“Some soar with art, others with religion; most with love. But when we soar, we can also crash.”
Levels of Life is a description of how the author himself experienced grief after the death of his wife. After 30 years of marriage, the love of his life, rather suddenly, died from cancer.
Barnes describes in detail his thoughts and feelings in the years following her death. Because grief is proportional to the love one felt, the book reveals insight into what true love and a happy marriage feels like. And what things you remember once it ends.
“We were together for thirty years. I was thirty-two when we met, sixty-two when she died. The heart of my life; the life of my heart. And though she hated the idea of growing old - in her twenties, she thought she would never live past forty - I happily looked forward to our continuing life together: to things becoming slower and calmer, to collaborative recollection. I could imagine myself taking care of her…learning the part of the tender nurse.”
“I am convinced that the Yes I uttered on our wedding day was an expression of the most complete and the most unambiguous certainty that I have every felt. A certainty more absolute than any I have felt about my vocation.”
“You put together two people who have not been put together before; and sometimes the world is changed, sometimes not. They may crash and burn, or burn and crash. But sometimes, something new is made, and then the world is changed. Together, in that first exaltation, that first roaring sense of uplift, they are greater than their two separate selves. Together, they see further, and they see more clearly.”
But every love story also has a dark side.
“Every love story is a potential grief story. If not at first, then later. If not for one, then for the other. Sometimes, for both.”
There is an inherent inequality that comes with love. One partner, unavoidably, will suffer more than the other, either sooner or later. The reasons are plenty.
Inequality may arise because one partner loves the other more. One gives but doesn’t get back.
“But imagine a pair of lovers, one able to write privately and at length on both sides of the page, and hide the tenderest words in an envelope; the other constrained by brevity and the knowledge that private feelings must be publicly inscpected by photographers and postmen. Although - isn’t that how love sometimes feels, and works?”
Inequality may arise because one partner’s love runs out.
“He had loved her as much as he was able for three months, and she had done the same; it was just that her love had a timing switch build into it.”
If not by anything else, inequality arises when one partner dies before the other. One dead leaves the other in grief. That was the experience of the author.
“You put together two people who have not been put together before. Sometimes it is like that first attempt to harness a hydrogen balloon to a fire balloon: do you prefer crash and burn, or burn and crash? But sometimes it works, and something new is made, and the world is changed. Then, at some point, sooner or later, for this reason or that, one of them is taken away. And what is taken away is greater than the sum of what was there. This may not be mathematically possible; but it is emotionally possible.”
The author lost his wife to cancer. The illness came suddenly. From the discovery to death were not even 30 days. After losing her, everything else lost its meaning and relevance.
“Just as, when something failed, was broken or mislaid, I would reassure myself with: ‘On the scale of loss, it is nothing.’”
“They said that the whole financial system might be about to crash and burn, but this didn’t bother me. Money could not have saved her, so what good was money, and what was the point in saving its neck? They said the world’s climate was reaching a point of no return, but it could go to that point and beyond for all it mattered to me.”
As a side note, I guess the last quote indicates a weakness of the human race. Our feelings make us believe that our own problems are so much more important than those of others. It is only when our own life is good when we begin to look beyond it. Anyway…
His thoughts are depressive.
“What happiness is there in just the memory of happiness?”
And he believes that it is not only him that lost.
“At times it feels as if life itself is the greatest loser, the true bereaved party, because it is no longer subjected to that radiant curiosity of hers.”
Throughout many passages in the book, we get a glimpse of what he misses most about his wife. These are the things you remember after losing someone. Or the things you miss if you don’t find the love of your life. In other words, these are symptoms of true love.
“I do not believe I shall ever see her again. Never see, hear, touch, embrace, listen to, laugh with; never again wait for her footstep, smile at the sound of an opening door, fit her body into mine, mine into hers. Nor do I believe we shall meet again in some dematerialised form. I believe dead is dead.”
“As for doing what I liked: for me, this usually meant doing things with her. Insofar as I liked doing things by myself, it was partly for the pleasure of telling her about them afterwards.”
“You feel sharply the loss of shared vocabulary, of tropes, teases, short cuts, injokes, silliness, faux rebukes, amatory footnotes - all those obscure references rich in memory but valueless if explained to an outsider.”
“How could it be, because it can no longer be corroborated by the one who was there at the time. What we did, where we went, whom we met, how we felt. How we were together. All that.”We “are note watered down to”I “. Binocular memory has become monocular. There is no longer the possibility of assembling from two uncertain memories of the same event a surer, single one, by triangulation, by aerial surveying.”
“I wish you had met her, and so met more of me.”
After her death, he regularly dreams of her:
“Sometimes in these dreams we kiss; always there is a kind of laughing lightness to the scenario.”
He regularly thinks of commiting suicide. Yet he found a reason not to.
“I could not kill myself because then I would also be killing her. She would die a second time, my lustrous memories of her fading as the bathwater turned red.”
Despite all of his pain, he does not regret falling in love.
“There are two essential kinds of loneliness: that of not having found someone to love, and that of having been deprived of the one you did love. The first kind is worse.”
And after years of suffering, it seems like he was able to get back on track. He just does not know where the next chapter of his life will take him.
“All that has happened is that from somewhere - or nowhere - an unexpected breeze has sprung up, and we are in movement again. But where are we being taken? To Essex? The German Ocean? Or, if that wind is a northerly, then, perhaps, with luck, to France.”