An amazingly well written narration with enviable depth of thought.
Let me just collect all phrases and pieces I annotated.
With the inability to laugh comes an inability to acknowledge the contradictions inherent in every society and relationship, the multiplicity and clash of desires, the need to accept that one's partner will never learn how to park a car, or wash out a bath or give up a taste for Joni Mitchell - but that one cares for them rather a lot nevertheless.
Beauty is the promise of happiness
As Proust once said, classically beautiful women should be left to men without imagination
Some people would never have fallen 'in love if they had never heard of love', aphorized La Rochefoucauld
Is it really her I love, I thought to myself as I looked again at Chloe reading on the sofa across the room, or simply an idea that collects itself around her mouth, her eyes, her face? In using her face as a guide to her soul, was I not perhaps guilty of mistaken metonymy, whereby an attribute of an entity is substituted for the entity itself?
Lovers cannot remain philosophers for long, they should give way to the religious impulse, which is to believe and have faith, as opposed to the philosophic impulse, which is to doubt and enquire. They should prefer the risk of "being wrong and in love" to "being in doubt and without love".
I was afforded a chance to mature thanks to the insights into my personality that Chloe afforded me. It takes the intimacy of a lover to point out facets of character that others simply don't bother with.
Her casual reference to a past lover provided the necessary objectification for me to realize that, however special I was to her, I still existed within certain definitions ('a guy', 'my boyfriend') - and that in in Chloe's eyes, I was necessarily a simplified version of myself.
Because in resolving our need to love, we do not always succeed in resolving our need to long.
And so the skiing holiday (and much of my life generally) proceeded: anticipation in the morning, anxiety in the actuality, and pleasant memories in the evening.
Her apathy embodied the hope that by doing nothing, another might take the decision for her, that by displaying her indecision and frustration while not acting on it I would ultimately perform the move that she had needed (but been too scared) to make herself.
First of all, one calls individual actions good or bad quite irrespective of their motives but solely on account of their useful or harmful consequences. Soon, however, one forgets the origin of these designations and believes that the quality good and evil is inherent in the actions themselves, irrespective of their consequences...
-Friedrich Nietzsche, "Human, all too human"
To have killed myself would have been to forget that I would be too dead to derive any pleasure from the melodrama of my own extinction.
There is an Arabic saying that the soul travels at the pace of a camel. While most of us are led by the strict demands of timetables and diaries, our soul, the seat of the heart, trails nostalgically behind, burdened by the weight of memory.
Mature love is marked by an active awareness of the good and bad within each person, it is full of temperance, it resists idealization, it is free of jealousy, masochism, or obsession, it is a form of friendschip with a sexual dimension, it is pleasant, peaceful, and reciprocated.
We are all more intelligent that we are capable, and awareness of the insanity of love has never saved anyone from the disease.
In calling for a monastic existence free of emotional turmoil, stoicism was simply trying to deny the legitimacy of certain potentially painful yet fundamental human needs. However brave, the stoic was in the end a coward at the point of perhaps the highest reality, at the moment of love.
I realized that a more complex lesson needed to be drawn, one that could play with the incompatibilities of love, juggling the need for wisdom with its likely impotence, juggling the idiocy of infatuation with its inevitability. Love had to be appreciated without flight into dogmatic optimism or pessimism, without constructing a philosophy of one's fears, or a morality of one's disappointments.