It’s my eighth anniversary today–Happy Anniversary, Rebecca, I love you–and it occurs to me that the cause of Rebecca’s corroboration of my story was her collaboration in it. This is how family stories–notorious for their mythical nature–emerge. If you pause, as I did, to think about your family stories, you will realize several things:

1. They contain at least as much fiction as fact.

2. Everybody knows them, can retell them, and enjoys the retelling of them, even to one another. Of course they’re always at their best with a new audience–a new boyfriend, a couple over for dinner, a traveler met in a foreign country.

3. Normally they are funny, although there are plenty of bitter ones, too. Either way, one is emotionally invested in the story. They are not reportage.

4. They define family roles–that is, we appear as set characters in the stories, and everyone is a slight caricature of herself or himself (“…like Dad always does…”, etc.).

5. Like all great oral histories, they either improve with time, or vanish from the repertoire.

We could go on. You get the point. As Rebecca and I have become a family, what began with me telling improbable stories to her has transformed, happily, into us telling improbable stories to other people, with our fifteen-year-old chiming in (though she’s happy to burst some bubbles, too–in fact, that can become part of the narrative, one of the punchlines). As they age, our five-year-old and three-year-old will doubtless get in on the game. All of this is about value; very little of it is about fact.

That might trouble some people: Don’t we want to live our lives in the world of facts? Aren’t we going to wind up with bloody noses, empty bank accounts, car crashes, no power and a desert planet if we don’t pay awfully close attention to the truth, to the facts of the matter? Well, yes, the truth counts, and if we neglect the facts entirely we will step in front of all different kinds of heavy oncoming chrome-grilled semis and won’t have much cause to complain when we are flattened to the blacktop. But the TRUTH of the matter, if you want to hear it, is that we only live about 10% of our lives in the world of facts, on the high side; the other 90% is in the world of values.

Why do you wear blue jeans instead of khakis? Why do read Flaubert rather than Steven King? Why did you go to Columbia instead of CUNY? Why do you live in Kansas City rather than Boston? Not fact after fact after fact, but choice after choice after choice, expressing value after value after value. It’s a point Sartre made most forcefully: given a certain set of factual constraints, you made your life (we don’t want to overdo this: many, many people need lots of help with bare facts like food and shelter and disease) on the basis of what you value. And what are values? Can you point to them? Prove them? Establish them as “facts”? (There is no Nobel Prize for Philosophy, but if you could find the “true values,” the so-called “factual” ones, they’d find a way to give you a Nobel, I promise. Smart people have been trying to do this for at least five thousand years, and no one’s managed yet.)

No, values are fictional things–which does not mean they are any less important than factual things, in fact it might turn out to be just the opposite, as with Shakespeare and the reality TV show–which we create and embrace as we live. Our first context for understanding value is the family (of whatever kind of family that may be); one way we do it in families is by telling stories. By describing our own history in the terms of our collective recollection and imagination, and highlighting–even, inventing–those parts that illustrate or capture what matters most to us: what we find funniest, most resonant, most noteworthy, most fitting, or most exceptional. When your spouse or your child says, “No, you’re not telling it right,” they don’t mean you’re getting the facts wrong. They mean you are placing emphasis in the wrong place, your delivery is off, you aren’t capturing what matters most: You aren’t communicating what we value in the story, why we love the story, why it’s one of the stories we always tell.

So now I will watch to see when Rebecca is agreeing with the way I’m telling the story, and to see how I respond to the way she tells it. I’m especially eager to hear how our three daughters tell their stories about all of us. The made-up parts, I’m betting, will be the best parts.

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I never graduated from high school, though I wish I had. I never went to a top fifty school as an undergrad, though I wish I had. I’ve never attended an Ivy League school, either as an undergraduate or a grad student—I never set foot on an Ivy League campus until I was giving my first paper—though I wish I had. I wish I had the pedigree that some of my friends who are professors have. It’s (more than) a bit silly–after a certain stage, all that counts is your work–but nevertheless it stays with you, if only because, well, wouldn’t it be nice if your kids could have that? If only because you wish you yourself had? It’s getting dangerously close to circular logic—and circular logic, like concluding an argument with the belief that you already wanted to believe, is a good sign of self-deception. Go back and look again at the steps, and more often than not you’ll find sophistry.

First, we lie to ourselves about ourselves. Then, if we have children, we lie to ourselves about them. (It doesn’t make things easier that they lie to us about themselves, and lie to themselves about themselves as well.) I lie to myself about how adept I am as a parent, about how much care and time I spend on my children, about how good I am at parenting—all the while feeling that I totally suck at it (isn’t that part of the proof that I’m doing a better job than I think I’m doing!?) and that I am learning as I go (see how open I am?!). But one of the most pervasive and pernicious lies I tell myself is that my needs are my daughter’s needs, that I can write her future in the ways I would like to rewrite my past.

The fact is that the many fuck-ups my parents made—and yes, some of them included guidance about education, because neither of them went to college—are totally different than the fuck-ups I am presently making. Or at least they are different in their particulars; they no doubt projected themselves onto me in just the same unhelpful way I am projecting myself onto my daughter. Here’s an intersection of love and lies I hadn’t really thought about until now: How I use my daughter to protect a kind of self-love by telling myself lies about how I make life easier for her, as though I am doing anything other than making her life no easier or harder than my parents made mine, albeit in grossly or subtly different ways.

