Book Review 2025.06: A Natural History of Love (1995), Paperback 337 pages, May 1, 2025
I have been fascinated by the concept of love, especially romantic love, since teenage, which is the foundation for my sustained and deep interest in film music of all my known languages, especially ghazals and Urdu poetry for which I make an extra effort to learn the meaning of new words that I come across even today. Prompted by this interest, I purchased this book two decades back but had read it only in parts. As part of my resolve to read unread books in my collection, I took it up last month and completed it cover to cover, in one stretch. On completion, I think have a better understanding of the evolution of the concept of romantic love, particularly in Europe, and similarities between the idea of romantic love in Indian continent and the Western world.
The coverage is quite comprehensive and includes tracing the concept of love across different Western cultures through history with specific emphasis on Egypt, Greece, Rome and continental Europe, which is traced through their myths, legends and poetry. The strange customs of courtship in different cultures and the place for love in marriage makes fascinating reading. The section covering men’s fascination with racing and cars, and women’s attraction to horses is quite insightful.
Troubadours or love poetry analysed into the five themes: love as alchemy or its power to transform, lover as animation of nature -symbolising perfection seen in the lover, love as enslavement that places the lover’s interest as supreme, love as a disability rendering one unfit for normal routines, and love as a secret to be protected from the society, is I think quite comprehensive, for I could classify the poetry I am more familiar with into one of these five groups. What struck me as quite revealing among many ideas covered in the books are the two: one, that mutual love as an essential requirement of romantic love was acknowledged in Europe only in the 11th century, and the other, of passionate love having a shelf-life of three years, after which it transforms itself into companionable love. This is probably the reason why most love-legends across the world end in tragedy, probably to keep the passionate love alive as an ideal to pursue.
While reading, I was often in raptures at the style of writing and the way certain ideas were presented making your mind linger on them for quite a while. Likewise, a key feature of this book is it delves into etymology of words to provide memorable insights to embedded concept the word denotes. Idiot, the word traced to the Greek word to denote a citizen not participating in politics of the city, thereby harming his own interest is an illustration. Likewise, symposium traced to the Greek word for a drinking companion with whom an intellectual discussion is enjoyed is another example.
A key limitation of this book is that Asian ideas, especially Indian and Chinese, is totally missing making this work incomplete. To illustrate, seven stages of courtship is listed, in contrast, the ancient Tamil literature lists sixteen stages of courtship. I just wonder how this work could have been enriched if it had blended Asian views along with the Western views to provide a more comprehensive picture.
This book is not for everyone. Only those interested in poetry, psychology or romantic love will find it engaging. Happy reading and a request please do share if you have come across similar books for me to read.
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