Enduring Love
"They say that birds do it - bees do it - Even educated fleas do it - Let's do it - let's fall in love." - Cole Porter I finished reading Ian McEwan's Enduring Love on the train today, and it inspired all manner of thoughts. For one, it meshed very nicely with Steven Pinker's How the Mind Works , which I'm also reading, since the narrator Joe is a science writer and thus Pinker's subject of consciousness and of evolutionary biology plays a role in McEwan's book. I was struck by that crossing of ideas between science and literature, then in the acknowledgements in the back, I noticed that McEwan acknowledges Pinker's formidable The Language Instinct as one of his sources. Was well chuffed to have made the connection. Enduring Love is a tale of erotomania , the complete delusion that someone is in love with you, which reminded me of the first time I heard the word: in Diane Ackerman's excellent A Natural History of Love , where she discuss...