darling books: the one that ruined me

  'Look,' we said, 'what is it that draws two people into closeness and love? Of course there's the mystery of physical attraction, but beyond that, it's the things they share. We both love strawberries and ships and collies and poems and all beauty, and all those things bind us together. Those sharings just happened to be; but what we must do now is share everything. Everything! If one of us likes anything, there must be something to like in it - and the other one must find it. Every single thing that either of us likes. That way we shall create a thousand strands, great and small, that will link us together. Then we shall be so close that it would be impossible - unthinkable - for either of us to suppose that we could ever recreate such closeness with anyone else. And our trust in each other will not only be based on love and loyalty but on the fact of a thousand sharings - a thousand strands twisted into something unbreakable.' 

Sheldon Vanauken: A Severe Mercy (picture from eden.co.uk). A lot of interesting things in this little true story: the love of beauty and freedom and literature, C.S.Lewis, finding a faith, Oxford in the fifties.

This is also the book that ruined my love life, possibly. For how could an impressionable teenager read a true story of such an incredible love between two people and ever settle for anything less in her own life?

Even now, as a jaded cynic, re-reading it makes something in my heart tremble. And against all logic, the same resolve re-establishes itself in me: I will not - cannot - settle for anything less.