Upon Some Verses of Virgil

Virgil’s verses on the love of Mars and Venus — their stolen congress, the fine net of Vulcan thrown over them, the laughter of the gods — these have occupied me for longer than I would readily confess. Not because the story is difficult, but because it is honest in a way that most writing about love is not. The gods’ laughter is the right response to love caught in the act. There is something absurd about the whole business, viewed from sufficient distance, and Virgil — grave, dutiful Virgil, poet of empire and piety — knew this, and could not refrain from letting it show.

I am writing this as an old man, or something approaching one, and I find I can speak of love and desire with a freedom I did not have at thirty, for the simple reason that the urgency has diminished. This is a loss, and I do not pretend otherwise. The loss of desire is also the loss of a certain vividness, a certain relationship with the present moment that desire enforces, because desire is always now, always this, always pressing. When it recedes, the world becomes somewhat quieter and somewhat flatter. I have learned to find this tolerable. I have not learned to find it entirely unregrettable.

“In love, there is nothing but a frantic desire for that which flees from us; and love, once it has obtained its object and settled into familiarity, loses the greater part of its force and beauty — which is to say, love lives in pursuit, not in possession.”

Marriage is a different thing. I do not speak against it. I am married, and if I have not found in marriage what the love poets promise, I have found something else — a form of sustained goodwill between two people who have chosen to share their difficulties, which is no small thing, and perhaps more durable than the love poets’ version anyway. But honesty requires admitting that these are different things, and that the institution has been oversold to those who expect from it the experience that only desire, in its unreasonable and unsustainable intensity, can provide.

What I value in Virgil’s treatment is that he does not moralize. He does not tell us that Venus and Mars were wrong, or that their exposure to the laughter of heaven was punishment deserved. He lets the scene be what it is: beautiful, absurd, entirely human, conducted by gods because Virgil knows it is most truly human when conducted at the extreme of what human nature is capable of feeling. The laughter is not contempt. It is recognition.