Big Frank has been thinking lately of a previous post of his on bifurcations: there are two kinds of everything and you can pretty much divide it all into either one or the other. Well, it is somewhat of a simplification, but that does make things much easier. So here are a few more with musings that follow with relevant excerpts from Alan de Botton.(1) There are two kinds of views on why things happen to you: that there is a reason for everything, or that it is all sort of willy-nilly - happenstance. It seems, in Big Frank's experience, that there are more and more people, especially new age types, Christians, eastern philosophy followers, and fatalists who believe that everything that happens to them is for a particular reason. This seems to be most emphatically believed by those at the two ends of life's spectrum - the fortunate and the unfortunate. Those on the fortunate end - take lovers who have first met - they can go on at some detail about the coincidences that led to their meeting (proof in their minds of it being their destiny). Alain de Botton in his great novel "On Love" writes of the meeting of two lovers and their subsequent belief in the inevitablility of their being together by listing coincidences:
"Chloe and I seized upon a host of details, however trivial, as confirmation of what intuitively we already felt: that we had been destined for one another. We learnt that both of us had been born at around midnight [she at 11:45 p.m., I at 1:15a.m.] in the same month of an even-numbered year. Both of us had played clarinet . . . Both of us had two large freckles on the toe of the left foot and a cavity in the same rear mlar. Both of us had a habit of sneezing in bright sunlight and of drawing ketchup out of its bottle with a knife . . . -- small details perhaps, but were they not grounds enough on which believers could found a new religion?"
However, being something of a philosopher, the guy in the novel could not help, in retrospect, in casting some scepticism on this view: "For me to have clung to the idea that Chloe and I had fated to run into one another on an airplane in order then to fall in love implied attachment to a primitive belief system on the level of tea-leaf reading or crystal-ball gazing. If God did not play dice, He or She certainly did not run a dating service."
(2) OK, here's another one. Big Frank has noted that there are two kinds of people who date: those who believe that good prospective relationships are discovered - sparks, chemistry, magic etc. , and those who believe that they are constructed over time through mutual efforts. It's sort of like the difference between prospecting for gold and working a steady job to get rich. Both have the same goal, but what a difference in how to get there.
(3) Big Frank will end this very short list that centers on bifurcation and love with another bifurcation set forth by Alan de Botton. He groups love into two categories: mature and immature:
"Preferable in almost every way, the philosophy of mature love is marked by an active awareness of the good and bad within each person. It is full of temperance, it resists idealization, it is free of jealousy, masochism, or obsession, it is a form of friendship with a sexual dimension, it is pleasant, peaceful, and reciprocated [and perhpas explains why most people who have known desire would refuse its painlessness the title of love]. Immature love on the other hand [though it has little to do with age] is a story of chaotic lurching between idealization and disappointment, an unstable state where feelings of ecstasy and beatitude combine with impressions of drowning and fatal nausea, where the sense that one has finally found the answer comes together with the feeling that one has never been so lost. The logical climax of immature [becasue absolute] love comes in death, symbolic or real; the climax of mature love comes in marriage, and the attempt to avoid death via routine [the Sunday papers, trouser presses, remote-controlled applicances]. For immature love accepts no compromise, and once we do not accept compromise, we are on the road to death. To someone who has known the pinnacles of immature passion, to settle for marriage is an unsustainable price -- one would rather end things by driving a car over a cliff."
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