Gara’s Weblog

Hearts don’t heal. It’s a lie as much as it is to say that love lasts forever. Life is an ever-changeable thing, and experiences accumulate in ourselves rather than being erased by a new one, unless one has been lucky enough to be born heartless, in which case the myth could indeed be reasserted.

In Onegin, Martha Fiennes’ film based on Pushkin’s versed novel, this fact is well illustrated and exemplified (I apologise to the readers who already know the story, in which case please just scroll to the end of this post). It tells the story of Eugeni Onegin, a noble Russian gentleman, bored of the fancy Petersburg life, who inherits a large country estate from his dying uncle. There he meets Tatyana, a young, rather unsophisticated but well-read girl who falls in love with him, and bluntly declares her undying love in a letter. Onegin reads this letter and responds to it in person, explaining to her why he cannot possibly correspond her feelings, and arguing why and how her love for him will with time die away and feel almost like a dream. Life has made of him a cynic, and he points out how a love declaration would only lead to a kiss, a relationship, an engagement, a wedding, and finally to adultery. “Is that the kind of future you imagine for yourself?”, he coldly asks. “No”, she replies, simply. Her heart is still young, her romanticism untarnished, but she’s far from being a fool and has a stronger idea of reality than he can imagine: she is stronger in her love (you see, the idea that undying love is a weakness should, in my opinion, be removed from the collective consciousness).

The years pass, and Tatyana marries a man of high society. Onegin sees her again, unexpectedly, at a ball, and love hits him. Regardless of the fragility of his position, he makes his way to her mansion, where he finds her sitting alone in a hall, reading a book. As he walks in, she asks him for the reason which took him there. “I have to see you”, he answers. “Why, why do you pursue me in this way?”, she asks, managing to hold herself together. “Because I love you”, he replies, “and in seeing you again, I saw myself”. She gets up, visibly annoyed, but touched, and reminds him of the words he said to her all those years ago: “You told me that my heart would heal”. “And has it? Has it healed, Tatyana?”, replies he, with a half smile of triumph in his face. She finally breaks down: “It hurts”, she mutters. “And why, why does it hurt?”.
Her answer is straight, blunt, horrific in its unchangeable truth: “Because you are too late, Eugeni”.

I only told this story to remind us that sometimes we fail to recognise love when perhaps only its seed is there. Onegin played the skeptic and he lost, because love is not love only with love- unfortunately other elements also play a part, and specially the timing has to be correct. If it fails, the whole structure collapses. And because we won’t heal, one has to know how to recognise it when it’s there, and grab it. Grab it while you still can.

Some people have the capacity to overcome the dark depths of the first sharp grief after a failure and move on; others choose to hide the pain in some place so deep in themselves that they almost manage to never find it again. Others, perhaps most, quite unfortunately have to learn to live with the wound, and go through existence with that grievance being very close to the skin in Winter, when the nights are long and loneliness bites, and deeper down in the Spring, when the instinct to reborn manages to push it down below. But it’s always there, like an appendix not even a surgeon would recommend removing, because the chance of bleeding to death from the amputation would be higher than that of happily surviving without it. So one has to learn to coexist with it, as you would with a siamese sibling whose head is so close to yours, that you hit it every time you want to turn round.

That is when love turns into a curse.