The story of love between Peter Abelard and Heloise Fulcolt is told in this novel via a series of love letters sent between them. I won't tell you how the story progress and definitely not how it ends, but I will tell you this - it's worth the read, and I do have some thoughts about the book that don't necessarily have to do with the plot.
Abelard and Heloise write to indulge in both thanatos and eros. In writing, one allows themselves dissociation in that they can meditate on the thoughts in their mind. This is one of the main reasons that I write - to disengage with what’s on my mind, and get it on paper where I can see it. This also allows me to meditate on what I have been thinking. It’s a lot like have a conversation with someone much smarter than you, except the conversation is with yourself. I learn a lot about myself from myself in these intracommunicative dissociations with my mind. Nonetheless, writing also serves as a form of eros. In the event that one writes to another they build something. The writer constructs a message, hopefully an honest one, through which the reader can gauge what he or she means to the author. Or maybe the author simply writes to tell his or her reader something about himself. Either way, this creation, this text builds. It builds into the relationship between the two people, and on its own, it stands as a construction unto itself.
That said, the medium of print does some other things too. It also serves to eternalize. While procreation is among the best ways to carry out one’s legacy print can, in its own way, allow one to continue in love if one cannot or will not procreate.
Because there is more introspection involved in writing, it can be said that writing is a more pure and a more conscious form of communication than the spoken word. In this, we can learn from what the other thinks of us. There is, however, an element of trust in letter writing and in love. In loving another, I trust them with myself, I make myself vulnerable in ways that I wouldn’t with just anyone. This trust is necessary though. For this medium of honestly to have it’s full impact, one must be willing to surrender themselves to the other. By this we come to know each other’s worlds in such a way that the two worlds begin to unify as one.
In Abelard’s and Heloise’s letters we see this on display. Early in their life together, Abelard is so struck with Heloise that his drops even his studies for her. What is he to do when she is no longer there for him? Well, first jealousy emerges, but this teaches Abelard something: when a person is in winter, they keep the artifacts of summer with them the same way that one distills flowers into perfume or dandelions into wine. Abelard, late in their relationship - in the deepest winter of their relationship - has nothing to cling to but those artifacts of his summer time with Heloise. He recalls with ink the memories that he covets, as does she. In this, jealousy proves so true an ill that, in the end, Abelard and Heloise have two choices. One, they can let the jealousy toward one another that their love creates fester until it kills them. Or two, they can let this illness teach them something; they can let love teach them dedication and, and more importantly, forgiveness.
We would know none of this if our authors had chosen not to write. Therein lies another purpose of writing. To carry on and out the musing of their minds. We are fortunate to be exposed to such great authors as Abelard and Heloise to learn from them their thoughts about some of the things that matter most. This is, however, a very vague version of what they would have learned from their writing and from each other. We look to these texts primarily to study them to find or form a definition of love, but how much more awesome would it be to be able to look to these texts to explore the minds of their authors within the context of a relationship with that author? Of course, we catch glimpses of this too, but surely not to the extent that the original reads did. Writing does that for us. When I write a letter to someone I love, they get possibly the most true version of how I think and feel about them.
I know the magnitude to which writing communicates love for me is more than speech by this; in the for me nothing is ever really true until I have written it or seen it in writing. Call me what you will in speech: sexy, stupid, smart, stubborn, arrogant, attractive, boorish, caprice, ignorant, wise, lethargic, lazy, slow-witted, discombobulated, contradictory, put-together, stable, what-have-you. If, however, you want to put it in writing, be careful what you write. Write what is honest, because when you write - when I write, I become most fully what and who I am. Whisper what you will in my ear, but when you write you set it in stone, you put it to the wind to carry to the edges of the world and through time. By all means, write with truth, but above all, write with love. This, to you, from The Letters of Abelard and Heloise.
