Elective Affinities, Kindred By Choice

Editor's note: I mentioned my romantic-love research to an old college classmate and good friend, Sonia, now a PhD at Oxford. She suggested that I review Goethe's novel, Elective Affinities (alternately translated from the German, Kindred By Choice), which touches on issues germane to my study.

of blood? or soul and spirit?

Goethe explores the question concerning how marriages come to be. Can one choose a mate, in any real sense? Can we be "kindred by choice"? Might "passion be selected"? (as King Arthur, in the movie Camelot, pondered concerning whether to condemn Lancelot and Guinevere.)

Is the true marriage bond just of this world or deriving from higher planes? Do marriage-mates come together like molecules in chemical bonding? But, if they do enjoy substantial nexus, why are marriages often so easily disrupted by simple presence of a third party?

Let's listen in on this debate in Goethe's Elective Affinities:

“Sometimes they will meet like friends and old acquaintances; they will come rapidly together, and unite without either having to alter itself at all—as wine mixes with water. Others, again, will remain as strangers side by side, and no amount of mechanical mixing or forcing will succeed in combining them. Oil and water may be shaken up together, and the next moment they are separate again, each by itself.”

“It appears to me,” said Charlotte, “that if you choose to call these strange creatures of yours related, the relationship is not so much a relationship of blood, as of soul or of spirit. It is the way in which we see all really deep friendships arise among [humankind]; opposite peculiarities of disposition being what best makes internal union possible."

Editor's note: This lady believes in "opposites attract."

“We had better keep,” said the captain, “to the same instances of which we have already been speaking. Thus, what we call limestone is a more or less pure calcareous earth in combination with a delicate acid, which is familiar to us in the form of a gas. Now, if we place a piece of this stone in diluted sulphuric acid, this will take possession of the lime, and appear with it in the form of gypsum, the gaseous acid at the same time going off in vapor. Here is a case of separation; a combination arises, and we believe ourselves now justified in applying to it the words, Elective Affinity; it really looks as if one relation had been deliberately chosen in preference to another.”

“Unhappily, we know cases enough where a connection apparently indissoluble between two persons, has, by the accidental introduction of a third, been utterly destroyed, and one or the other of the once happily united pair been driven out into the wilderness.”

Editor's note: These characters in Goethe's story speculate on the nature of apparently cohesive forces which unite lovers. Do opposites attract? Do lovers bind themselves to each other just as various chemical elements come together?

But why, and how, is it that two might enjoy a tolerable marriage, but suffer loss when a third party is introduced? Is love, that which passes for love, so fragile and brittle to be swept away in a fickle moment, as depicted in the song Tennessee Waltz: "And while they were dancing, my friend stole my sweetheart from me."

Can you "steal" another's true love? Is that possible? Could this romantic wedge even exist, even in potentia, if the first union were authentic? Is the genuine love-nexus fashioned by mutable human whim and choice, a mere "relationship of blood"? -- or is it something God-breathed and permanent, an eternal union of "soul and spirit"?

Goethe asks - and warns - why do we act surprised when marriages don't work out?

"It is our own fault if we allow ourselves to be surprised [when marriages fail].  We please ourselves with imagining matters of this earth, and particularly matrimonial connections, as very enduring; and as concerns this last point, the plays [or, in our day, the romantic movies] ... help to mislead us; being, as they are, so untrue to the course of the world. In a comedy we see a marriage as the last aim of a desire which is hindered and crossed through a number of acts, and at the instant when it is reached the curtain falls, and the momentary satisfaction continues to ring on in our ears. But in the world it is very different. The play goes on still behind the scenes, and when the curtain rises again we may see and hear, perhaps, little enough of the marriage."

Editor's note: Yes, when the curtain falls, the marriage continues behind the scenes. And that's when the shooting starts. The reality is not like the movies. If we are "surprised" when egoic relationships fail, "it is our own fault," we "please ourselves," as ample evidence of the true nature of things is available.

Twin-Soul romance is not an example of "kindred by choice.” Passion, in its truest form, cannot be selected. The sacred two do not choose this union, as such, but, it might be said, true love, Heaven, and destiny chooses them.

Only this higher form of romantic love, ultimately, will prove to be enduring.

Editor's last word:

For some time I was confused by Krishnamurti’s provocative assertion that “We think we are free when we choose, but we are not, are we? Where there is choice, there is no freedom,” and “Choice in itself indicates the lack of freedom. A man who is really free has no choice.”

However, I finally understand. But this understanding, though available to all, will not present itself as fruit of “trying very hard to think about it.”

We must go within. We must let the answer come to us, percolating upward from the depths. We must access the true self, align ourselves with Universal Consciousness, and then clarity will begin to be ours.

When we live according to the dictates of the false self, each person will have his or her own perspective. For example, ten people witnessing an accident, or any event, will offer ten different perspectives on what happened. And, on a larger scale, seven billion people on this planet will each offer a different viewpoint on life, truth, meaning, God, and any other big question.

Everything we think we know, all data supplied to us by the mediating five senses, enters our awareness having been filtered, processed, interpreted by limited fields of vision, what grandma/priest/second-grade teacher imposed upon us, along with a personal history of pain, fear-and-guilt, and disillusionment.

There can never be unity of vision and heart when we are led by the slanted testimony of the false self. In this myopic condition, as Krishnamurti said, there is no true freedom, no getting it right, no possibility of authentic choice, as we’re haltered-and-led by our cultural conditioning, education or lack thereof, overlaid with instinctual passions.

And yet, unity, we learn from the afterlife reports, is to be our destiny. How will this happen? It will happen when, more and more, we align ourselves with Universal Consciousness, the “singular, all-pervasive joy.”

We learn from the "quantum" world that only Consciousness is real and objective. All that exists, every environment we might live in, on this side of life and the next, is a kind of virtual reality, drawing provisional existence from a superintending Consciousness. Truth can never be accessed by the "voice in the head," the "chattering monkey-mind." Instead, ultimate reality comes to us by severing the link to all mediating filters, all mechanisms of translation and interpretation.

When, finally, we do, in this state of the untethered, we will find ourselves, for once in our lives, truly free.

Notice again Krishnamurti's dictum: Those who "have no choice" are the truly free. That is, when we align ourselves with Universal Consciousness, we will find, from the deep hidden depths of inner-self, a bubbling up to the surface of personhood a sense of who we are and what we are to do.

And it won't be our choice; not really. It will choose us.