Very funny.

Doubt is easy when it is not a matter of survival: We are as skeptical as we can afford to be, and it is easiest to be skeptical about things that do not fundamentally sustain us. It is easy to doubt the existence of a table. It is hell to doubt the legitimacy of one's love.

[...]

Lovers cannot remain philosophers for long; they should give way to the religious impulse, which is to believe and have faith, as opposed to the philosophic impulse, which is to doubt and inquire. They should prefer the risk of being wrong and in love than in doubt and without love.

I've long proselytized for Alain de Botton's 1993 "On Love," and I picked it up again this weekend to see if it held up as well for me this decade as it did last decade. I was prepared to be disappointed and to find it twee, especially since, as de Botton has moved from fiction to non-fiction and documentaries, I've felt some of his more recent work to be self-parodyingly pretentious. Indeed, the novel stumbled early, as I recognized a glaring mathematical error in the first chapter (though that would probably annoy me more than 99% of the book's other readers), and found the characterizations relatively thin and immature.

But I was still pleasantly surprised. De Botton gives a clever voice and taxonomy to numerous concepts, emotions, tactics in the romantic sphere. (E.g., romantic fatalism, romantic terrorism, romantic fascism, and, my favorite pun in the book, romantic Marxism.) The frisson of recognition runs throughout the book, and there's no better therapy than a witty articulation of universal feelings that one would otherwise think unique to oneself. And, very nicely, different sections spoke to me this time around than the last time I read it. I can see why many reviewers blasted the book as pretentious, but I like a novel that aspires to break out of the intellectual box in that regard.

The book was written in 1993, set in modern-day London, with an unnamed (and far from perfectly mature) narrator protagonist, but de Botton writes in a series of numbered paragraphs of pithy pensées, making wide-ranging references to and quotes from philosophy and literature and, to a lesser extent, popular culture. In other words, it's effectively in the style of a blog, before there ever was such a thing. (Quick, someone tell Jeremy Blachman.)

My friend Glenn and I like to tell the joke of the un-Oz-like prison where the prisoners harmoniously sit around the lunchroom and shout numbers at one another, followed by uproarious laughter. A guest is mystified: what's so funny? It is explained to him that there is only one jokebook in the prison library, and the prisoners have become so familiar with it that they resort to the shorthand of numbers (URLs?) to communicate humor. The guest is excited by the concept, and jumps onto a cafeteria table and shouts "74!" Dead silence; crickets chirp. "What happened? Why didn't they laugh?" The warden shrugs: "Must've been the way you told it."

One can imagine a universe of bloggers using the same concept. All they would have to post is 12:6! 3:22! And the readership (perhaps using software equipped with an automatic de-deBottonizer) would sit and nod knowingly. Ah, yes, 3:22, of course.

Spoiler-heavy Bookslut review. The New Republic's review is also spoiler-heavy, but makes a good observation:

One of the novel’s nervy jokes is how perfectly ordinary, how unexceptional, all this is. ... De Botton is well aware of this. And the narrator knows it, too. But that doesn’t keep him from making his textbook-case romance the center of his life, and the improbable springboard for his metaphysical triple flips. So each mini-step forward or setback in his love moves him to microscopic analysis or flights of heroic abstraction.