George Gordon, Lord Byron
I’ve had a lot of time to think about good ol’ Byron over the course of my life. When I first switched out of Engineering in order to become an English major, I had a lot of catching up to do in order to meet my graduation requirements. My two years spent taking Physics, Computer Aided Design (CAD), and Pascal programming (among many others) had left me with a deficit of the required courses in order to graduate with a B.A. in English. Thus was I introduced to the likes of Percy Bysshe Shelley, Coleridge, Wordsworth, and the great Lord Byron. For a college kid (and a romantic at heart), reading the great poets of the Romantic era was like finding out that all the things that you thought about and idealized and dreamed had been said, in verse, a thousand times better than you could have imagined. Pretty cool and heady stuff. Robin Williams’ character in “The Dead Poets Society” captures this perfectly in a short clip – here. Skip to 1:47. “No matter what anyone tells you, words and ideas can change the world… We don’t read and write poetry because it’s cute; we read and write poetry because we are members of the human race! And the human race is filled with passion…”
And no one more embodied this than Byron. His life is… well, interesting just doesn’t seem big enough word to capture it. His own mother once said of him: “He has no indisposition that I know of but love, desperate love, the worst of all maladies in my opinion.” He was so in love with a young woman (Mary Chaworth) that at 15 he refused to return to school (keep in mind this was 19th century England and he was a noblemen – it wasn’t quite like playing hookie today). Chaworth was also engaged at the time and two or 3 years his elder.
Byron would write poetry, skewer his critics, and traveled throughout Europe and the Middle East, where he eventually took up the cause of Greek independence from Turkey and died there of illness at the age of 36. He is credited with inspiring numerous works by composers and other writers (including Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. All three wrote works over a weekend’s idles while drinking together and telling ‘ghost stories’.)
So, was Byron right?
In college, I had a girlfriend a couple of years younger. She was an absolute kick. I liked her, but I didn’t love her. I suspected/knew that she was pretty serious about me. I wasn’t callous, nor did I treat her badly… at least not intentionally. It’s just that I was, I don’t know, indifferent to her feelings. I was raised by two women (my mother and sister) so I treated women with respect, but no matter how honest you are with someone who is in love with you, if you don’t feel the same way, you’re going to hurt them. Probably badly. How badly is directly proportional to the difference in your feelings and theirs. My best friend always says “when two people are in a relationship and one feels more strongly than the other, that person is going to get hurt.” True.
In fact, I’ve come to believe that marriage is, in essence, a mutual pact to stay together even when the feelings change over time. It’s an agreement that when Boy A feels a little less strongly about the relationship than Girl B, that he’s still going to honor her until such time as they can get it right. And vice versa. It’s why divorces are so painful. There’s this sense that somehow the other person has given up and hasn’t simply waited for things to get straight – the way they were when you first decided to get married and were crazy in love (hopefully).
Byron’s view above is intriguing to me. It raises the question of whether there’s ever a chance of making peace with a former mate after you’ve been in love. I felt badly about the girl in college. I was honest, but she got hurt. I felt bad enough that when the miracle of Facebook arrived, I contacted her. She’s married, happy, and thriving. I called her to apologize – not for anything specific, really, but just to tell her that I felt bad about how indifferent I had been to her heart. She was magnanimous, kind, and we even made plans for me to visit her and her husband when I was down their way for a case. It pled out and I never got to make good on the offer to take them both to dinner.
Not long after, in a strange bit of coincidence, a girl contacted me on Facebook. I didn’t recognize her name initially, but it turned out to be a gal I had been deeply in love with (in college, of course – what else do you do in college but fall in and out of love in between finals and mid-terms?) She dumped me, broke my heart, and eventually I moved on. She had survived cancer, was married with a daughter, and was calling to ask my forgiveness for how she treated me. It was emotional and heart-wrenching. And I did my best to be as kind as my paramour had been to me. So, happy endings all around, right? Does it prove Byron’s quote wrong?
I’m still not positive. But I do know this – there’s no point in trying to avoid the pain. As Robin Williams character said (in the clip above):
“Medicine, law, business, engineering – these are noble pursuits and necessary to sustain life. But Poetry. Beauty. Romance. Love. These are what we stay alive for…”
Byron, a guy who died at 36, also said: “Like the measles, love is most dangerous when it comes late in life.” I’m not so sure I’m inclined to listen to a 36 year-old talk about love “late in life.” Nor am I inclined to put too much stock in the ol’ boy, given the confused state of his own sexuality. I’m sure he was an intelligent, even wise man, nor do I pretend to be some “old salt” at 41. But I know how much I’ve learned in the last 5 years alone, and how many of the things about which I was absolutely certain at 36 are not so nearly as clear cut at 41. And maybe, in some cases, I even feel exactly the opposite as I did five years ago. Mark Twain famously said “When I was a boy of 14, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be 21, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years.” I suspect that is true of any seven year period in our lives.
But, I’ll give Byron this, the guy sure could write poetry… especially about love. Try this one on for size. Less famous, and lyrical, than “She Walks in Beauty” – it’s still a moving piece of work.