This is not to say that we can’t make the lives of our children easier: If we gave birth to them in the wealthy West and we ourselves were born into a particular socio-racial-economic strata, we have already done that. If we come from abusive homes and raise them in non-abusive homes their lives are better; if we were raised by alcoholics but raise our kids sober we (probably, I think, I hope) improve their lives. Immigrants come to America to improve the chances their children have in the world for good reason. But supposing–as so many of my friends do, including those who have immaculate intellectual pedigrees–that your child’s life will be advantaged by what they may have one day if they make the appropriate sacrifices now (like giving up a month of summer so that you can get an extra few points on the PSAT) goes beyond trying to make your child’s life better than your own, and starts being about trying to make your child into someone you imagine you might have been. And what do you know about that person? Are you sure he or she would have been happier than the present you? Would have been a better parent than the present you? A better professor, a better writer, better at life?

Nonsense! And that’s only talking about you. That’s before you even get to considering your child, who is someone altogether different than you are in many ways, in ways you don’t understand yet (nor do they), and no doubt also similar to you in ways you have yet to fathom (and they will only slowly and reluctantly come to admit). Who am I thinking about, when I’m thinking about the PSAT, my daughter, or me? Am I making the sacrifice or is she? Please. As a good friend said to me, “Clancy, you’re an adult for a long time.” (This friend is 81 years old and still practices medicine fifty hours a week, though it should be said that not everyone gets to be an adult as long as Grace. I hope I’m as lucky).

Readers of my column know that I think lying is over-maligned, and much more necessary than any of us are willing to admit (including, yes, self-deception). But the importance of the truth is also hard to overestimate, because there are times when we must strive to be clear-eyed with ourselves. What’s the PSAT compared to a lazy June afternoon when you are beautiful, and growing, and fifteen years old?

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My girlfriend (who is basically my wife, we’ve lived together for 4 years now) said what I thought was the oddest thing two nights ago just as I was about to get into bed beside her. She said, “You should lie more.” I’ve never heard a woman say that before and it shocked me, as it goes completely against what I’ve been led to believe (by media, relationship counseling etc) that women always want a man to tell the truth. We discussed it and when she explained her rationale I could totally see where she was coming from, whereby she reckoned I have been hurting people in the past year by being too honest and telling them exactly what I think (particularly some friends), thus jeopardizing my relationships with them, when it would have been much better for all concerned if I simply told a little lie.

To which I replied with Mark Twain’s essay, “On the Decay of the Art of Lying”:

Observe, I do not mean to suggest that the custom of lying has suffered any decay or interruption–no, for the Lie, as a Virtue, A Principle, is eternal; the Lie, as a recreation, a solace, a refuge in time of need, the fourth Grace, the tenth Muse, man’s best and surest friend, is immortal, and cannot perish from the earth while this club remains. My complaint simply concerns the decay of the art of lying. No high-minded man, no man of right feeling, can contemplate the lumbering and slovenly lying of the present day without grieving to see a noble art so prostituted. In this veteran presence I naturally enter upon this theme with diffidence; it is like an old maid trying to teach nursery matters to the mothers in Israel. It would not become to me to criticize you, gentlemen–who are nearly all my elders–and my superiors, in this thing–if I should here and there seem to do it, I trust it will in most cases be more in a spirit of admiration than fault-finding; indeed if this finest of the fine arts had everywhere received the attention, the encouragement, and conscientious practice and development which this club has devoted to it, I should not need to utter this lament, or shred a single tear. I do not say this to flatter: I say it in a spirit of just and appreciative recognition. (It had been my intention, at this point, to mention names and to give illustrative specimens, but indications observable about me admonished me to beware of the particulars and confine myself to generalities.)

No fact is more firmly established than that lying is a necessity of our circumstances–the deduction that it is then a Virtue goes without saying. No virtue can reach its highest usefulness without careful and diligent cultivation–therefore, it goes without saying that this one ought to be taught in the public schools–even in the newspapers. What chance has the ignorant uncultivated liar against the educated expert? What chance have I against Mr. Per–against a lawyer? Judicious lying is what the world needs. I sometimes think it were even better and safer not to lie at all than to lie injudiciously. An awkward, unscientific lie is often as ineffectual as the truth.

What Twain is talking about is a small part of what Confucians call the virtue of li (one would like to add the ‘e’ to get ‘lie’): the norms of correct social behavior, the norms of how we get along with one another. For the Confucian, this includes religious rights, filial piety, loyalty, and many other aspects or ordinary life in a community; but, like Twain, who playfully emphasizes that “you…are nearly all my elders—and my superiors, in this thing” (this thing being lying), the Confucian recognizes that in much of our daily life truth and truthfulness are not the most important goods. Your friends, your beloved, your teachers, your parents: all of them require that you tell lies—some larger, some smaller: some demand that you tell lies (in my experience, mothers are prone to this), others merely depend upon it (as I depend upon my wife to lie to me about my appearance, now and then, and she relies on me to do the same).

