My good friend C. is having a crisis.  He might not frame it that way exactly, but what else do you call it when every time we meet up he ends up asking "what is love?"  And it's not a rhetorical question.

When we met Tuesday afternoon for a late lunch and beers, I fully expected the question to come up again.  It's not like I'm not perfectly happy to speculate, but lately he has seemed to really want to know The Answer — like there's one, and only one. 

Since we had plans for a movie later — Away We Go was on our agenda — he mentioned  how Hollywood love affairs had warped his sense of what love is. 

I was like: dude, you need to watch more foreign films. 

I mean, take any old random foreign film — I happened to pop in Renoir's La règle du jeu the other night, and there's a cynical quote from the French aphorist Nicolas Chamfort that's apropos: "Love as it exists in society is merely the mingling of two whims and the contact of two skins."  The most famous quote from the film, though, is even more to the point: "The awful thing about life is this: everyone has their reasons."

I think the best love story I've seen recently is the Swedish Låt den rätte komma in (Let the Right One In) — which combines a number of necessary ingredients of modern cinematic love affairs, including an adolescent vampire, a great spontaneous combustion scene...


... and possibly the most awesome attack by a clowder of cats ever caught on film.

But movies are only one place to explore what is, after all, an immortal question that we must each finally answer for ourselves in the way that we conduct our intimate affairs, whether we ever put it into words or not. 

My friend exasperatedly revealed that all he really wanted was that "across a crowded room" moment (I sometimes get it when the restaurant has a mirror on the back wall).  And then, once that happens, he would like if his partner wouldn't mind being seen in public with him.  And I have to admit, it doesn't seem like he's asking too much.  If nothing else, it helps to have a wingman.

Love — of the romantic variety at least — is something experience forces me to acknowledge is more or less independent of any object.  I pick it up like swine flu God knows where, and have to ride out the misery and hope it doesn't kill me. 

I expect a bout of bad love every so often — I don't know if you can really inoculate yourself against it — but there are other kinds of love that are also intense and richly rewarding, and don't leave you quite so incapacitated. 

Right now I'm inclined to believe that all love is ultimately agapic — all love is love of God.  My departure point is the great theologian Martin Buber's I and Thou, a book I first read in college which continues to resonate. The idea of a personal and personified God always seemed a little limiting to me.  The God of I and Thou is wholly relational. 

But what I really like about Buber's God is "he" is so promiscuous we can experience "him" anywhere relation is possible.  The I-Thou (as he calls these divine encounters) is a coming together of two subjects in a fleeting moment where they share the unity of being. 

And that's a great pick-up line, by the way.

Our species is empathic to a fault.  Imagining ourselves as another, imagining our way into the other is not just an idle pastime — we find it not just in watching porn, but in nearly every mental and emotional act — it's the very basis of our humanity, and the kernel out which our moral imagination grows.  Our failure to empathize well and deeply enough is the singular cause of our conscience.  Communication, music, art, drama all seek to address this core component of what we are, and to some it answers the ultimate question of why we are.

Of course, there are limits to empathy, to how much we can, and how completely we should identify ourselves with the other.  We require in others as for ourselves a degree of containment.  We are, after all, bound by the exigencies of our physical selves, isolated and alone in our bodies, except for that sweet (and sometimes sweetly tragic) taste of union. 

Love, in all its forms, connects us intensely, vitally, with some other.  Sexual union accomplishes this literally.  And while it isn't always an I-Thou, it can be as real and powerful outside the social constructs we invent to facilitate or contain it — usually with practical good reason — as it can be within them. 

Which is also not a bad pick-up line, if you're married or looking for a third.

After dinner, it was off to the Kendall to see Away We Go, which is sort of about love, I guess.  Coming from Dave Eggers I knew we were in for something precious, full of coyly earnest, self-conscious navel-gazing Gen-Xers whose chief aim is to heroically defy the self-absorbed cynicism of the boomer overlords who were once just like us.  Eggers, in everything he does, holds out the promise that we can start out with the same premise but avoid the same fate.

Anyone who has read anything by Eggers knows that he is among the pureof heart.  He is never shy to say so.  But this doesn't stop him from indulging in a good deal ofpassive-aggressive scorn for those who have been corrupted.  And thankGod for that.  Without them to liven up this flick, we'd have suffocated.

So self-consciously stunted are the protagonists that they are literally stuck in the oral phase.  The movie opens with its sole sex scene — Maya Rudolph's Verona receiving some oral pleasure from John Krasinski's Burt, who comments on her flavor.  Which sets the stage for the Gen-X picaresque to follow, in which they sample various cities and family situations in a quest to find some place to settle down and raise a family of their own.

I have to say, the one performance worth tagging along for was Chris Messina's...


I crushed pretty hard on him in Six Feet Under, where he played the only unpretentious person Claire Fisher knew.  He plays a similar role here, as Tom, one of the few likeable ones — who's also, not surprisingly, a contemporary of the happy couple. 

But it's not his exuberant, inspired lecture on love, which he needlessly wastes a whole bottle of maple syrup on that did it for me — it was his manly weeping when he reveals a personal tragedy later on.  I like a man who cries, but not over every little thing.  I like 'em choking back the tears.  Nothing sexier than a man trying with all his might not to cry, and failing.

But his "love is like maple syrup" speech is really the soft, squishy center of the story.  The problem with pouring the whole bottle of syrup over your pancakes to make a point is that then you can't eat the pancakes.  Tom was obviously finished with his pancakes when he drowned them in love, otherwise he clearly would not have done it.  Too sticky, two sweet, too soggy. 

Hmm.  Just like this movie.

But it's true: we have to keep on loving, and loving hard.  Granted, those "across a crowded room" moments are few and far between.  Sometimes we have to direct this inconvenient emotion at people we don't love (despite Alexei Alexandrovich Karenin's insistence in that book by Tolstoy that "to love those whom you hate is impossible"), plants and animals, empty rooms, blank walls.  It has to go somewhere. 

But if it must be on your flapjacks, don't go crazy. And if you truly can't contain it, be sure to leave a little something extra by way of a tip for the busboy.