The Passion

by Jeanette Winterson

They say that every snowflake is different. If that were true, how could the world go on? How could we ever get up off our knees? How could we ever recover from the wonder of it?

Somewhere between fear and sex passion is. Passion is not so much an emotion as a destiny. What choice have I in the face of this wind but to put up sail and rest my oars?

I sat at the back, listening to the music or mumbling through the service. I'm never tempted by God but I like his trappings.

Church basking is taking what's there and not paying for it. Taking the comfort and joy and ignoring the rest. Christmas but not Easter.

What a wonder, joining yourself to God, pitting your wits against him, knowing that you win and lose simultaneously. Where else could you indulge without fear the exquisite masochism of the victim?

When I say I lived with heartless men, I use the word correctly. As the weeks wore on, we talked about going home and home stopped being a place where we quarrel as well as love. It stopped being a place where the fire goes out and there is usually some unpleasant job to be done. Home became the focus of joy and sense. We began to believe that we were fighting this war so that we could go home. To keep home safe, to keep home as we started to imagine it. Now that our hearts were gone there was no reliable organ to stem the steady tide of sentiment that stuck to our bayonets and fed our damp fires. There was nothing we wouldn't believe to get us through: God was on our side, the Russians were devils. Our wives depended on this war. France depended on this war. There was no alternative to this war. And the heaviest lie? That we could go home and pick up where we had left off. That our hearts would be waiting behind the door with the dog. Not all men are as fortunate as Ulysses.

I didn't know what hate felt like, not the hate that comes after love. It's huge and desperate and it longs to be proved wrong. And every day it's proved right it grows a little more monstrous. If the love was passion, the hate will be obsession. A need to see the once-loved weak and cowed and beneath pity. Disgust is close and dignity is far away. The hate is not only for the once loved, it's for yourself too; how could you ever have loved this?

We gamble with the hope of winning, but it's the thought of what we might lose that excites us.

Bonaparte taught us that freedom lay in our fighting arm, but in the legends of the Holy Grail no one won it by force. It was Perceval, the gentle knight, who came to a ruined chapel and found what the others had overlooked, simply by sitting still.

I think now that being free is not being powerful or rich or well regarded or without obligations but being able to love. To love someone else enough to forget about yourself even for one moment is to be free. The mystics and the churchmen talk about throwing off this body and its desires, being no longer a slave to the flesh. They don't say that through the flesh we are set free. That our desire for another will lift us out of ourselves more cleanly than anything divine.

My passion for her, even though she could never return it, showed me the difference between inventing a lover and falling in love. The one is about you, the other about someone else.