I finished another book!! This is a decently long book, but I also read only a tiny bit here and there, even though I would LOVE to devote most of my time to reading, especially books about love. 🙂
So this book, for me, was the most perfect book ever. Literally. Now, you may be different than me, but if you’re the same as me, it’s the best non-fiction book in the world. Everything I could possibly want to know about love in an informational sense was covered in this book. Therefore, I can’t really give you any summaries/tidbits, because, as a highly detail-oriented person, my summary would be a book itself. I can, however, list off some of the different topics that were listed. The book covers history (starting with my 3 favorite ancient cultures; Egypt, Greece, and Rome), religions, philosophy, psychology, science (i.e chemistry, biology), erotics, customs, and variations. It’s just plain wonderful. I could not have asked for more. Diane Ackerman is also an excellent writer, to top it off.
So basically, the only thing I can tell you, is that if you have any interest in any of those topics, you should probably read it. I can’t begin to discuss any of it here, so just READ IT!! 🙂 There are also way too many amazing quotes, so I will just leave you with the last paragraph of the book:
In that sense, the heart is just such a museum, filled with the exhibits of a lifetime’s loves. We remember them frozen in time, illuminated by distance, rinsed in the most unnatural light at times, the better to reveal their finer points. Can they breathe and embrace us? No. But neither can they threaten and wound us, if they’re restrained by glass. They are commemorative. The heart issues them like emotional stamps. They are emblematic. Ransack the museum of your heart for love-sappiness, and you’ll find it for sure, just the right example. My mother once told me how, when she was a teenager, she was so in love with a certain boy that she secretly picked up the Popsicle sticks he tossed away and kept them under her pillow, kissing them at night. To this day, she remembers that as a perfect specimen of girlish infatuation. That same boy, now in his late seventies, bumped into her brother recently and asked tenderly about her. He hasn’t forgotten her, either. The heart is a living museum. In each of its galleries, no matter how narrow or dimly lit, preserved forever like wondrous diatoms, are our moments of loving and being loved.
Reflections on Love 