We may know a thousand beautiful ways to describe love and still be entirely unprepared for the moment it happens to us.
A person may spend years reading about love and still be uncertain what to do when it arrives.
This seems almost unreasonable. Surely a life spent among novels, poems and the private thoughts of other people should leave us better prepared for intimacy.
Literature teaches us how lovers have suffered, how desire can disguise itself as devotion, and how easily we mistake possession, admiration or the fear of loneliness for love.
It gives us beautiful sentences with which to express affection. It lends grandeur to emotions we might otherwise struggle to describe. Sometimes, borrowing the words of a poet or novelist, we discover a more graceful way of saying what our own hearts have been trying to say all along.
And beyond those beautiful expressions, literature offers something even more valuable: an understanding of the illusions we so frequently mistake for love.
We learn to recognise jealousy dressed as concern, dependence mistaken for intimacy, and the strange human tendency to desire not another person, but the feeling of being desired by them.
Through literature, we may explore the world of love to astonishing depths.
But, my dear reader, the depth of love is measured by diving in.
And no amount of reading can take that plunge for us.
The peculiar intimacy of reading
Reading is an unusual form of closeness.
A stranger whom we would never approach in ordinary life may reveal everything to us in a novel. We are allowed into thoughts that would be concealed behind manners, pride or embarrassment.
We may understand a fictional character better than we understand people we have known for years.
But there is a difference.
The character cannot ask anything of us.
We can close the book when the discomfort becomes too great. We can disagree with a character without having to remain in the room. We can examine someone's suffering without being responsible for what happens next.
Even our sympathy carries remarkably little risk.
Real intimacy is less accommodating.
Another person arrives with preferences we do not share, fears we cannot entirely understand and expectations that may interrupt the life we have arranged for ourselves.
We are no longer invited merely to observe.
We are asked to participate.
When love refuses to be reasonable
Perhaps the most extraordinary thing about love is how little respect its arrival can have for everything we believe we know.
We may have spent years forming sensible opinions about relationships. We may understand compatibility, emotional dependence, attachment and the many illusions of romantic attraction.
We may even pride ourselves on being rational people, incapable of surrendering our judgment to a passing feeling.
And then someone appears.
A glance lasts a moment longer than expected. An ordinary conversation acquires an inexplicable significance. A message arrives, and suddenly the smallest part of the day becomes the most important.
All that carefully assembled wisdom does not necessarily disappear.
It simply finds itself unable to explain what is happening.
There is a Filipino word for a particular sensation of romantic excitement: kilig.
It describes that delightful, almost involuntary thrill, the flutter of butterflies in the stomach, the sudden exhilaration of finding oneself affected by someone in a way that seems entirely disproportionate to the event.
A smile should not rearrange one's afternoon.
A casual remark should not return to the mind a hundred times.
And yet it does.
One may know perfectly well that a racing heart is not evidence of everlasting love, that attraction is not intimacy, and that the excitement of being noticed tells us very little about the future of a relationship.
Such knowledge may be perfectly correct.
It is also remarkably powerless against the immediate experience of kilig.
For a moment, love, or what we hope may become love, is not an argument to be examined.
It is something happening to us.
This does not mean that every thrill is love, or that love must remain irrational to be genuine. Those butterflies may disappear without anything lasting taking their place.
But their arrival reminds us of something easily forgotten by those who have grown accustomed to analysing the world:
Understanding an emotion is not the same as experiencing it.
The danger of being eloquent
There is a kind of person who speaks beautifully about emotions.
Such a person can explain longing, identify the hidden motives behind a quarrel and recognise the difference between desire and affection.
Their understanding may be sincere. Their sensitivity may be real.
Yet eloquence can become a form of distance.
Sometimes, when someone asks how we feel, we offer an explanation of feelings in general.
We describe the nature of love when the question was whether we love them.
We speak about vulnerability instead of admitting what frightens us.
We give the carefully considered version of ourselves, the one in which every uncertainty has already been made presentable.
What remains unspoken is often the very thing another person was asking to hear.
There is no dishonesty in every unfinished answer. We are not obliged to expose every thought simply because someone wishes to know it.