So I think Mark Twain would tell my Australian friend that he has work to do in two areas: Firstly, learn to lie when it’s appropriate, as his girlfriend suggests; and secondly (and for Twain, just as importantly), learn to lie well. Because a clumsy lie will be even more offensive than the truth—just as baldfaced flattery is more offensive than somewhat abrupt frankness. Canadians remind me of Australians, in many ways; but one difference I am not surprised to encounter is that Australians might be more upfront and candid while Canadians, as Hemingway once pointed out, “have the easy social graces” that come with a willingness to massage the truth, to find the right—hopefully harmless—falsehood.

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“Did these people never reproduce?” one wants to ask–but many new truths about infants and children will doubtless be revealed as more and more scientists become more and more active parents, whether it is more women becoming scientists, or male scientists spending more time caring for the kids. Furthermore, on the subject of parenting, Dr. Victoria Talwar (of McGill University) has shown that children learn how to lie not from television, or peers, or older kids, or other bad influences, but—you guessed it—from their parents. So it’s good that our kids lie, and they are modeling us when they do it—and yet there is hardly a parent out there who doesn’t discourage her or his child from lying. (“Better not tell a lie. Santa Claus might be watching…”)

A friend of mine at the University of Arizona who is an expert on lying, Don Fallis, reminded me that Holden Caulfield described himself as “the most terrific liar you ever saw in your life.” And all of the residents of Salinger’s world seem much less worried about the truth—at least, the truth as cold, hard fact—than they are about a different quality that usually relates, we think, to truthfulness: namely, sincerity. Holden Caulfield and the Glasses are nothing if not sincere. (They are as sincere as glass—if not always as transparent.) One thing that drove Holden crazy and that the Glass kids also despised–and we suppose Salinger must have hated as well–was what Holden called “being a phony,” or what we more often refer to as hypocrisy. The ancient vice of the whited sepulcher. The one who actually dares to pretend he is without sin and throws the first stone. The people in glass houses who think theirs are made of brick. We all live in glass houses, but some of us are more willing to admit it than others; the Glasses wear it as a name, perhaps because they see better than we do.

It is hypocrisy that makes us furious at politicians, much more so than actual lying (the “that woman” statement was Clinton’s moral low point, much more than the adultery and the cover-up). But is sincerity as virtuous as it seems? There was a cover of the European edition of The Economist in 2004 that showed Bush and Blair arm-in-arm, with the caption “Sincere Deceivers”: the point being that Bush and Blair believed their own lies before they sold them to us. This is, as any great liar will tell you, the best way and most convincing way to lie: Make yourself believe it first before you try to tell it to someone else. Here’s how Nietzsche described it:

“With all great deceivers there is a noteworthy occurrence to which they owe their power. In the actual act of deception, with all of its preparations, its enthralling in voice, expression and gesture, in the midst of the scenery designed to give it effect, they are overcome by belief in themselves….Self-deception has to exist if a grand effect is to be produced. For men believe in the truth of that which is plainly strongly believed.”

Sincerity, in short, is more complicated and may be less virtuous than it looks. And what about hypocrisy? Here’s Nietzsche again: “The hypocrite who always plays one role finally ceases to be a hypocrite….The profession of almost every man, even that of the artist, begins with hypocrisy, with an imitation from without, with a copying of what is most effective.” (We all know how that goes: “fake it until you make it.”) Erving Goffman made just the same point but extended it to all social interaction in his famous work on the presentation of self in ordinary life. We are all, always, actors.

Now we are turning somersaults, and it’s hard to know where the truth and character coincide. I think what we want from ourselves, at least as a start, is the truth about lying: that is, an admission that we all lie (yes, including our children), and that we do it much more often and more nimbly than any of us would like to admit. The next step—the epistemologically and morally responsible step—might be to recognize that part of one’s daily mental activity is the work of sorting out the lies from the truth: that is, of at least knowing when one is lying, of catching oneself at it. This is harder than it looks—in a study at Stanford, students underrated their own daily lying by a factor of ten.

The hardest lies to catch are the ones we tell ourselves, and it might be wise to use gentle, even furtive fingers in teasing those out. I don’t know about you, but for me it takes twelve self-deceptions just to get out of bed in the morning. Once that work is done, maybe we are in a position to be able to start worrying about avoiding such vices as hypocrisy, and cultivating such virtues as sincerity. The Ancient Greeks thought self-knowledge was a life-long project, and a dangerous one–witness Narcissus, who died because he came to know himself, and Oedipus, who became a blind beggar for the same reason. They understood, as Nietzsche put it, “the wisdom of appearances.”

Holden Caulfield was on to something when he admitted he was a liar and recognized that he was surrounded by phonies: We are the worst sort of phony when we pretend we don’t lie. So what are we teaching our two-year-olds when we tell them that lying is always wrong? Is it anything else than a lesson, at that tender age, in how to be a phony?

