Chapter Forty-Seven
Hands behind his head, Gangakanta stretched out across the sofa in Enid’s sitting room. She placed a cup of tea on a saucer on the low table in front of him, then went to sit down in a chair and took a sip from her own cup.
“I’ve read all manner of explanations of the phenomenon we call ‘love’,” she said. “Chemical. Psychological. Evolutionary. Literary construction in the gardens of the medieval court. So if I were ever to feel it—feel something that seemed to suggest to me that the appellation ‘love’ ought to be attached to it—how would I ever know what it really was?”
“I wouldn’t know. I fear there’s no statistical calculation which would help us with this topic.”
“And if I did feel such an emotion, how could I distinguish it from pure lust for another person’s flesh? Perhaps if I were one disembodied spirit falling in love with another, such questions would be, well. . .immaterial.”
“Emotions have always been a little unsynchronised with me,” he confided. “Interacting with people. . .understanding their feelings. . .even understanding my own—not an easy, or, I’ve often wondered, worthwhile, pursuit. Feelings—they’ve always seemed like literary symbols planted to be decoded in a huge, worthy novel I’ve been assigned by my teacher but honestly have no desire to read. But that’s just me, isn’t it? I’ve never felt myself a part of everybody else. I’ve always felt at least as affiliated with a wall, or a desk, or a tree, as with a fellow human being. Such is my life: an overpeopled party to which I was never invited, among whose guests I have no place, into whose corners I bashfully slink, for no discernible purpose, and yet—here I am.”
“I know feelings from the books I’ve read,” she added. “And sometimes. . .sometimes I feel like my feelings match. And that feels like a sacred thing.”
He considered whether to say what was next, but then remembered the probable death of reality, and concluded that nothing would be lost, so said: “I’ve never known physical love.” He looked up, half-expecting an expression of mockery, but when he found, instead, sympathy, he went on: “The idea of physical love—in essence, a chimp poking around an anthill with a stick—with a woman, or with anyone, has always repelled me. I never indulged. No offence intended.”
She smiled, and he went on:
“I reserve the notion of true love, if I may, for a communion with that which is beyond me.”
“God?”
He shrugged.
“Nature?”
He shook his head. “I do not know. I feel it might finally be. . .with oblivion.”