But there is a difference between privacy and the habit of making ourselves impossible to reach.
Literature can help us notice that difference.
Whether we have the courage to act upon it is another matter.
When books enter the room
This tension lies close to the heart of The Dialect of Touch.
Its protagonist, Marco Orsini, grows up in Florence surrounded by beauty and literature. At twenty-three, he possesses a language for experiences that he has not always known how to live.
He is observant, articulate and attentive to the people he encounters. He reads closely and records his thoughts in private notebooks.
Yet the distance between describing an experience and inhabiting it begins to trouble him.
The books he loves have not failed him. They have given him ways to recognise things that might otherwise have remained obscure.
What they cannot do is live his life in his place.
He can recognise a beautiful declaration of love. He can admire the precision with which a novelist captures human longing. He can contemplate desire and uncertainty through the experiences of characters.
But there are moments when another person's wisdom is no longer sufficient.
Marco must discover what his own answers might cost.
And perhaps this is where literature reaches its necessary boundary: it can accompany us towards an experience, but it cannot cross that boundary on our behalf.
Love has an ordinary vocabulary
Literature often gives us love at its most dramatic: separation, sacrifice, betrayal, impossible choices.
Ordinary life asks for something less theatrical.
It asks whether we can listen when a conversation becomes repetitive. Whether we can admit uncertainty without trying to make it impressive. Whether we can continue paying attention when another person is no longer new to us.
The first excitement of attraction can be intoxicating, and there is no reason to diminish its beauty.
That sudden kilig, the delight of an unexpected message, the anticipation of another meeting, the difficulty of concentrating on anything else: these are among the pleasures that make romantic experience so memorable.
But the depth of love cannot be measured by excitement alone.
The same person who once made our heart race may eventually stand before us exhausted, disappointed or unable to offer the warmth we hoped to receive.
There may be no beautiful quotation suitable for the occasion.
No carefully chosen sentence capable of repairing what has gone wrong.
Only the difficult, ordinary work of understanding another human being.
Desire may awaken our curiosity about someone.
Affection may make their happiness important.
But intimacy also requires us to encounter the parts of another person that do not confirm our expectations.
A human being is not a literary character waiting for us to discover their central theme.
Sometimes they are inconsistent. Sometimes they change their mind. Sometimes they need something that does not fit our understanding of who they are.
To love someone may require knowing when to stop interpreting them and simply listen.
What literature can give us
Perhaps the greatest contribution of literature is not instruction but attention.
A good novel can make us linger over an emotion we would ordinarily dismiss. It can reveal the self-deception beneath a seemingly reasonable choice. It can help us recognise that the person causing pain may also be afraid, and that the person offering tenderness may not fully understand their own motives.
It enlarges the number of human possibilities we are willing to consider.
And it gives us words.
Wonderful words.
Words with which to confess affection, to express longing, to apologise, to celebrate, and sometimes to make another person feel that what exists between us belongs to something larger and more beautiful than an ordinary afternoon.
There is no shame in borrowing those words.
A beautiful sentence can be a gift when it expresses something we genuinely feel.
But the finest words in the world cannot manufacture the feeling itself.
We may memorise the greatest declarations of love ever written and still find ourselves speechless before someone who matters to us.
We may understand every philosophical distinction between love, lust and attachment, yet discover that our own emotions refuse to arrange themselves into such convenient categories.
We may spend a lifetime studying the depths of love through literature and still have to discover those depths for ourselves.
Perhaps that is not literature's failure.
Perhaps it was never meant to replace experience.
It was meant to enlarge our understanding, sharpen our perception and give us the courage to recognise something when it finally arrives.
The book may teach us how beautifully love can be expressed.
It may teach us how terribly love can be misunderstood.
It may even warn us about the illusions waiting beneath its surface.
But when the moment comes, when reason grows unexpectedly quiet and something within us begins to flutter, no passage we have read can feel it for us.
Literature can describe the depths of love.
But, my dear reader, to discover how deep the water truly is, you must dive in.
Further reading
The Dialect of Touch, a novel by P.K. Vael, follows Marco Orsini through encounters with literature, desire, relationships and the unfamiliar demands of lived experience.