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The difference, of course, is that in love lost, the lost beloved goes on living: you imagine how she looks at him, twisting her hair around her finger at her ear; how his eyes change when he sees her; how she supposes she knows him so well, while you know that, in Tori Amos’s words, you “knew him, better, better, better.” And while you might feel like tearing out your own eyes with grief at your inability to ever again speak to a loved one who has died, at least you will never have to suffer through the conversation which is the very low point of heartbreak: when the person with whom you were once more intimate than any other in the world pretends that she doesn’t understand what you are talking about, or acts as though she simply can’t hear what you are saying anymore. “It’s me,” you want to scream — or do scream — but it doesn’t work. In fact, it has the opposite of the desired effect; everything you do or imagine trying only makes matters worse, only further sinks the lead weight of your hopes. She’s gone, and you can’t have her back. But then again, maybe you could! Meanwhile, somebody else has her.

Sartre says the lover “wants to be loved by a freedom but demands that this freedom as freedom should no longer be free.” Funny how, in heartbreak, the first clause that sets up the paradox goes out the window. I don’t give a damn anymore whether she comes back freely or in chains; I’d use any kind of potion or threat to estrange her from her new lover. Sartre insists that “if the beloved is transformed into an automaton, the lover finds himself alone,” but the hell with that, at least the robot wouldn’t have her cold legs wrapped around his furious, eager, doubtless nimble hips. This first blind moment of irrational despair and infantile demand is a heartbroken person’s moment of denial.

I have been reading a poet named Honor Moore: her work is new to me, and I am still letting it settle in. (I owe my happy discovery of Moore to the poet Chad McCracken.) A poem of hers about denial, called “Disparu,” is beautiful enough and short enough to offer in its entirety. Anyway we should all read a poem a day.

I spent the day with invisible you, your arms Invisible around me, holding me blue in your Open invisible eyes. We walked invisible, Invisible and happy, daydreaming sight as if Light were a piano it played on. Invisible My hand at your well-cut trouser, invisible Speeding night, the invisible taxi, bare The invisible legs, kissing the vanishing Mouths, breasts invisible, your, my invisible Entwining, the sheets white as geese, blue as sky. And darling, how your invisible prick rose, Rosy, invisible, invisible as all night Galloping, swinging, we tilted and sang.

Let’s look at two lines: “Invisible and happy, daydreaming sight as if/galloping, swinging, we tilted and sang.” The first we might call the transparency feature of heartbreak; the second the quixotic feature. Both transparency and quixotism are crucial aspects of the creative project of love generally, and we should not be surprised to encounter the same steps on the ladder both on our happy climb up and on our desperate slide down. But there is no acceptance here, nor depression; no bargaining or begging; not even yet anger. This poem is about early heartbreak, so it is overflowing with impossible hope.

Because the lovers are invisible, they have nothing to hide from one another. They are completely transparent — light passes through them as if they were not even there — even seeing has become daydreaming, substance is as light as music. We are out of the realm of cold truth and colder falsehood, in the happy fictional land of “as if,” where anything might be. It’s a sort of denial, but denial that depends upon one of the first myths of love: that we will know one another completely, that we will see through one another, that we will blend in such a way that we could hold one another in our eyes, and become truly one.

A grown up love, I think, will always believe that we can become more transparent to one another, while accepting that complete visibility (which is really an invisibility — to see completely through someone is to see them like glass) is impossible, probably undesirable, and maybe even threatening.

Which leads us to the the quixotic feature of this denial: “galloping, swinging, we tilted and sang,” like Don Quixote on poor old Rosinante, swinging wildly in the saddle and tilting after his famous sail-armed giants in the name of the beautiful pig-tender Dulcinea. This love must believe the romantic dream in order to continue its love; it will deny all empirical evidence and love for romance’s sake alone; it will sing where it cannot be satisfied. We cannot love without the imagination, without projecting ourselves and our lover into a realm of value that stands far beyond the pedantry of ordinary, everyday fact — this is the great lesson of Don Quixote, and why Miguel de Unamuno claims that, for the Spanish, he is a greater religious figure even than Christ. But the price of sacrificing the ordinary world is that, when love is lost, what was an imaginative transformation of reality now becomes a blindness to fact. For Sartre, this the extreme end of one of his two poles of bad faith: Honor Moore’s narrator has moved entirely into transcendence, into the world of possibility, and is denying every fact (her “facticity,” in his jargon) that might free her to love someone new.

Honor Moore’s poem “Disparu” can be found in her collection “Red Shoes” (W.W. Norton, 2005).

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There was a moment, though, when I had an intimation of what was to come. After the U-Haul was loaded, and we had split the money and kissed goodbye, she said, “So you really are going?” We both cried, and I gave her something — I don’t remember what it was — and she turned and walked down the sidewalk, going to work, and just as she walked over the crest of the hill, before she would disappear out of sight, she turned and waved. It was a May morning, and she was beneath a tree, and the green-and-yellow light was across her face and in her hair, and for a moment I felt a pinch of what would become, in a few weeks, that vise of loss and despair and debilitating grief and craziness that is heartbreak.

In a month she was already in love with someone else, and I would have told any wild lie, I would have robbed a bank if she’d asked me too, I would have cut off three fingers with a kitchen knife — I really believe I would have — just to have her back again. We’ve all been there, you all know what I’m talking about. As a parent it’s terrifying: you know you’ll be useless when your children are having their hearts broken. And it has to happen; it will happen, and probably more than once.

