ABSENCE
Two thousand years ago Ovid advised the readers of his Remedia Amoris who wished to cure themselves of an unwelcome attachment to flee the capital, to travel, hunt, or till the soil till all danger of a relapse should he averted. “Out of sight, out of mind,” wrote Thomas à Kempis; and this theme has been varied by a hundred writers in prose and verse. “Love is a local anguish,” exclaims Coleridge; “I am fifty miles away and am not half so miserable.” Carew puts it thus—
“Then fly betimes, for only they
Conquer love, that run away.”
Even the unspeakable Turk has a proverb advising a lover to fly to the mountains. The Himalayas are probably meant, for no other chain would be high enough to allay the anguish of a polygamist rejected by a whole harem.
On the other hand, “I find that absence still increases love,” wrote Charles Hopkins in the seventeenth century; and Bayly gave this paradox the familiar form of “absence makes the heart grow fonder”—to which a modern realistic wag has added the coda “of the other man.” “La Rochefoucauld has well remarked,” says Hume, “that absence destroys weak passions, but increases strong ones; as the wind extinguishes a candle but blows up a fire.”
This simile is not very appropriate, nor is the statement unquestionable. It is more correct to say that short absence increases Love, while long absence cures it.
There are two ways in which a short absence favours Love:
Like the thirst of a man who would wean himself of strong liquor, the lovers ardour is at first increased when he is placed where he can no longer drink in the intoxicating sight of her beauty. Time is needed to annihilate the maddening memory of that pleasure.
Secondly, short absence favours the idealising process in the lover’s mind. Removed from the corrective influence of her actual presence, his imagination may abandon itself to the delightful task of painting a gloriously unreal counterfeit of her charms—which is oil in the flames.
This idealising process is facilitated by the strange difficulty which most people—and lovers in particular—experience in recalling the features of those specially dear to them.
Given sufficient time to fix the idealised image of the beloved in the memory, and a cure may be effected through the shock subsequently felt on comparing this image with the greatly inferior reality.