alone/alive in bellevue

“But who will I take care of?”

–Bobby, Company 

I’ve been thinking a lot about Company lately, the musical I assistant stage-managed in college. Today, its final song, “Being Alive,” sounds a bit too on the nose to me (and certainly the show is far too focused on marriage for me), but to my teenage self, it was an exhilarating acknowledgment of love as something complicated and imperfect, something that takes effort, something in which giving is at least as important as receiving. 

“But alone is alone
Not alive

Somebody make me come through
I’ll always be there
As frightened as you
To help us survive
Being alive”

I thought about how love is an act primarily of giving yesterday when I listened to “Somebody to Love” by Queen (someone he can give love to takes precedence over someone he can be loved by) and to the song from Nashville that Masha shared on her blog, with its line, “Please stop pulling at my sleeve if you’re just playing, if you won’t take the things you make me want to give.”

Today as I was flying here to Washington and reading Erich Fromm’s book The Art of Loving, the book commented on these things I’ve already been thinking about lately. 

 When he describes love as “the answer to the problem of human existence” and says “the deepest need of man…is the need to overcome his separateness, to leave the prison of his aloneness,” I think of Bobby’s line, “Alone is alone, not alive." 

When he writes,

Love is an activity, not a passive affect; it is a "standing in,” not a “falling for.” In the most general way, the active character of love can be described by stating that love is primarily giving, not receiving… The most widespread misunderstanding is that which assumes that giving is “giving up” something, being deprived of, sacrificing… Some make a virtue out of giving in the sense of a sacrifice. They feel that just because it is painful to give, one should give; the virtue of giving to them lies in the very act of acceptance of the sacrifice. For them, the norm that it is better to give than to receive means that it is better to suffer deprivation than to experience joy. 

For the productive character, giving has an entirely different meaning. I experience myself as overflowing, spending, alive, hence as joyous. Giving is more joyous than receiving, not because it is a deprivation, but because in the act of giving lies the expression of my aliveness.

Not to give would be painful.

I think of how it is not so much receiving love that I sometimes yearn for but giving and expressing love, and how in love, some of the joy of receiving originates from the way that, through receiving love, we, too, are giving–we give the giver the joy of giving.

He does not give in order to receive; giving is in itself exquisite joy. But in giving he cannot help bringing something to life in the other person, and this which is brought to life reflects back to him; in truly giving, he cannot help receiving that which is given back to him. Giving implies to make the other person a giver also and they both share in the joy of what they have brought to life. In the act of giving something is born, and both persons involved are grateful for the life that is born for both of them. Specifically with regard to love this means: love is a power which produces love;

Maybe at times, in my weakest moments, I’ve thought to myself that I’ve been alone too long, and that, since that’s mostly what I know, that’s how I should stay, that I don’t know enough about love and that it’s too late to start now.

But then I give, just for the sake of giving, and it feels good to do it, and I know that I’m not entirely alone, and that I am capable of being entirely alive.