the look of love always comes back

love isn't blind or rose-coloured

Last summer I was sitting in the garden of the Reina Sofia in Madrid, crying just a little over Simone de Beauvoir’s The Woman Destroyed.

A woman finds herself adrift from the people she loves, estranged from her son and arguing with her husband. She walks through a warm evening in Paris, but her grief leaves her cold: “Nothing moved me at all. The moonlight and the sunset, the smell of showery spring and hot tar, the brilliance and the changing of the year.”

De Beauvoir’s words covered the dry July sun above me like a stray cloud. Suddenly, it was November again, and I was heartbroken on a small blue train in Sicily, watching from the window as the sun dazzled and skipped and glittered across the Mediterranean — but seeing nothing at all. And this blotting out of the world only felt more acute because I knew that just months before, love had given me the ability to be moved by everything, by anything: even London’s grey skies had turned iridescent in the face of my total and complete happiness.

Losing the ability to pay attention is a terrible thing. Because my tears in Spain weren't for the end of that relationship. By then, the wounds were healing nicely, new feelings were stirring inside me, and I could look out of windows without my thoughts blocking the view. What I found so upsetting was how easily I ignored the beauty of small things: watching sunlight dance over water, eating a glut of June-fresh strawberries. All the clichés about heartbreak are true: food turned to ashes in my mouth, the world looked duller, my skin was always cold. Back in London, I was overwhelmed by how ugly everything looked.

In The Woman Destroyed, the narrator is horrified by her numbness, recalling her younger self’s desire to stop and pay attention to the world. “I have known moments that had the pure blaze of a diamond… They used to spring up unexpectedly, an unlooked-for truce, an unhoped-for promise… I would enjoy them almost illicitly, coming out of the lycée, or the exit of the metro, or on my balcony.” The ability to notice the beauty of the smallest, most ordinary things, even in the middle of a busy and complicated life, is an act of pleasure, like having good sex or eating good food. It requires your senses to be fully engaged, and it requires you to be in the world. Imagine eating an oyster or touching a beloved body and tasting nothing, feeling nothing.

i. here’s to looking at you, kid

‘Devotion – The Two Girlfriends’ (1895) by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec

People talk too much about rose-coloured glasses and love being blind. If love is coloured by anything, it isn’t roses – it’s the time we take, when we’re in love, to really look at one another. It’s a rare thing, to pay that much attention. Once, I was about to leave someone’s bed, and he tangled his hand in my hair and said: “Wait. I just want to look a little longer.” Simone Weil thought that attention was the same thing as prayer, Mary Oliver thought it was the beginning of devotion. “Attention equals life,” a critic once wrote about Frank O’Hara’s poetry.

In Portrait of a Lady on Fire, after the artist Marianne has spent hours and hours painting portraits of Héloïse, the muse speaks. “If you look at me, who do I look at?” she says. The women literally exchange looks, swapping the tiny gestures they’ve noticed in each other. Earlier in the film, when Héloïse sees Marianne’s first attempt at painting her, she’s upset: “Is that me? Is that how you see me?”. In this scene, though, they have both been paying attention: Marianne has noticed the way Héloïse bites her lip when she’s embarrassed, Héloïse has noticed the way Marianne breathes through her mouth when she’s troubled. Looking has become seeing.

And as for love being blind, I’m not convinced. My friend Alice hates it when people say, “he was just some guy!”. Everyone, she says, is just some guy until you love them. The philosopher Irving Singer writes that “love [bestows] value without calculation. It confers importance no matter what the object is worth.” Love, he says, “does not create its object; it merely responds to it creatively.” So: maybe this is actually a deeper way of seeing.

Also, a creative way of seeing. Because lovers look at each other the way artists look at the world: they locate importance in the shape of a freckle, the way light falls on a beloved face. When you’re in love, pleasure makes itself readily known to your eyes. That’s why, in Frank O’Hara’s poem, ‘Having A Coke With You’, the poet can’t imagine anything better than sitting under a tree, drinking a soda, with the man he loves. There’s nothing in any art museum he’d rather look at: “I look / at you and would rather look at you than all the portraits in the world”. He wonders:

“what good does all the research of the Impressionists do them

when they never got the right person to stand near the tree when the sun sank”

Which is why, in the garden in Madrid, I thought: maybe heartbreak is the blind one.

ii. eye of the beholder

When I’m sad, there’s a game I play.

