Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.
- 1 Corinthians, 4-7
Watching the Movie "The Last Station" the other night, I thought of the above quote, a staple of wedding ceremonies and Hallmark sentiments, and my reaction (to the quote not the movie) was, "what a crock." Let me be more expansive. Love, capital L as Platonic ideal, may be comfortable with "always," but relationships exist in a world akin to Plato's cave, where all that is seen is shadow play on the walls, not the thing in itself (das Sein in Heidegger-speak). Love has to survive equivocations and mitigations, hard-edged truths and comfortable lies. But somehow, it does.
"The Last Station" is a period piece, set largely on Tolstoy's country estate, Yasnaya Polyana, in the early years of the Twentieth Century, before the onset of the Great War (they didn't know then to number them) and upheaval of the Bolshevik revolution. Disguised as a historical drama, what we get is really an extended disposition on the meaning of love as demonstrated by the interactions of three couples: Bulgakov and Masha (young love), Totstoy and Sophia (mature love), and Tolstoy and Chekhov (ideal love). Each flawed in its own way, none of these relationships meets the rigorous test of Corinthians (I love that word, Cor-r-rinthian, always remins me of R-r-ricardo Montalban and his fine cor-r-rinthian leather).
Bulgakov, Toltstoy's recently arrived secretary, is the foil for much of the action. Recruited by Chekhov, principal proponent of a tolstoian movement, because of his naive adherence to tolstoian principles and his blushing protection of his virginity. Not long after his arrival at Yasnaya Polyana he meets, and is tenderly seduced by, Masha, a young and attractive feminist and free love proponent. I could almost feel the fluttering in my chest as they got naked together for the first time, the continual confusion with roles and expectations, the forthright giddiness in his first professions of love. Boy meets girl, boy falls in love. Im' leaving. Oh no! Come with me. I can't. Separation and reunification. Been there, done that, zip your fly and get to work. Not much is added to our understanding.
Much more complex, however, is the fiery interaction between Tolstoy and his wife of many years, Sophia. Through her we see Tolstoy at his youthful and playful best, crowing like a rooster (You are my little bird! You are my big cock!). We also see him at his worst as they argue about private property which Tolstoy no longer believed in (very anti-tolstoian), paricularly the copyrights to his published works (Anna Karenina, War and Peace, we're talking big money here) that Sophia cared deeply about both for herself and for her children. Sophia finally drove Tolstoy to an incapacitating despair (I can't live with her, I can't kill her); those flaring arguments provide some of the truly satisfying dramatic moments in the film, and lead eventually to Tolstoy's secretive nighttime flight from his estate, and Sophia's subsequent unsuccessful suicide attempt.
Most complex of all is the interplay between Tolstoy and the stalwart of his movement, Chekhov (not a bad writer in his own rite). What we are shown is mostly Chekhov's angling to get Tolstoy to change his will to put his copyrights in the public domain for the Russian people. Hard to ever get a good read on Chekhov; they give us nothing overt to make us distrust him, but maybe it's his intense focus on the copyrights that makes those more cynical of us think it's somehow all about the money. But then I can't figure out how Chekhov gains from it all, so maybe he is truly a believer in the tolstoian ideal, hoping to do away with private property, and promote universal (if platonic) love (in retrospect very Marxian ideals, ones that would move to the fore in Russia in less than a decade).
But we find ourselves with Chekhov at the furthest remove from the Corinthian ideal. We see a love neither patient nor kind, rather self-seeking and rude. With Sophia we had fault with easily angered and keeping record of wrongs. With Bulgakov we find love that trusts and hopes, and is disappointed (even if in the end we get the Hollywood hormone stirring reunification). None of them seems to be able to pass biblical muster.
So here's what I've got, speaking as a man now married for more than thirty years. Love is hard. Done correctly love is unremitting work, and requires constant nurture. It is a daily battle to keep growing together rather than growing apart. Love can be rude, self-seeking, and quick to anger, but it can as well be patient and kind. Love holds your hair out of your face when you're hugging the commode after a bout of food poisoning. Love leaves home and follows you to Chicago, Milwaukee and Brussels. Love figures out how to fix your wife's kiln when it would rather watch the ballgame. Love fixes dinner and love figures the taxes, and love watches a sunset and shares a good bottle of wine that you bought together at a chateau in France. Love gets teary eyed at An Affair to Remember, and roots against all odds for Rick and Ilsa even after seeing it a hundred times and knowing how it ends. Love reads poetry out loud in bed at night. And love still gets goosebumps and the fluttering in it's chest when we get naked together.
Tolstoy was probably closer than Mr. One Corinthians when he said:
What counts in making a happy marriage is not so much how compatible you are, but how you deal with incompatibility.
And after all these years I'm still a sucker for a good love story.
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