EspañolHappiness is elusive, when we want to hold it we lose it
As the Swiss philosopher Denis de Rougemont (1906-1985) noted in his book “Love and the West” (1939): “Happiness is an Eurydice: we lose it when we want to grasp it”. For him, “any happiness that one wants to feel, that one wants to have at one’s mercy… is instantly transformed into an unbearable absence.”
Can love be considered authentic, even without being returned? Rougemont states that in all Western literature, love that is not reciprocated is not taken for true, meaning that happy love has no history. This is a point worthy of reflection.
As the Swiss philosopher Denis de Rougemont (1906-1985) noted in his book “Love and the West” (1939): “Happiness is an Eurydice: we lose it when we want to grasp it”. For him, “any happiness that one wants to feel, that one wants to have at one’s mercy… is instantly transformed into an unbearable absence.”
Can love be considered authentic, even without being returned? Rougemont states that in all Western literature, love that is not reciprocated is not taken for true, meaning that happy love has no history. This is a point worthy of reflection.
In the 12th century, the written version of the myth of Tristan and Isolde appears, a story that, like “Pyramus and Thisbe”, rescued by Ovid in his “Metamorphoses” (4 A.D.), culminates in the death of the two lovers. Tristan has been anticipated by Pyramus at least a thousand years. Seven centuries later, Richard Wagner (1813-1883) brought the myth of Tristan to life in his eponymous opera of 1859. In the famous tale, the young Tristan must win Isolde the blonde in battle, take her from Ireland to Cornwall to present her to his uncle, King Marc, and thus make her his queen. On the way, Tristan and Isolde, by mistake, drink from the magic filter, a spell that the bride’s mother has prepared with the aim of making the future royal marriage a blissful affair. The moment the young people sip, there is no possibility of return; the beverage has thrown them into the quicksand of passion.
Rougemont examines the history of Tristan and notes that: “It is therefore no coincidence that the myth of Tristan and that of Don Juan have only been able to obtain their full expression in the form of opera… Only music can speak clearly of the tragedy whose mother and daughter it is”. Therefore, Tristan reaches three expressive dimensions, that of verse, that of prose, and only in the 19th century, the new dimension given to it by the operatic genre. For Rougemont “the orchestra broadly describes the dimensions of a tragedy of a very internal order. The disturbing lurid morbidity of the melodies reveals a world where carnal desire is but an intimate and impure languor in which the soul is cured of living.”
Spanish doctor José Ramón Trujillo, in his 2019 article, Tristan and wild love, remarks that “The force and novelty of his myth have nourished, from its very origin and for centuries, all artistic manifestations, including video games, attracted to represent the theme of the fatal amour à mort.” Rougemont, for his part, asks: “Why does he want this love whose magnificence can only be his suicide?” And he states that “the third act of Wagner’s drama describes something more than a novel catastrophe… this repressed taste of death”.
Unlike other famous couples in Western literature -Pyramus and Thisbe, Romeo and Juliet- Tristan and Isolde cannot decide for themselves. Their capacity for judgment has been limited by a potion, an external circumstance that has imprisoned them. From this moment on, any moral discussion of the couple’s decisions becomes meaningless. Unlike the other lovers, Tristan and Isolde’s freedom has been violated. To judge them with the moral rigor with which sane beings are judged is a mistake. This is the case in Shakespeare’s “Midsummer’s night dream”, where a magic ointment is smeared on the eyelids of two sleepers, who, because of its effect, will give their hearts to the first person who appears before their eyes when they awake.
The topic of love seems never to be conjured by art, after millennia, it seems that the answer is contained in the experience itself.