* * *

Marcel had come to despise Albertine. He told himself that she provided at best a little pleasure while preventing many wonderful pleasures and real happiness — until he heard the words “Mademoiselle Albertine has gone.” He was certain that she meant nothing to him, that he had self-knowledge at least on this score: “I believed that I had, like a precise analyst, left nothing out. I believed that I knew the very bottom of my heart.” Then she left, and his pain was so wrenching that “wondering retrospectively whether or not she looked at a woman on a particular day in the corridor of a little seaside railway train causes one the same pain as would a surgeon probing for a bullet in one’s heart.”

There is a debate in the philosophy of emotion about the level of cognition in our emotional experiences: it began (in American academic philosophy) with the work of my own mentor, dear friend, and co-author, the late Robert C. Solomon, and in the context of love it has been forcefully investigated by Martha Nussbaum (my thinking here is indebted to her). Part of the debate is about whether one comes to know love in heartbreak (that is, I was wrong in thinking I didn’t love my girlfriend, just as Marcel was wrong in thinking he didn’t love Albertine) or whether the suffering of heartbreak is in fact constitutive of the love (that is, I came to love my girlfriend in a different way when I lost her, just as Marcel came to love Albertine in his agony). There is also a third option: the pain we suffer in heartbreak is yet another layer of self-deception. While pain, real suffering, seems to bear the mark of undeniable truth (“the lies I told myself just because I was happy!”), the pain may nevertheless be one more half-truth, false belief, or strategic self-deception.

Back in my college drug days — now very far behind me, thank God — I remember the end of a crack cocaine binge in Miami. I was sitting on the railing of the balcony of my hotel room, confronting, as I felt then, the irrefutable and unbearable truth about myself and my place in the world. I was trying to let myself roll off the railing. The mental anguish I was in seemed to reveal the triviality and deceptiveness of my ordinary life. But in fact, I was just coming down. The reason cognition matters here, is because pain seems primitive (and thus somehow “truthful”) in a way that thinking does not. If emotions are involved with thinking, if they are, as Solomon first put it (following Sartre), “judgments,” or “evaluations” (Sartre described an emotion as a “magical transformation” of the world, and that is better than either judgment or evaluation, I think), then they are slipperier than we suppose. And they are that much harder to grasp when they are swimming in the muddiest pond of them all, self-knowledge.

But if we can’t know ourselves when we are and are not in love, what can we know? Could it ever make sense for you to approach me and say: “You think you love her, but you don’t”? Could your arguments ever persuade me? We know from experience that arguments of that kind tend to have the opposite effect. And if we can’t know whether or not we are in love, does it make sense for us to say that we are self-deceived in love?

Maybe heartbreak is not so much a state or a judgment as it is an activity, and so our usual way of thinking about the emotional condition (“truly loved,” “falsely loved,” “the truth of my love was revealed”) does not fit heartbreak very well. There are certainly lots of judgments that go into heartbreak: “She didn’t love me as much as I thought she did!” “I’m unlovable!” “I am a different person than I was before, part of me is gone!” “He is too good to love someone like me!” “If only he could see how much I really love him, if only he could hear me, he couldn’t help but love me back!” And of course there is a small subgenre of art, literature, music and film devoted to this subject (as in like, half of all of it). Take that brilliant image of heartbreak from the late eighties: John Cusack standing in the rain with his boombox over his head (the real reason we still love Cusack after so many badly chosen roles). Judgments are part of the activity of heartbreak, I think, but are not sufficient to its description (the judgment without the heartbreak, Kant would say, is empty); just as heartbreak without judgments — what I have called primitive pain and Proust calls simply “suffering” — would be blind.

So what is heartbreak? We have broken some ice, but haven’t made as much forward progress as I would like. Please look for “Heartbreak Revisited” in two weeks.

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You may get lucky and find the person who completes you. (If you’re especially lucky, according to Aristophanes, who tells this story in Plato’s drinking party dialogue “Symposium,” you and your other half are both males: every other combination is a somewhat lesser whole.) In “Love’s Confusions,” a brilliant book that I recommend to all my readers, my favorite contemporary commentator on love, the philosopher C.D.C. Reeve, summarizes the problem this way: “Plato’s picture of desire as an emptiness figures the ideal beloved as an object that completes the lover by perfectly filling him out” (p. 117). Plato’s view (which runs much deeper in “Symposium” than Aristophanes’ playful speech) has a superficial appeal to it, because it seems to accord with the way we experience the longing for love (in philosophy-speak, we would say that Plato’s view captures the phenomenology of love—or at least, the kind of love we think of when we think of enduring erotic love). But what Reeve argues—and the view I want to advance here—is that this way of thinking about love is really a way of avoiding thinking about death, among other things. Or, to put the same thought another way, to buy into this view of love is to buy into the idea that there is an afterlife.

The account doesn’t doesn’t turn out to as Freudian or as complex as you would expect. We are messy collections of desire and anxiety: seeking what we do not have, and fearful of losing what we do. So we have a tendency to think of existence as painfully incomplete. The constant presence of evil in the world adds to our evidence for a kind of inadequacy of existence that should be overcome. When in love, or when loving, it is true that most of us for a time breathe easier, we feel consoled. And out of love, we are back to need and loss. Life, similarly, is an oscillation between satiation and lack—but maybe in the next life we will be complete. Love is a bit like God’s drug, the dealer “gives you sweet taste”(Lou Reed) of what’s to come after all this struggle and stress.

