Friday Ephemera # 6 Love….. Again
What have we learned about love and romance from art? Probably everything? Here are this week’s suggestions to sweep us off our feet.
Before we begin - February’s The Creative Year post can be found here . ‘Walking the Dog’ is full of inspiration and exercises to help you fall in love with your creativity again. Now, back to LOVE…
Love. Again. Always. Forever. The subject that has launched a thousand sonnets, a million films, a billion bad decisions. What else is there to say? And yet, here we are, saying it. Again. Because love, in all its exhausted, endlessly fertile glory, never quite stops demanding our attention.
Valentine’s Day looms, a festival of expectation, a commercialised fever dream where florists and chocolatiers conspire to keep romance gasping on life support. And the stories we tell about love—those grand, sweeping, artfully lit stories—aren’t helping.
In art, love is always heightened, luminous, doomed or triumphant. In Casablanca, love is self-sacrificing, noble, drowned in the golden light of regret. In Romeo and Juliet, love is youthful, reckless, and dead before it sees twenty. In Brief Encounter, love is tea-stained, repressed, trembling on the brink of ruin. These are the templates we inherit. No wonder we’re all a bit disappointed.
What they don’t show: the love that lives in the margins. The love that endures the snore of a partner who has fallen asleep during the film they swore they wanted to watch. The love that takes out the bins. The love that doesn’t know how to say the right thing, but shows up anyway.
Art skews our expectations. Literature drowns us in impossible ardour. Film gives us a sweeping orchestral score that real life rudely withholds. We are raised on the promise of love as revelation, as destiny, as something that will once and for all fix the problem of being human. And then, inevitably, it doesn’t.
And yet, there’s something reassuring about this cycle—our collective willingness to believe in love, again and again, no matter how often it lets us down. Because, despite it all, we want the story. The fleeting intensity. The impossible yearning. The small, quiet moments that are perhaps the most romantic of all.
So we turn the page, start the film, pick up the paintbrush. Love, again. Always. Forever.
Recommendations
• Book: The Lover by Marguerite Duras – Sparse, elliptical, and seething with unsentimental passion, this novella understands that love is often more about memory and myth than reality.
• Film: In the Mood for Love (2000) – Wong Kar-wai at his most devastating: unspoken longing, impeccable tailoring, and a romance that never quite happens (which, of course, makes it all the more romantic).
• TV: The Durrells (2016–2019) – A love letter to life itself. It’s got romance, yes, but also sun-drenched landscapes, eccentric animals, and the kind of family chaos that makes romantic entanglements look positively restful.
Women Artists & Writers on Love
• Agnes Varda – The great French filmmaker who understood that love exists in the everyday, in glances and gestures, in memory and loss. Watch Le Bonheur for a more challenging exploration of love and romance.
• Anaïs Nin – Her diaries are a lush, fevered account of desire, self-invention, and love in all its entanglements.
• Chantal Akerman – Her films (Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles) show how love and duty, passion and monotony, blur in the quiet domestic spaces where women’s lives unfold.
A Creative Exercise
Write a love letter—but to something unexpected. A city, a season, a forgotten book on your shelf. A pair of shoes that carried you through a difficult year. The trick is to use all the grand, romantic language of traditional love letters but redirect it towards something that has loved you in its own quiet way.
Cocktail: The Bitter Valentine - because love isn’t always sweet.
You’ll need:
• 25ml Campari
• 25ml Sweet Vermouth
• 50ml Prosecco
• A dash of orange bitters
• Ice
• Orange twist to garnish
Pour the Campari and vermouth over ice in a glass, stir gently, then top with Prosecco. Add a dash of bitters and garnish with an orange twist. Best served while dramatically rereading old love letters (or deleting texts you regret sending).
Observation
In the early February hedgerows, blackbirds are starting to sing again—not the full, confident song of spring, but a hesitant rehearsal, as if they’re remembering how to do it. Love, too, is like that sometimes. A tentative note in the cold, waiting to become a song.
Quotation
“In love, one and one are one.” — Jean-Paul Sartre
Other posts to read - The Creative Year February - Walking the Dog
Wondering what The Creative Year is? Still a work a work in progress! But start here - My Creative Year, Your Creative Year