from anyone, because she lives each day alone, ignored by her scornful husband. And, as a result of being left companionless, she does not mature, rather she longs for tenderness. In other words, Boyle explains her dysfunctional relationship with her husband, “The mystery and silence of her husband’s mind lay like a chiding finger of her lips. Her eyes were gray for the light had been extinguished in them” (57). That is, Mrs. Ames’ spirit remains oppressed by her husband who treats her as a child, and, in doing so, isolates her from his world.
True love is a reason for everything, even deleting the laws of life. People's mistakes and weaknesses are part of life; and, without contradic...
Love and affection is an indispensable part of human life. In different culture love may appear differently. In the poem “My god my lotus” lovers responded to each other differently than in the poem “Fishhawk”. Likewise, the presentation of female sexuality, gender disparity and presentation of love were shown inversely in these two poems. Some may argue that love in the past was not as same as love in present. However, we can still find some lovers who are staying with their partners just to maintain the relationship. We may also find some lovers having relationship only because of self-interest. However, a love relationship should always be out of self-interest and must be based on mutual interest. A love usually obtains its perfectness when it develops from both partners equally and with same affection.
The sixth chapter explores the love that Gatsby has for Daisy. It is unfortunate that the foundation of the deep passion is set on only one summer hype from which Gatsby has based his life goals (Fitzgerald, n.a). Langston Hughes in his poem A Dream Deferred explores what happens when a dream is put off for a long time; Gatsby’s Love for Daisy. It is curious to explore the fact that Gatsby expects Daisy to forego her life for him after being apart for five years. The chapter closes with Nick pondering over the course of Gatsby’s dream of being with Daisy and how that cannot be recreated from the past (Fitzgerald, n.a).
Love plays an important role in most physical and emotional relationships. Love is a word that can prove difficult to define or even compare to other emotions. This is due to the diversity of meaning and the complexity of the emotion itself. Everyone has been in love at least once before and has gotten a taste of all the good and bad things that come with it. Christina Rossetti’s “Song” presents some of the good parts of love while Philip Larkin’s “Talking in Bed” shows us some of the bad parts of love. Larkin’s poem presents a failing relationship where communication has failed between a couple and things are getting more and more difficult. Rossetti’s poem presents a wholly different view on love; it is told from the viewpoint of someone talking to his or her lover about what said lover should do after the speaker dies. The love between them seems better, more powerful and good. The two poems also present wholly different attitudes towards “The End,” whether that is the end of life or the end of the relationship. Larkin presents the end as something dark and sad, difficult to cope with. Rossetti, on the other hand, talks about the end as just another beginning, a chance to start over in a new world. Finally, the two poems represent remembrance in different ways. Larkin’s presents memory as something extremely important while Rossetti implies that it does not matter whether we remember or not.
So often, it seems, life can seem like a "patient etherized on the table" (Eliot, 3). Be it the apparent futility of existence as a whole, or the insecurity of those single moments of doubt; life is often fleeting. I believe life is best described as a fickle beast, always elusive; always turning down some new and unexpected road. This fleeting life is what both Jay Gatsby of The Great Gatsby and Alfred J. Prufrock of "Love Song of Alfred J. Prufrock" experience. These two men experiences move down remarkably similar paths as they quest for love and life. Yet each has sealed their shared fate in a different manner. As they head toward the seeming abyss of death, both remiss on all they wish they had done during their lives. By the time each man meets his end they both feel they have failed themselves and life as a whole.
“I know for certain that we never lose the people we love, even to death. They continue to participate in every act, thought and decision we make. Their love leaves an indelible imprint in our memories. We find comfort in knowing that our lives have been enriched by having shared their love.” (Buscaglia, 2013)
“The Great Gatsby” and “The Love Song for J. Alfred Prufrock” are two pieces of writing written in the 1920’s. Both F. Scott Fitzgerald and T.S Elliot were able to express the overwhelming force of the most powerful human emotion. Although the two eponymous characters seem vastly different from each other in, it can be seen when analyzed in greater depth that the two hold more similarities than differences. Both Prufrock and Gatsby live more in their own minds than the actual world. This causes them to become isolated from other people and become captives by their own illusions. Both men will eventually allow love and fear to corrupt their lives and lead them to make decisions which will ultimately bring about their demise.
Most of the time love is our encouragement when we are in trouble, sometimes love can drag us to things we don’t want to happen in our lives. “First Lieutenant Jimmy Cross carried letters from a girl named Martha, a junior at Mount Sebastian College in New Jersey. They were love letters, but Lieutenant Cross was hoping, so he kept them folded in plastic at the bottom of his rucksack.” (p.1) The letters from Martha signed, “Love Martha” even though the letters were not love letters, Lieutenant Jimmy Cross understands that he doesn’t receive the type of love he hopes for from Martha.
Love, love, love; the only thing everybody talks about. Every movie, every series, every story talks about how two people fall in love and live happily ever after. All stories get to the conclusion that the love the couple shared was unique and that the two lovers matched perfectly together. But what happens when two lovers do not belong to the same social class? What happens when they don’t share common things they like? Are they not meant to be? “In love everything is possible”, someone once said. When someone is in love, he/she would make everything that he/she cans to make his/her lover happy and keep him/her by their side forever. F. Scott Fitzgerald, one of the most important American writers of the twentieth century, depicts a love story in his novel The Great Gatsby and shows how love can change a person. Gatsby, the man from which the story takes its name, fell in love with Daisy when he was young officer just before going to war. As the story goes on, he falls more and more in love with her, but he loses her to a richer man. Gatsby’s love for Daisy
...he characters play out to be and even though the ending is not perfect. The struggle that Leo faced was a punishment for the reasons he had in searching for this wife. The authors past and religion also played a significant role in this story. This reason was not just thrown in there, but the clearly thought out by the author in order to get the experience a young rabbi went through at this time. So it could express the relation he had with him at that time of confusion
Death is something that no one can avoid; eventually everyone must face it. But can it end a memory of a loved one, can it end the feelings held toward them? The majority of people in the world have needed to cope with losing a loved one to death, and that is something that is never simple to cope with, no matter the circumstances. However, people know that death doesn’t make them stop their feelings to those who have passed. Through a modern viewpoint and understanding of the play The Tragedy of Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare one can discover that the mere mortality of humans cannot stop the everlasting bond that is love.
Love is deep, intense, true and passionate, but all too often ends tragically seemingly to always leaving one person behind who carries the burden of the love. The stories I am comparing all have tragic love as a common theme. When exploring the relationship of young lovers Veronica and JD in Heathers, the passionate love of Ludmila and Theodor in Worthy, or follow the love story of John Keats and Fanny Brawne we get a glimpse of how each of these love stories ends in tragedy and how our survivors of those relationships deal with the aftermath.