But suppose death really is the end of life, and nothing comes after. I always tell my students: “Wouldn’t it be the best surprise party ever? The lights are dimming, your family is around you, you’ve said your last goodbyes—now the light grows dimmer still, there is only a tiny circle, and then, nothing. And: SURPRISE! The room is full of sunshine, you’re back on your feet, all your old dead friends and family are there to greet you—there’s Mom, she can barely wait to kiss you—there’s Jesus, smiling on, in a golden toga. Everyone shouts, welcome, we fooled you, hurrah! General laughter and genuinely exceptional champagne.” To me it seems a bit too good to be true, though I hate to be a party-pooper.

So for the sake of argument, let’s say death is the end. Now it occurs to you: there is no completion to this business, except for death. Well, that’s depressing, so let’s look for other sources of completion. But what if the point—what if the lesson of death, as Heidegger thought—is that there is no completion, but only creation, only becoming. Now suppose you think about love in those terms: not achieving love—not being reunited with your missing other half who will complete you—but love as movement and vigor, love as a fundamentally creative act, love as a becoming rather than a being. Then love no longer “seeks with fury, through the medium of the beloved, something beyond, and since it finds it not, despairs”(Miguel De Unamuno); rather (and this might be the uncomfortable part) the whole onus of love is thrown back upon the lovers. They are engaged not in a process of finding the truth within each other, or discovering whether they are well-matched, or changing one another so as to better fit their needs and circumstances, or of ever reaching that place some of us (childishly, charmingly) thought our parents had reached, of “true love.”

Nope. Now love—like life, or work—is an activity, irreducibly and permanently an activity, practiced well or badly, actively or passively (and passive activity doesn’t take us very far unless we are very well-trained Daoists). It is for this reason, as Reeve argues, that Aristotle defined his God as an activity: an activity can be perfect in a way that a process, which is an incompletion that slowly comes to an end, cannot. There isn’t anywhere we are going with love, just as there isn’t anywhere we are going with life—except, again, to death.

But activity can be sufficient unto itself. Think of children at play. Doesn’t that model, if we are honest about it, better match the phenomenology of love: two children at play? Competitive at times, cooperative at others, often tearful, inconclusive, ongoing only so long as both participants can be encouraged to engage? And the jealousy of watching two of your friends play while you are excluded from the game; the heartbreak of being the last one picked for the team; the dynamics of personality that are the most interesting and complex and indefinable (or difficult to pinpoint) forces that drive play. And when she told you, “It’s over,” didn’t it feel like she was saying, “I don’t want to play anymore”?

I don’t want to play in your yard, I don’t like you anymore, You’ll be sorry when you see me, Sliding down our cellar door, You can’t holler down our rainbarrel, You can’t climb our apple tree, I don’t want to play in your yard, If you won’t be good to me.

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Sexually exclusivity for men, as the study notes, does not obviously contribute to the evolutionary success of high IQ males — in fact, just the opposite. (Though the truth about the relationship between evolutionary success and high male IQ may be more subtle). Women, I should add, are also more likely to be atheists and liberals if they are very smart, but are not more or less likely to be sexually exclusive. (What to make of that is anybody’s guess.) I find this to be delightful, strangely comforting, and puzzling, so I have been asking friends, relatives and fellow professors what they make of this new statistic.

Here are some of the theories that have been advanced:

(1) The smarter men are, the less psychologically stable they are. They find that stability in a partner, and so quite sensibly avoid losing their psychological footing by playing around. (This is my own theory, which tells you something about Clancy.)

(2) The smarter men are, the more they value financial success. Cheating, as anyone can tell you, is always expensive (hotels, flowers, champagne, shoes), and sometimes ruinously so (divorce, child support). So, smart men keep their pants zipped and their wallets in their pockets. (If this is the reason, it depresses me. But several male friends suggested it.)

(3) The smarter men are, the greater respect they have for rules and promises. I find this to be hilariously implausible, but remember, I know a lot of philosophers. Smart men, in short, have a higher inclination to be moral (Nietzsche is rolling in his grave–though of course in his own life he followed a very strict moral code. In fact he complained that when Lou Salome told him he had no morality, he misunderstood her to mean that she had, like him, a much higher and stricter morality.)

(4) Smarter men have lower sex drives. (Suggested by several female friends of mine, and no males.) I refuse to countenance this impertinent suggestion.

(5) Intelligent men are less likely to view women as “sex objects,” and in general tend to have greater respect for women (and what about gay men? I wonder). This is my wife’s view, I am pleased to say, but she may only have been flattering me.

(6) Intelligent men tend to be less self-confident with women, to flirt less often and less effectively, and generally are more prone to self-doubt and shyness. These same intelligent men are astonishingly dumb when it comes to recognizing sexual invitations from women. (Many female friends offered this view, which seems to me to be highly plausible).

