The Firefly in the Ravine

“Love Loves to Love Love”

The line is James Joyce’s, from Ulysses, and it may be the truest sentence in that enormous book: we love love. Romantic love is a state we all seek and aspire to.

Romantic love has also been called a type of insanity — “a temporary insanity curable by marriage,” as Ambrose Bierce defined it in The Devil’s Dictionary — and modern researchers echo him, describing the early stages of romance as a kind of chemical addiction.

Our relationship to it changes whether we are in the throes of a new love or have just had our hearts broken. Poets and pop songs capture its phases. When we are fresh in love, we listen to the music. And when we are heartbroken, we listen to the lyrics.

We have all fallen head over heels in love, and most of us have had our hearts broken — many of us more than once. Maintaining a supple and open heart in the face of experience is one of the hardest disciplines a human being can undertake.

Once bitten, twice shy.

Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me.

We have lots of sayings to fall back on to rationalize the fortress we build around our hearts.

They stack up and help us feel protected. We feel vulnerable, and we want protection from hurt. It is a reasonable want. But the walls that keep pain out keep life out too, and we end up defended against the very thing we were made for and most desire.

Remaining open-hearted is a practice — a mindfulness practice, and a courageous one. The flame does not need to be a bonfire. It can be hidden and tiny. But it must be acknowledged, tended, and praised.

Nearly a thousand years ago, a Japanese woman named Abutsu-ni wrote:

Who knows

That in the depths of the ravine

Of the mountain of my hidden heart

A firefly of my love is aflame.

Consider what that image asks of us. A firefly is the smallest imaginable light — intermittent, fragile, nearly imperceptible. And she places it not on an open hillside but in the depths of a ravine, inside a mountain, inside a hidden heart: three layers of concealment. Yet it is aflame. It took the soul of an artist, listening intently to the subtlest vibrations of her own existence, to recognize that light, draw it up, and articulate it. And because she did, the image has lasted a millennium. The firefly is still burning.

Abutsu-ni knew what she was writing about. She was a poet and a nun of thirteenth-century Japan, remembered for the Izayoi Nikki, the “Diary of the Waning Moon,” and for a life shaped by a love affair in her youth that marked her permanently. She entered religious life, married, was widowed, and, late in life, made an arduous journey from Kyoto to Kamakura to defend her son’s inheritance. Through it all, the firefly stayed lit. That is the whole argument of this book, compressed into four lines.

What follows is a meditation on great lovers and great love affairs through history — emperors and poets, admirals and pianists, chemists and queens. Some of these loves were triumphant, some were catastrophic, and several were both at once. Almost none of them were prudent. What they share is that each pair of lovers, in their own century and their own idiom, refused to let the fortress win. They kept the flame visible, in letters and sonnets and symphonies and, in one case, a building of white marble that may be the most beautiful structure on earth.

Read them as inspiration to keep your own love alive. The ravine is deep in all of us. The firefly is there. And every lover in these pages, from the poet to the empress, is what the deaf composer named the woman in his hidden letter: an immortal beloved.

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Rome, in the last decades before the common era, was the capital of the world and believed itself to be the capital of virtue. The emperor Augustus, having won everything, had decided that what his empire needed next was moral reform. He passed laws against adultery. He exiled his own daughter for her love affairs. He commissioned solemn poetry about duty, agriculture, and the founding of the state.

Into this prudish, sober atmosphere strolled Publius Ovidius Naso — Ovid — a lawyer’s son from the Abruzzi hills who had abandoned a respectable career on the first rung of the Senate ladder to write poems about kissing. He became, almost instantly, the most fashionable poet in Rome. And the woman at the center of his early poetry, the woman who made his name, was called Corinna.

Who was Corinna? Two thousand years of scholarship have failed to unmask her, and that is exactly as Ovid wanted it. She may have been a real mistress disguised under a Greek pen name, in the tradition of Catullus’s Lesbia and Propertius’s Cynthia. She may have been a composite of several women. She may have been entirely invented — a muse assembled from desire and craft. Ovid himself teased his readers about it, boasting that all of Rome was asking who Corinna was. The mystery was part of the seduction.

What is certain is the poetry. The Amores, the “Loves,” published when Ovid was in his twenties, follow the affair with Corinna through every weather of the heart: the first sight of her arriving in his room at siesta hour with her hair loose over her white neck; the quarrels; the locked door and the poet pleading half the night with the doorkeeper; the jealousy; the reconciliations. It is all rendered with a wit so light and so modern that reading Ovid today feels less like archaeology than like eavesdropping.

Because here is the thing about Ovid: he was the first great poet to insist that love is not a madness or a curse — the standard classical view — but an art. A thing that can be studied, practiced, and perfected, like rhetoric or wrestling. His scandalous masterpiece, the Ars Amatoria, the “Art of Love,” is a mock instruction manual in three books: where to find a lover (the theater, the racetrack, the triumphal parade), how to win her (write letters, be attentive, remember that flattery works on everyone), and how to keep the affair alive once you have it. Book Three, remarkably for its era, is addressed to women, giving them the same tactical advice he gave the men. Underneath the jokes runs a genuinely radical proposition: that love is a game both players can win, a collaboration of equals in pleasure.

Rome devoured it. Augustus did not. In the year 8 CE, the emperor banished Ovid by personal decree to Tomis, a frontier garrison town on the Black Sea, at the freezing edge of the civilized world. Ovid tells us the causes were two: carmen et error — a poem and a mistake. The poem was almost certainly the Ars Amatoria, which made elegant mockery of the emperor’s marriage laws. The mistake he never names, though scholars have long guessed at some entanglement with the imperial family. The most fashionable poet in Rome spent his last decade among soldiers and Scythian wind, writing letters home that no one could answer with a pardon. He died in exile. Rome never took him back; the poems never left.

It was Ovid’s fellow poet Virgil who actually wrote the famous line

Amor vincit omnia

Latin for love conquers all things, but it is Ovid whom the sentence fits. Because his love did conquer. The Amores and the Ars Amatoria survived the emperor who hated them, survived the fall of the empire itself, were copied by medieval monks who should perhaps have known better, and taught the troubadours, and through them all of Europe, how to speak of love. Every love letter written in the West carries a trace of his DNA.

And Corinna — invented or real — outlived them all. That is the first lesson of this book, and Ovid teaches it with a wink: the beloved written down becomes immortal. He promised her exactly that, in verse: through his poems, he told her, she would be sung as long as Rome’s language lasted. It has lasted. She is.

* * *

In summer’s heat, and mid-time of the day,

To rest my limbs upon a bed I lay;

One window shut, the other open stood,

Which gave such light as twinkles in a wood,

Like twilight glimpse at setting of the sun,

Or night being past, and yet not day begun...

Then came Corinna in a long loose gown,

Her white neck hid with tresses hanging down.

— Ovid, Amores I.5, translated by Christopher Marlowe (c. 1599). Original and translation in the public domain.

Accept one who would serve you through all the long years; accept one who knows how to love with pure faith. I have no ancient names to recommend me... but on my side are Apollo and the Muses, and Love himself, who yields to no one. We two shall be sung together throughout the world, and my name shall be joined forever with yours.

— Ovid, Amores I.3, translated from the Latin for this volume. Original in the public domain.

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