Crazy little thing called love: The human heart is greedy as the motor of an old Lincoln Zephyr

(Whatever feeds our greedy, needy hearts…)

Life has its funny and often weirdly serendipitous moments. In yesterday’s column I linked to W.B. Auden’s ‘O tell me the truth about love’ poem but now I feel I must render it in full, thanks to a story I just read in one of the English tabloids.

First the story, I think:

“American grandmother Linda Wolfe has become “the most married woman in the world” after walking down the aisle 23 times, and is now “on the lookout for number 24″. Mrs Wolfe, 68, is included in the Guinness Book of World Records for the dubious honour of being wed more times than anyone else alive. She has said that she is “addicted to the romance” of getting married.

Born Linda Lou Taylor, the American first married in 1957 aged 16, to a 31-year-old called George Scott. The union lasted for seven years, the longest and happiest of any of her marriages. Since then things have tended to go downhill. Over the subsequent decades she married a one-eyed convict, a preacher, barmen, plumbers and musicians. Two turned out to be homosexual, two were homeless and one beat her. Another put a padlock on her fridge. One marriage lasted just 36 hours because “the love wasn’t there”.”

As I said, it’s a funny story, although it’s also kind of desperate.

The human heart is like the motor of an old, American car - a Lincoln Zephyr, if you like. It runs on the kind of fossil fuels that are both strangely uneconomical and damaging to the immediate & future environment.

I am sure that there are many social, psychological and evolutionary reasons why we’ve developed this ‘crazy, little thing called love’, to explain and accompany our mating habits but humans are quite complicated animals and we tend to overdo things.

Which, at times, results in Columbine type shootings, bungee jumping, sending armies to Afghanistan, eating record numbers of pies or, indeed, marrying 23 times because you are ‘addicted to romance’.

Which is, come to think of it, more sad than funny, really but that’s humans for you.

Like the motors of those old cars I mentioned, the human heart feeds a most greedy and ostentatious machine that’s not very good at turning corners.

Anyway, here’s that old Auden poem, in full:

O Tell Me The Truth About Love

Some say love’s a little boy,
And some say it’s a bird,
Some say it makes the world go around,
Some say that’s absurd,
And when I asked the man next-door,
Who looked as if he knew,
His wife got very cross indeed,
And said it wouldn’t do.

Does it look like a pair of pyjamas,
Or the ham in a temperance hotel?
Does its odour remind one of llamas,
Or has it a comforting smell?
Is it prickly to touch as a hedge is,
Or soft as eiderdown fluff?
Is it sharp or quite smooth at the edges?
O tell me the truth about love.

Our history books refer to it
In cryptic little notes,
It’s quite a common topic on
The Transatlantic boats;
I’ve found the subject mentioned in
Accounts of suicides,
And even seen it scribbled on
The backs of railway guides.

Does it howl like a hungry Alsatian,
Or boom like a military band?
Could one give a first-rate imitation
On a saw or a Steinway Grand?
Is its singing at parties a riot?
Does it only like Classical stuff?
Will it stop when one wants to be quiet?
O tell me the truth about love.

I looked inside the summer-house;
It wasn’t over there;
I tried the Thames at Maidenhead,
And Brighton’s bracing air.
I don’t know what the blackbird sang,
Or what the tulip said;
But it wasn’t in the chicken-run,
Or underneath the bed.

Can it pull extraordinary faces?
Is it usually sick on a swing?
Does it spend all its time at the races,
or fiddling with pieces of string?
Has it views of its own about money?
Does it think Patriotism enough?
Are its stories vulgar but funny?
O tell me the truth about love.

When it comes, will it come without warning
Just as I’m picking my nose?
Will it knock on my door in the morning,
Or tread in the bus on my toes?
Will it come like a change in the weather?
Will its greeting be courteous or rough?
Will it alter my life altogether?
O tell me the truth about love.