The Weight of Love

On maps, love, lightness, and communal laundry

It was May’s end and a month of firsts: first summer on my own, first college boyfriend, and my first apartment. Four of us had moved into a two-bedroom place, but one had gone to her parents’ for break and another worked night shifts, so the apartment was often quiet that summer. The rooms were small. Roaches lived in the kitchen, and the hot water quickly ran out. The floor sloped by the pantry, or so the guys claimed when they stood there to compare heights and pencil them against the wall—a mark and a name, a mark and a name, a name and two marks, an extra one for what the name’s height would be if the floor didn’t slant.

Three student apartments had cropped up in our complex: two girls’ and a guys’. Ours had the only washer and dryer, which became a hearth for travelers to stop, baskets full of socks and jeans, and share their news as they ran a load. It was not uncommon to wash my dirty clothes, throw open the dryer, and find it full of athletic shorts and t-shirts left by a man. Or there would be blouses and camisoles, draped over chairs and hung from cupboard handles to dry, which belonged to neither my roommates nor I. A spare key passed from hand to hand, depending on who needed it; one friend let himself in to do laundry and watched old Seinfeld episodes on our couch as he waited for his clothes to dry, though none of us were home. This was our convention: an unbarred threshold.

I lived with one cousin, and another lived in the guys’ apartment around the corner. Three women and a cat shared the third apartment. Early on Wednesday mornings, all three apartments—excluding the cat—convened at Waffle House to share coffee and breakfast before we went to work. Other students who had stayed in town for the summer would drive over and join our tables. It was an atmosphere of suspension: a group of young adults, all around twenty, all school friends unanchored from our studies for a summer of work, all in each other’s constant company.

We stayed for the summer because we had begun to think of here as home, not there. Though we’d come for classes, we stayed for the web of friendships and places and associations that wove itself around the town. That was the graveyard where we’d read the Iliad aloud, there was the coffeeshop where she and I first became friends, here was the street where he broke your heart. The grocery store suggested late night trips for ice cream and Red Bulls, exams crammed and essays submitted at the last minute. The park evoked first dates—or, perhaps, the well-known “not dating” walk that often preceded a confession. The thrift store recalled gowns for feasts and blazers sought to fit the academic dress code. We were college students in an off-season; we were also adults who had chosen to act out our microcosm of society here, in the world that had sprung up around our seminars. We worked, we kept our own apartments, we went to church, we saw friends, we payed bills, we fell in love, in a town that had become home because of an academic calling, but had not stayed a mere center for education.

Last summer, when I visited Oxford for the first time, I understood it at once, like a Euclidean proof which you intuit as you scan the given and sought for, because you have studied so many same-but-other propositions like it. The Elements, Book VII, Proposition 7: If a number be that part of a number, which a number subtracted is of a number subtracted, the remainder will also be the same part of the remainder that the whole is of the whole. Now follow the same pattern for Prop 8, with parts instead of part. A town in Tennessee, in which students live, and learn, and have their being. Now the same, but for South East England. In Oxford, you are always walking into parts of the campus as if by accident—little doors or alleys or sudden, sandy towers—while in and among and around the campus run tea shops and Oxfam bookstores and flats with slanted floors. Just so, our town, only instead of Magdalene, Blackfriars, or St. Peters, our map was marked with every spot where students trod: Starbucks, consignment stores, and the small church where our classes met.

During the school year, we lived as lone planets orbiting a barycenter. I had coworkers who asked about “the Bible college” that I attended, but our experience had little in common with such institutions. We had no campus buildings, no cafeteria, no dorm halls, no RAs looking in on us, no room checks. If you wanted to eat, you blocked in time between classes and jobs (multiple jobs, sometimes) to buy groceries and cook. If you had a guy over, there was no curfew to his visit except the one agreed upon by roommates. Those who could buy alcohol and nicotine did; those who couldn’t bothered the older students to do so for them. It didn’t take long after moving out of my parents’ house to learn what it was like to get tipsy, or feel a nicotine buzz, or flirt with a guy while doing one, or the other, or both. I had habits that, to a homeschooler from a small Midwestern town, seemed rebellious: I dyed my hair blue, smoked a pipe, drank when I could. I skipped church and slept in on Sundays. I stayed out late with my boyfriend and had him over often, slipping into an easy, almost-cohabitation.

Why? I cared less about the things themselves than about what I thought they signified. I wanted to distance myself from my upbringing, determined to come to my own conclusions about life. I did not want to be seen as one of those shrinking Christians, who walks around with a long face and a longer list of prohibitions, as if they are afraid to touch life. Maybe I wanted to be free from people’s opinions, maybe I wanted to challenge them; the two impulses often go hand in hand. My habits were a shorthand, a way of holding myself apart from what others might have expected from a church kid from small town Iowa, and in distancing myself from one circle, I sought initiation into another, more admired set. My habits also became a screen to conceal parts of myself that I didn’t want exposed. I like to be seen as independent, and untouchable, and strong. In reality, I am not so rebellious, nor so wise to the world, nor so unbreakable—quick to cry for others, prone to heartbreak, easily surprised by malice, easily shaped by praise and hurt by criticism. It felt safer, then, to adopt a posture that deflected opinions than allow myself to be gentle.