(7) Adam Phillips — I did not speak with him directly, I should say — argues that monogamy is a way of reducing the number of versions of ourselves, “a way of convincing ourselves that some versions are truer than others–that some are special,” as he writes in “On Monogamy.” This relates, I think, to the view I offered in (1). On this account, men with higher IQs feel a greater need for “a special self” or (stronger) an “authentic self,” and the naivete that comes along with such a need might explain why the need was peculiar to men and not women (at least, vis a vis sexual exclusivity and IQ). Women seem, speaking very broadly and thus perhaps stupidly, to be more sophisticated than men on the question of “what it is to be a self” (just read Irigaray’s “This Sex Which is Not One,” and she will convince you that, at the very least, women are more subtle and complex when it comes to their thinking about selfhood).

(8) Okay, fellas: if you’re smart and monogamous, you are not going to like this one. I have been reading all over the place about this phenomenon, and though very little research has been done on it — the study with which I began really is groundbreaking — here is some speculation from the New York Times’ hot-babe evolutionary biologist Olivia Judson: “Perhaps it will turn out…that men with large testicles (anticipating a high risk of sperm competition) are prone to seducing other men’s wives and have difficulty forming lasting bonds, whereas men with small testicles (anticipating a low risk of sperm competition) are prone to sexual fidelity and jealousy and turn all lovey-dovey after sex.” (You can read more about this in her best-selling book “Dr. Tatiana’s Sex Advice to All Creation,” in the section Till Death Do Us Part.”) Of course it does not follow from this that smart men have small testicles, or that dumb men are luckily endowed: Aristotle, we know, was very unfortunate in the “does size matter?” department, and the wise, peaceable mountain gorilla tends to be both very monogamous, and endowed with unusually small testicles. But the interesting connection is still worth mentioning.

That’s enough theories to get the discussion started, in any event. I hope readers will be tempted to weigh in on this one. I’m writing a book about sex right now, and I need all the help I can get. (With the book, that is; my wife takes care of the sex end of things very nicely, thank you very much.)

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Sartre called this “The Look,” when you realize, with a kind of shock and terror, that another universe is there beside you, one you can never grasp, that everywhere that universe is oriented is oriented away from you, so that just as these are your walls, your buttons, your elevator door, so are they someone else’s, but differently, and his owning that universe creates a kind of vortex that whirls the universe away from you. The Look was there in the way we looked at one another–I saw it, and he saw it, too. But it wasn’t just The Look, either. It wasn’t even that each of us realized that the other was having this experience of The Look, though it was obvious we both were (though I don’t know if this guy ever read Sartre; he’s not such standard fare as he once was, and maybe especially not in Kansas City, Missouri–we have a different “The Look,” which is the look you give a proper pulled pork sandwich). Anyway, you don’t have to read Sartre to have the experience. Sartre was describing the experience, not discovering or creating it.

There was also a poignancy in the look we gave one another, as though we were meant to be friends and missed the opportunity at an earlier point in our lives; as though, if we fell to talking, we would have uncovered truths in common, and maybe would have understood one another. And then we looked away. He got off the elevator before I did, and when he did, I wanted to reach out or call out to him, but naturally I didn’t. He didn’t look back.

In “Being and Time,” Sartre explained that part of The Look’s power derives from the other person’s attempt to appropriate you into their universe, to make you a part of their world. In looking at you, I try to take possession of you. But I think Sartre’s analysis is misguided–perhaps by his own sexually notorious lifestyle; he took possession of many, which was a source of constant misery to his partner Simone, though she took possession of as many as he did–in that it fails to acknowledge that when we look at one another and see into one another in a mysterious way, we don’t just make one another a part of our own individual universes, our universes somehow mingle (curiously, they have the right idea in the concept of “I see you” that is tossed around in the movie “Avatar”).

Irving Singer calls this “the look of love,” and uses the metaphor of the look between a child and its mother; Martin Buber thought that this way of looking revealed the presence of God. (Buber argued that if you looked at a tree in a truly contemplative way, you would understand that the tree was, so to speak, looking back at you, and looking back at you with love and respect. This sounds a bit crazy, or like Buber took a lot of acid when he went back to the Holy Land, but try it sometime, when you have time to sit and be very calm: The tree is not you, but you get the feeling it knows you are there. Well, it’s worth a shot.)

When two lovers first let themselves really look at one another–this is less common than we suppose it is–the same thing is happening: There is shared recognition, not just of otherness, but of togetherness. That kind of intimacy is frightening, just as this unexpected shock of intimacy between myself and this total stranger on the elevator was frightening, and felt like a loss afterward. This is one reason that the looks of lovers matter as much as they do, and why the betrayal of love has an oddly visual character. Adam Phillips gets it just right in his discussion of jealousy (another diabolically visual phenomenon: think how much hangs on looking for the jealous lover) in his book “Monogamy”: “But if jealousy is the way I notice that the other person is not my sole possession–not my thing–then I need to be betrayed to break out of the magic circle of myself. While betrayal makes us too real to each other, its impossibility makes us invisible.”

Unless we can be betrayed, we cannot see one another at all; it is in looking at one another and seeing one another that we become more than who we are. Let’s hope that Phillips is wrong when he suggests that betrayal is a prerequisite for breaking out of our own little circles–I suspect Freud and Sartre both would have agreed (on this account, betrayal moves us from understanding love as identification to love as transference)–but he gets the triangular phenomenology of visibility, love and selfhood exactly right.

