Passion Is Perennial and I’m Not Sure What I Think About That
What happened to “the wisdom of age”?
This morning the Apple News app spiked me with an algorithmically-targeted dart right to the heart. “The Price of Passion!” crowed the headline, above an article in which the acclaimed novelist Isabel Allende “reflects on her reckless choices”.
Her “reckless choices”, as I read on, didn’t seem to be as legion as the subheader implied. Seemed, to me, that she’d only made one truly reckless choice and that was one time in the 1970s when she fell helplessly in love with a musician and sped off with him to Rome for a passionate summer of romance and love in the sun.
It was reckless, by the way, because when she did that whole falling in love thing and then the moving to Rome thing, she had a husband and kids already. (They didn’t come with her to Rome, by the way. She left them behind).
“Passion,” Allende says wisely in the piece, “can destroy you as much as define you.” As soon as her eyes were opened to the truth of the destruction she’d left in her wake, the grief of her children, and the reality of her lover’s personality — he was not consistent or kind, not like the husband she’d left at home in Venezuela — she rushed back home, penitent, straight into the arms of her husband and her “skinny and sad”…
