A Brief Note on Love, Fire, and Age

A friend responded to my most recent Substack with some backhanded encouragement: “I rather like these very short ones. You don’t need to say very much.”

Oh.

Another friend asks me what I’d be looking when and if I start to date again. The first thing that came into my mind were these lines from Robinson Jeffers’ (very free) translation of Euripides’ Medea.

Two women of Corinth (a city whose residents will be on the receiving end of a very famous letter on love) discuss Medea, a woman with a broken heart, a woman on the verge of weaponizing her husband’s betrayal in the most horrifying way imaginable.

First Woman of Corinth, listening to Medea’s howls of anguish:

A great love is a fire
That burns the beams of the roof.
The doorposts are flaming and the house falls.
A great love is a lion in the cattle-pen,
The herd goes mad, the heifers run bawling
And the claws are in their flanks.
Too much love is an armed robber in the treasury.
He has killed the guards and he walks in blood.

Second Woman of Corinth, nodding:

A little love is a joy in the house,
A little fire is a jewel against frost and darkness.
God keep me from fire and the hunger of the sword
Save me from the hateful sea and the jagged lightning,
And the violence of love.

I read the Jeffers translation when I was in high school. I thought, “I’ll take that fire of love, thanks, and let it consume me.” A few years later, when I had my first of several spiritual conversions, I said, “Lord, refine me in your fire and melt away my impurities. Destroy the house of my sin. Scatter the leaves of my old self.”

Mostly, I saw the pretty brunettes with the great dark eyes and I said, “Please let the lion(s) in. I should very much like those claws in my flanks.”

So, now. Now, if there is to be any love, I’ll take the “jewel against frost,” the flame just hot enough to cast a little warmth but too feeble and sedate to burn down the house.

Women of Corinth, can you write my Hinge profile?