At LIVE from the NYPL, we've had the chance to speak with some of the most brilliant visionaries of our time. And amongst these guests, from poets to pianists, boxers to columnists, we've noticed a common theme: love. The insights are myriad. There are thoughts on love of books, of course, but there are also musings on monogamy and memories of first meeting a long-time love (in this case, the great Harold Pinter.) It's a LIVE on Love Fest, and we're happy to share it with our beloved patrons.
Dan Savage and Andrew Sullivan on love without monogamy
Mike Tyson on his love of books
Harold Bloom on falling in love with a poem
"Falling in love with a poem or falling in love with a Shakespearean play or character is not greatly different from a young man and a young woman or, these days, a young man and a young man falling in love with one another. It's essentially the same human mode. Of course, sometimes you fall out of love with a person and, indeed, sometimes you fall out of love with a particular poem or poets. But without that initial falling in love, I don't think the work of memory begins. I don't think possession in any sense of possession, whether by memory or any other mode, can take place."
Marjane Satrapi on loving Dostoevsky
"Friedrich Nietzsche, he said about Dostoevsky, he's the only writer that when he reads him, he has the feeling he understands better the human soul. And when I read Dostoevsky, I understand better the psychology of the human being. He goes very, very deep into the psychology. And he has a sense of humor. And he gives his personal point of view. He's never trying, you know, to show how objective he is. He is completely subjective and he teaches me."
Rebecca Mead on long-lasting love
"In reading the story of Fred and Mary who are betrothed as children and marry, and then we discover at the end of Middlemarch spend their lives together, I recognized that these are my parents and what a grand accomplishment that is...The one thing I'll never experience is that long-lived love in one place, that home epic shared with one person for a whole lifetime. I find it awe-inspiring and beyond romantic. I find it beautiful and awesome."
Antonia Fraser on meeting the love of her life, Harold Pinter
"It was January the 8th, 1975... I went up. Harold was actually sitting down, and I said, 'Wonderful play. Amazing actors. Blah blah blah. And now I must be off.' And he looked up with these black eyes and said, 'Must you go?' And I thought, I must get up in the morning, take the children to school, must go shopping for groceries, must write King Charles II, you know, and I said, 'Well not, it's not absolutely essential.' And I stayed."
W.S. Merwin on helping kids fall in love with poetry
"I was at Poet's House yesterday, and they have children's programs. And the children are running around talking about what fun it is to memorize poetry, to suddenly start remembering lines of poetry. Well you know, if they come at it five years later not having done, they'll say, 'I can't remember. I can't memorize things. I can't do it, you know." And there's this resistance that grown in. If they start early enough, they realize it's fun and that they have something that they can carry around with them and have fun with."
Van Cliburn on the heart of the ideal person
"The old philosophers used to say that the ideal human being was someone who had a heart that thinks and a mind that feels."