Last May, one of my professors introduced us to Krzysztof Kieślowski’s film, Bleu. I have identified with few fictional characters as strongly as its protagonist, Julie. At the start of the film, she loses her husband and daughter in a terrible car accident. She attempts to commit suicide and can’t follow through with the act, so instead she severs herself from everything about her old life—she moves into a new apartment, abandons her old friends, destroys the manuscript of the symphony she had composed. She says: “I want no possessions, no memories, no friends, no lovers -- they're all traps.” What she wants, of course, is freedom safe from the agony of love. C. S. Lewis said the same thing when he wrote, “To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken.” I spent my first summer on my own caught between heartbreak and hardening, and gravitated toward the second, because it made me feel stronger, and sharper, and safer.

And yet, as with everything, the novelty soon faded. Once a habit of rebellion becomes a habit, it loses its thrill. Had I gone to a different small Christian college, I would’ve had an establishment to push against, sneaking alcohol on campus or boys into my bedroom late at night. Had I gone to a state school, my small acts of illicit behavior would have seemed laughable and labeled me a sheltered homeschooler, as all my coworkers used to, good-natured but teasing as they traded their own stories. After all, I was no Sebastian Flyte. As it was, I was in a setting where I could drink, or smoke, or have my boyfriend over late at night. Since none of it was taboo, all of it lost its edge. And smoking or drinking or being careless with men for the sake of flaunting opinions brings no real enjoyment, only a short buzz and a lasting sense of dissatisfaction with yourself.

I changed, therefore, as I left that first summer for later seasons. I took my coursework more seriously. I took the reputation of the college more seriously. I did not, until my senior year, take the dress code too seriously, as a camera roll of colored hair, eyebrow slits, and ripped fishnets can attest, but eventually I ended up in blazers and button downs, inspired by the women I walked past in the streets of Oxford. I also began to take seriously the old virtues that we discussed in class: piety, magnanimity, chastity, temperance, prudence, charity. In the Phaedrus, Plato describes a winged chariot drawn by two horses, one beautiful and divine, the other bad-tempered. As the charioteer attempts to steer through the heavens and towards the abode of the gods, the one horse flies straight, and the other “drags its charioteer toward the earth and weighs him down if he has failed to train it well.” These two horses, Socrates says, represent the movement of the soul towards or away from the divine. The soul is winged, and these wings “are akin to the divine, which has beauty, wisdom, goodness, and everything of that sort. These nourish the soul’s wings, which grow best in their presence; but foulness and ugliness make the wings shrink and disappear.” Every day, I seemed drawn up and down like that chariot, as I faltered between wants and oughts, often falling on the wrong side. And yet—to borrow Plato’s image—the wings of my soul have grown stronger.

Many of us underwent a metamorphosis. The change in my friends came out in small ways—earlier bedtimes, neater dress, more diligence in their coursework—and greater ones—a new care for younger students, a dedication to serving those around them, a refusal to speak badly of others. I watched as friends in the class above mine grew tired of adolescence and began instead to imitate the fellows of the college. From our mentors, they drew their habits, their taste, sometimes even their dress—at least, I am not convinced that the epidemic of satchel-wearing that seized the young men was not prompted by a certain professor, distinctive for his bag, his red scarf, and his way of leaning back in a chair and dipping his tea bag in and out of his mug by its string as he posed a question on Homer. Or, to give another example, I have heard that one student so closely imitated the look of one of the professors as to once borrow a pair of his Converse, with the help of the professor’s wife. They say imitation is the highest form of flattery. It is also the simplest form of love.

As I have said, I watched my friends gain a new gravity as they grew older. Gravity, for us, means the force which makes things fall. For the medievals, it meant the inclination of a thing according to its kind. Earth falls; fire rises. The gravity of fire is to the skies. This is what St. Augustine meant when he wrote, “Weight makes not downward only, but to his own place. Fire tends upward, a stone downward. They are urged by their own weight, they seek their own places…My weight is my love.”

My weight is my love. In Kieślowski’s Bleu, Julie tries to sever herself from the weight of love, as a guard against grief. But, as Willa Cather wrote, “Freedom so often means that one isn’t needed anywhere.” Julie can’t escape being needed, or needing love, and slowly as the film continues, the gravity of love draws her back into life, first through small things, like sunlight and coffee, then through greater things, like music and friendship. These nourish the soul’s wings.

Like Julie, I have gentled over time. In part, through the imitation of friends who have shown me that gentleness has a fierceness all its own. More and more, I am the kind of woman I would’ve made fun of as a college sophomore. I am also the kind of woman who can have compassion for the struggles of that college sophomore, which I was not strong enough to do when I still lived them. I would not trade that compassion for her sharp and carefree attitude.

It is heavy, to love and to be loved; it is a grave calling. But, as Rilke said, “The purpose of life is to be defeated by greater and greater things.” I no longer try to be strong, or build defenses from careless habits. Rather, I want to be weak enough to be defeated by love. In the medieval era, a scribe might illustrate a map of gravity: earth tending downward, fire upward, and above them both, the stars. For a handful of men and women, a similar map can be drawn around a small town in Tennessee, from apartment complexes to cafes, all permeated with a gravitas that drew us upward, all constellated into a pattern of love. This love outweighed my fear to receive it, and like a lodestone, drew me from my hardened heart. My weight is my love—but such a love is lightness, granting wings.