Loving

"Love is not love / Which alters when it alteration finds, / Or bends with the remover to remove: / Oh no! it is an ever-fixed mark, / That looks on tempests and is never shaken:"  Oh sure, and rots of ruck.

Later, much later, older, and apparently chastened, Shakespeare wrote, "That time of year thou mayest in me behold / When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang / Upon those boughs which shake against the cold, / Bare ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang."  

The author is counting on mutual aging to cause the lovers to cling together.  I hope it worked out for him. We'll never know. Will In The World a new book about the actual world of Shakespeare may throw more light on Shakespeare's marriage. She was Catholic at a time when that was dangerous, and Shakespeare was chummy with Elizabeth I the Protestant Queen heavy into survival.

Can loving exist in a time of social upheaval? I mean what must the life of lovers be like when one is an Arab, and the couple move into a Red State? while she declines to stop wearing Mid-Eastern garb? Ha! Makes me laugh, but it's also tragic, our separations, and violent prejudices. 

Marriages of conveniences. Is that all marriage can be? Convenient?  My marriage is excoriated on AOL message boards and AOL does zip about it. A poster uses my son's name as a Screen Name, then puts words into the mouth of my 'son' about my sex life, and AOL does nothing about it.

This is not free speech, it is freedom to murder reputation. AOL, you're sliding, sliding down a slope toward wrecking yourself.

Barry