The End of Love and Literature
- Paulo Pereira de Araujo
- 15 de nov.
- 3 min de leitura
Atualizado: 18 de nov.
When the Relationship Ends and the Book Begins
There is no heartbreak that an enjoyable book cannot transform into an underlined phrase. It is almost a natural law: the romance ends, we rush to the bookshelf in search of someone who has suffered worse and written better. The first time I fell in love was by mistake. I swear. I thought it was love, but it was just neediness seasoned with reading Fernando Pessoa, who makes us believe that even melancholy has a certain glamour. It happens.
When the loneliness went away (and it always does, as if obeying a secret manual), I did what every sensitive and troubled young person does: I locked myself in my room with a book and a glass of wine. The book was The Sorrows of Young Werther; the wine, of course, was cheap. I cried silently. Not because of the end of the relationship, but because Goethe was far too right for someone as young as I was.
Literature always arrives after the chaos, like a belated ambulance. When lost love has already turned into a memory, resentment, or that awkward mixture of the two, it appears, elegant, patient, almost maternal, like that friend who does not judge, just offers a handkerchief and quotes Simone de Beauvoir with surgical precision.
Sometimes she even exaggerates, she offers Proust, and then you realize that your pains are minimal compared to someone who resurrected an entire century trying to rediscover the taste of unrequited love in a madeleine, that small French cake in the shape of a shell.
And it is not just Proust. The literary world is practically a club of broken hearts charging an annual emotional dues. Flaubert can attest to that: he transformed the emotional monotony of Emma Bovary into a universal symbol of romantic frustration. Turgenev, in First Love, showed that there is no adolescence without emotional humiliation.
The Brazilian writer Hilda Hilst wrote letters that are almost pleas transformed into art. Kawabata, with his cruel delicacy, reminded us that unrequited love has silence as its official language. And Emily Brontë, perhaps the most radical, proved in Wuthering Heights that there are passions that survive until the Last Lady, which does not mean they become any easier.
Clarice Lispector, who never knew whether she was writing about love or the abyss, loved what she did not understand and transformed that lack of understanding into literature. Carlos Drummond de Andrade, more direct, said that love is a cousin of the Last Lady, and both behave like mischievous children, knocking everything down in their path. Machado de Assis, disguised as irony, taught that impossible loves are clearer when seen through the biased lens of memory.
Sometimes I think we only love so we can write about it later. That deep down in affection, there is an aesthetic urgency, a secret desire to transform abandonment into style, silence into beautiful phrases, pain into narratable memories. As if what does not become text continues to haunt us, demanding form, demanding a voice.
Literature does not console. That would be asking too much. It shares. It says: “Are you suffering? Me too. But see how, with care, this can become beautiful on paper.” And perhaps that's why, when love dies, we write. Because, in the end, surviving passion is easy. The difficult part is surviving the memory, and that is where the book, always the book, arrives with its belated but necessary light.
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