Our language betrays our self-betrayals: We speak of finding love, as if it were an undiscovered eighth continent or a habitable world in another solar system, as if it got lost like the Little Red Riding Hood or the names of the women who painted the caves. Like the paradoxical notion of finding yourself, the notion of finding love pulsates with equal parts helplessness and hubris — a rueful recognition that something is missing from your life and a belief that it falls on you to do the looking, that if you only look hard enough and long enough, you will achieve the goal of finding it. But no one, not one person in the history of the heart, achieved love by striving.
From the vantage of love, it is you who are lost; it is love that finds you — and not the way you expected.
No one has articulated this more perfectly, more poignantly, than James Baldwin (August 2, 1924–December 1, 1987) in a conversation with his young filmmaker friend Sedat Pakay, quoted in Nicholas Boggs’s altogether excellent biography Baldwin: A Love Story (which also gave us the moving letter Baldwin received at the peak of his fame and his heartbreak from his childhood teacher).
Having turned his entire life around to follow his improbable Turkish lover to Istanbul, Baldwin reflects:
I will never be able to deny for any reason at all is a certain power that I had to deal with, which has dealt with me, which is called love. And love comes in very strange packages. And I think everything depends in life on whether or not you are able to accept what comes to you. Because it never comes to you the way you think it will. It never comes to you the way you’re taught it will. It comes as it comes.
Never having imagined that love would make of the Harlem River an estuary to the Bosphorus, Baldwin finds himself reckoning with the broader meaning of it all:
Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within. I use the word “love” here not merely in the personal sense but as a state of being, or a state of grace — not in the infantile American sense of being made happy but in the tough and universal sense of quest and daring and growth.
The trouble, of course, is that we can choose, without knowing we are choosing, to stay behind the mask, chose being sure over being seen, chose control — which is always the feeling of control, never the fact of control — over possibility. The notion of finding love suffers the same pitfall, for it presumes that the searcher is in control of the find. Elsewhere, Baldwin razes through the delusion:
People who believe that they are strong-willed and the masters of their destiny can only continue to believe this by becoming specialists in self-deception. Their decisions are not really decisions at all — a real decision makes one humble, one knows that it is at the mercy of more things than can be named — but elaborate systems of evasion, of illusion, designed to make themselves and the world appear to be what they and the world are not.
Ultimately, love asks of us the same thing life does — to meet it on its terms. Baldwin writes:
People can’t, unhappily, invent their mooring posts, their lovers and their friends, anymore than they can invent their parents. Life gives these and also takes them away and the great difficulty is to say Yes to life.
