How to be lazy (i.e., avoid running) on an cold evening when it is not raining but can rain imminently? Read tomes ambitiously titled "Love & Friendship" by tangy (or is it tart?) folks like Allan Bloom. Since I have already professed laziness, I will borrow from one of the reviews at Amazon to give a quick summa of the book:

"This book,'' begins Bloom, ``is an attempt to recover the power, the danger, and the beauty of eros under the tutelage of its proper teachers and knowers, the poets.'' So far, so good. Bloom looks out on the wreckage of modern social life--the lost marriage of his colleagues, the loveless couplings of his students, the thorough devaluation of domestic life and privacy--and states the obvious fact that something has gone seriously awry. We cannot love properly today, according to Bloom, because we have lost the proper words: The classical conception of love was essentially sacrificial and heroic, whereas the modern mind cannot envision human relations as anything other than as a contractual agreement. We are shown some examples of the Real Thing as it appeared in Shakespeare, Stendahl, Austen, Flaubert, and Tolstoy--and are given a close reading of Rousseau, whose notion of the Social Contract planted the seeds for much of our later troubles..."

For those unaware of Bloom, he was considered to be a brilliant teacher, and a brilliant thinker (brilliant enough to get Saul Bellow to turn his life into a novel, "Ravelstein") but also at the same time an passionate critic (without offering any broadly applicable, and clear cut solutions) of the modern condition. Oh, he was also Paul Wolfowitz's - the necons' guru - guru. Given this background, and having read his more famous "Closing of the American Mind" (COMA) *, I expected L&F to be as sharp, and it is. But in constrast to COMA, L&F is a much more enjoyable read, mainly because what this book offers to the readers are substantially erudite and close readings of the great novels.

In the course of today's evening, I have read his essays on "Pride & Prejudice", "Madame Bovary", and "Anna Karenina", and hugely enjoyed them. But since my laziness prevents me from writing down the gist of what he has to say** on these great novels, here is an "speech" that borrows heavily from this book, and which addresses "Love in the Age of Hooking Up". But since I know at least one person reading this would be interested in hearing what Bloom might have to say on "Pride and Prejudice", here are some of the lines I had underlined in the course of my reading:

"Jane Austen is the steadfast defender of bon sens against self-expression and commitment."

"There are bad people but none of the monsters that one finds in Stendhal, Balzac, or Dostoyevsky. Wickham in P&P is throughly disagreeable and contemptible, but more weak than evil, certainly no highway robber or murderer."

"The good men, Bingley and Darcy, semm to have in no way participated in the great political and ideological events of the day. Austen's horizon is so narrow that one might simply accuse her of being simply feminine, unable to recognize or appreciate politics, war, and the movement of great ideas."

"Stripped of all external drama, the history of the heart as presented by Austen is endlessly fascinating."

"The greatest betrayal of the seriouness of the relationship would be decide about marriage on the basis of mere sexual attraction. The adjustment of sexual passion to the love of virtue is for Jane Austen the central question."

"Each becomes interesting to the other because he or she is not a pushover. Contempt and resentment, or opinions about the other's opinions, determine the attachment while impeding it."

"Elizabeth would never marry a man she considered her inferior, while she hates a man who considers himself her superior. Equality of the partners would seem to be the answer, and it is. But the establishment of equality between two strong-willed individuals is not such an easy thing and probably requires each to think the other is superior."

"Her heronines fit into the conventional order, but that does not entirely disguise the unconventional grounds of the relationships. They are triumphs of nature over convention."

"Marriage is the most significant of conventions, but the sucessful marriage is really the triumph of nature over convention or the use of convention to support nature. The core of the good marriage is the friendship of two people who are attracted to each other and whose virtues are such as both to be admirable and to ensure the fidelity of the partners against temptation and in difficult times. ... The many have marriages, and hence human relationships, that exist only by law and public opinion. The few have substaintial attachments that consist in continuous delight in the company of the other. Charlotte's marriage to Mr. Collins is tolerable only because she is able to arrange her husbands's study in such a way that he is not tempted to come out and bother her, whereas Elizabeth wants to be with Darcy as much as she can."

"The sharper and shrewder Elizabeth is aware of the ambigious motives and can see them even in herself. When she sees Darcy's magnificient estate, she feels what a wonderful thing it would be to be the mistress of all that. Austen does not insist on this point, but we have to wonder whether Elizabeth's love would have been as strong or Darcy's so sucessful without the support of wealth and prominence. ... Modern taste is much more extreme, either reducing things to the lowest common denominator or insisting on a furious idealism. Austen evidently belives that she is giving a more honest account of the complexity of human affairs, in which there is a mixture of high and low."

* Very quickly, and without doing significant battle against his descriptions and diagnoses of what is wrong with "American" intellectual life; oh, except laughing like mad when Bloom sermonizes by commenting that rock music destroys the human soul by inducing sexual frenzy