Singer argues that, at the end of the day, love is a kind of acceptance of another person–not a trivial acceptance, but an acceptance that goes all the way down–and as good as that is, he still misses part of what is happening in that look. What he is missing, and what I felt I lost, I think, is the way in which who we are and how we understand ourselves is through the eyes of other people. Every time I look at you and you look back at me, a new me appears, very similar to the old me but also full of of different possibilities and whole futures I had not imagined, lives I might lead and now won’t lead when you look away. Our future is defined, even in the simplest and most obvious ways, by the people we decide to bring into our our universes (and when we step into theirs). Think how different your life would be if it weren’t for certain friends, particular mentors–not to mention parents, siblings, children.

But your connection with these people isn’t merely what you have enjoyed and suffered together, or even what you have chosen together (the exercise of one’s freedom in conjunction with another’s–the “let’s do this together”–is one of the most satisfying aspects of long-term partnerships of any kind, romantic or otherwise). It is also, and maybe more fundamentally, this recognition, this look, this vibration in the air as though mental electricity were being exchanged, electricity charged with possibility. You want to swallow. The soles of your feet may tingle. Or a chill might run up your spine like when you read a line of real poetry. There is someone else there, and that someone is not you, but somehow also is you, too, and who you might have been, or might yet become.

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These three students were in many ways quite similar: all were unusually bright, highly motivated, upper middle class, talented, male, and (at least in the case of both of my students) a bit uneasy, a bit more eager to prove themselves than the other students around them. Or I could be simply projecting that anxiety onto them now, as a consequence of their action. The first friend I ever had who killed himself was a kid named Ben who was in I.B. Physics with me at Western Canada High School in Calgary, Alberta. We competed with one another in physics, the class that really counted for the I.B. kids. Before that, my earlier experiences with suicide were when my stepbrother Paul leapt off a building in Calgary, when I was seven, and when my stepsister Lisa tried the same thing, a year or so later. Paul died; Lisa lived, with a ruptured spleen.

As readers of my column know, I tried to kill myself a little over a year ago. People asked me, “How could you? With a wife and three daughters? Don’t you know how much they need you? Think of how much harm you would be doing to them. How could you be so selfish?” Of course it’s the right question, and it is fair to ask these young men how they failed to see how much promise they had, how loved they were, how much pain they would leave behind for the people who love them. It is part of the hellish, circular logic of the suicide (at least, in my own experience): that you know these things as you go through the short ritual that precedes your failed or successful attempt, and that knowledge is further confirmation that you are not the sort of person who ought to be alive. You’re not thinking, “I’ll show them,” but rather, “They’ll be better off without me”–and the fact of the harm this will cause them is only further proof of the fact that you are the kind of person they should not be exposed to. You know something about yourself that they must not know: here’s the way to keep it forever hidden, or to finally expose it. Selfishness is part of it–and, usually, unbearable suffering, suffering that is profoundly wrapped up with selfhood. For Kierkegaard, there was a deep split in the very center of the self that was experienced as anxiety, and the deeper we fell into the black chasm of the self, the more that anxiety threatened to overwhelm us (and our only hope of being made whole, he thought, was through faith).

The best contemporary literature on suicide tells us that the urge to kill oneself, if the means are not available, often passes, and for good (Scott Anderson wrote a very nice summary of this literature in the New York Times). But the determined suicide finds a way. (One always has this nasty desire to ask the failed suicide: “But did you really mean to do it?” just as the failed suicide always has this perverse self-doubt: “But was I truly trying or not?”) When I was in the hospital after my own attempt, there was a young girl there–she was nineteen, but if you met her, you would have called her a girl, too–who was back in after her fifth suicide attempt. She had tried various things: pills, slashing her wrists, hanging herself. We talked about the feeling of not wanting to live–everyone one of us, I think, has had the experience of feeling “this is simply too much, I can’t bear it anymore”–but also the different and much more conclusive, more difficult to eradicate feeling of not deserving to live, of causing harm by living. As though one could be a virus that would spread. It’s a crazy thought: and maybe just one more justification of the need to escape. One of the familiar feelings of real depression is the inability to discern the difference between the depression itself and one’s drama about the depression.

Albert Camus’s notion–Camus always gets quoted when it comes to suicide–of Sisyphus pushing the rock up the hill without end, and his conclusion that “we must imagine Sisyphus as happy,” is flat-out crazy talk, unless he means that “we must imagine Sisyphus as happy, otherwise we’ll all kill ourselves!” If this is some kind of practical self-help self-deception, maybe he’s right. But if I were Sisyphus I’d let that boulder roll right over me.

We aren’t in Sisyphus’s position. We do wake up in bed a year later with our partners curled around us, or our three year olds with their heads on our chests, or the winter sun out the window looking sideways across the clusters of pine needles and the long branches of a huge, two hundred year old tree. That, of course, must be what Camus meant to say, what I wish I could have said to my student, and what I did say to that nineteen-year-old in the hospital: “Just don’t give up.”

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