I’ve recently been to the book launch event – Alain de Botton, one of my favourite opinion leaders, a modern philosopher with a melancholic outlook on life snippets of which he shares on his Twitter account, wrote a new book titled ‘The course of love’. I had to be there.
The book is about love and specifically marriage, about ‘happily ever after’. De Botton bravely probes unspoken sore points and dissects the elephant in the room. His study is akin to the encyclopaedia of love: choice of a partner, children, sex, waning desire, fear of mortality, monogamy, infidelity – nothing evades his studying eye.
Some ideas were new to me and I’ve followed him on Twitter for years. To anyone new to de Botton, the book will be a revelation. It’s extremely quotable. I emailed my husband a photograph or two of the book pages that particularly touched the nerve (on sulking and why we hurt emotionally our nearest and dearest). The main achievement of the book for me though is leaving one with the liberating feeling that they are not alone – with the final page of the book turned, and a cheeky tear wiped, you drop the burden of the big questions, you breathe out and you think, jeez, I am not the only one in this mess. Continue reading
Nomad of the Universe 