You can play it anywhere, but the point is to play it in the most impossible circumstances. To win, all you have to do is look around and find one beautiful thing. As I write, for example, I’m sitting in an office building in North London, facing a sliver of a window. Outside, I can count seven different shades of grey, painted across the sky, the road, the buildings. There is a zebra crossing, and the stripped-down skeleton of a tree. I keep looking. And then — it’s the way the sky is reflected in the windows of an expensive new block of flats. Some alchemy in the glass has turned the mass of grey into the purest pale blue. (Where have I seen that blue before? Matisse, a hotel room, the glimpse of sky above the sea). And because I’m paying attention, I notice there’s a small balcony, where a girl leans over the railings. She, too, looks up at the sky.

Interior at Nice (1919) by Henri Matisse

I play the game as a kind of practice. I once knew someone who whispered to me on the Overground, “Doesn’t everyone look so ugly?”. I should have said: no, they don’t. Because you can train yourself to look with love, to seek out beauty in the everyday. If you can sit on the subway during rush-hour and name at least one beautiful thing, you’re on your way to creating a pleasurable life.

iii. the pure blaze of a diamond

In romantic relationships we spend so much time hoping the person we love will notice that we love sunflowers but hate lilies, that we wear gold and never silver, that we take our coffee milky but not sweet. What if we redirected our attention towards ourselves?

Whenever I go through heartbreak, or someone I love is going through heartbreak, I go back to Lorde’s advice in ‘Hard Feelings’: “I light all the candles, cut flowers for all my rooms / I care for myself the way I used to care about you”. When you take this advice, heartbreak becomes an unexpected gift: an opportunity to pour love back into your body, metabolise it, let it heal you, and then watch it multiply, burst forth and cover yourself and your friends with the adoration you once kept sacred for one person.

In my favourite O’Hara heartbreak poem, ‘Mayakovsky’, the poet cries over the bathtub, certain he’ll never be able to get up and move again unless his lover comes back to “kiss me on the face”:

then I can put on my clothes

I guess, and walk the streets.

But then, gradually, he does get up. He steps out on the window ledge – not to kill himself, but to look out on the world. It’s a cold, grey day, but, he thinks, “not just darker, not just grey.” He keeps looking, and then –

It may be the coldest day of

the year, what does he think of

that? I mean, what do I? And if I do,

perhaps I am myself again.

When things don’t work out, how wonderful to have the time to ask: What do I think? What do I see? What do I want to pay attention to?

iv. for the pleasure of seeing

My friend Georgia texts me on a rainy afternoon:

I’ve had moments like that, coming home from a dinner party, a little pink-wine-drunk and walking along cold streets, passing by beautiful little flats and people laughing in fairy-lit pubs. When love hits you, it’s simultaneously central and insignificant. Like being in a film, like a pivotal moment, but the moment is just another night in everyone’s year and in yours. Call it rose-coloured, but a new lens descends over my eyes, and now I can see the way the rain catches the lamplight, and the smile on the commuters’ faces as they send their best friend a silly text. It’s funny how the look of love always comes back to you.

At the end of the first story in The Woman Destroyed, the narrator sits under the night sky with her husband, now reconciled. “The moon was shining,” she says, “and so was the star that faithfully accompanies it: a great peace came down over me.” All at once, she returns to her youth’s way of seeing: “The world seemed to me as fresh and new as it had been in the first ages, and this moment sufficed to be itself.” She continues:

I was there, and I was looking at the tiled roofs at our feet, bathed in moonlight, looking at them for no reason, looking at them for the pleasure of seeing them.

When I leave the house these days, I feel like de Beauvoir’s narrator, slowing down and stealing illicit longing looks at the magnolia trees in bloom, the delicate cherry blossoms which have only just started to scatter themselves like icing sugar over the pavements. When the sun sets just right over the London skyline, the Shard is dyed a sweet pink, the colour of ballerina tulle. In noticing these small things, my feelings are immense, my pleasure absolute.

That’s all – flowers, a trick of light. It is enough. It is worth looking for the pleasure of seeing.