This post is tangentially related to the news out of the Pentagon a few weeks back that women are now able to kill and be killed in combat just like men. This makes sense in our brave new world of gender obfuscation, but is a tragedy from a certain, classical point of view (a view that I happen to find myself sympathetic with).
I say tangential because mostly what I want to do is put this beautiful passage from Mark Helprin's novel In Sunlight and In Shadow in front of as many people as possible and let it do the arguing for me.
To set the stage ever so briefly, the main character, Harry Copeland, a recent World War II veteran has fallen madly, wildly, and intoxicatingly in love with the socialite Catherine Hale. In a fit of mutual love and youthful zeal, she has abandoned her well-connected fiance on the night of their engagement and fled the Hamptons with Harry in tow. Over a pre-dawn dinner on the return ride to the city, Harry tells Catherine--who has previously been misused by men--that he wants to court her: dress up in his best suit, meet her parents, get her back before curfew, etc. She begins to protest and this is where I turn it over to Helprin:
"We were told," she began, "that courtly love. . . ."
"Told by whom?"
"By our professors. . . that courtly love is twisted."
"How so?"
"Demeaning. Controlling."
He straightened in his seat, lifting himself up until he seemed taller, unconsciously positioning his upper body as if for a fight--not with Catherine, but with an idea. His eyes narrowed a bit as they seemed to flood with energy. "I don't know who told you, but I do know that whoever said this was a fucking idiot who must never have seen anything, or risked anything, who thinks too much about what other people think, so much so that he'll exterminate his real emotions and live in a world so safe it's dead. People like that always want to show you that they're wise and worldly, having been disillusioned, and they mock things that humanity has come to love, things that people like me--who have spent years watching soldiers blown apart and incinerated, cities razed, and women and children wailing--have learned to love like nothing else: tenderness, ceremony, courtesy, sacrifice, love, form, regard. . . The deeper I fell, the more I suffered, and the more I saw. . . the more I knew that women are the embodiment of love and the hope of all time. And to say that they neither need nor deserve protection, and that it is merely a strategy of domination, would be to misjudge the highest qualities of man while at the same time misreading the savage qualities of the world. This is what I learned and what I managed to bring out with me from hell. How shall I treat it? Love of God, love of a woman, love of a child--what else is there? Everything pales, and I'll stake what I know against what your professors imagine, to the death, as I have. They don't have the courage to embrace or even to recognize the real, the consequential, the beautiful, because in the end those are the things that lacerate and wound, and make you suffer incomparably, because, in the end, you lose them."
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