To Fall In Love Analysis

Love, according to Malte (the protagonist), is an extraordinary journey towards what cannot yet be attained. To fall in love is to make a pact with the suffering that it endows on the one in love. The suffering, however, is not a curse but a blessing. It raises one towards the absolute, towards what he is in search of. Those who love are on the higher side than those who are loved. To love is to labour, and to be loved is being a passive receiver. There can be no love without labour. If there is no effort, the search will come to nowhere. While one falls in love to be loved in return, those whose love remains unrequited are the blessed ones. It is because the beloved becomes a screen between the lover and the beyond (in other words, God), and

It is they who have always done the labour of love. Malte writes in his notebook that men have only been passive receivers of love, and love is lost in doing so. It is the women who have loved selflessly. The men, however, have only tried to limit their love. Malte wishes men to learn to love, to learn to endure the suffering and the pain that it showers upon one. To love is to completely surrender oneself, and rise as a newer being. Love opens up heavens to the ones who love passionately, without thinking of something in return. It is a quest about which one does not know anything. Being in love in itself is a blessing. It is an unending journey, and it is only in the journey that one discovers. The women who have always done this labour, have emerged as greater human beings because they have rediscovered the world and themselves. Some of them have come out as great writers who have transformed their love and their suffering into poems, letters, and other works. Those women lovers are still remembered through their works, and their counterparts are only remembered because of them. Writing is more impressive if it emerges from personal experiences. The women lovers have transformed their personal experiences into works of art which have emerged as one of the

Like death, it is a singular experience in which the lover is distanced from the world around. It is as if he did not exist before. He sees everything anew, he now exists in relation to love. It is his love for Abelone (his mother’s sister) that makes Malte understand the famous women lovers of the past whom he mentions. Because of Abelone, he feels one with those lovers, and his experience of love gives way to an extraordinary understanding of this quest. In those women lovers, he sees Abelone. According to Rosy Singh, “Malte likes to fantasize about his love for Abelone as a part of the paradigm of immortal love. He juxtaposes his own letters exchanged with Abelone with the writings of the great lovers of the past” (34). At points, he compares Abelone with them, and imagines her to be one of them. It is, therefore, his personal experience too that comes into his writing. It is his love that makes him write in detail about love in general as a search, and to share the experience of other lovers of the distant past that he now seems to understand. Because he feels that Abelone is like all those lovers of the past, it is, therefore, not the journey to achieve Abelone but to understand what love is. It is the journey to be the lover, to be the one who knows and