The Course of Love (25 page)
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Authors: Alain de Botton
Wanting to capture this moment, Rabih calls them to gather for a photo, then sets the camera on a rock and runs to get into the shot. He knows that perfect happiness comes in tiny, incremental units only, perhaps no more than five minutes at a time. This is what one has to take with both hands and cherish.
Struggles and conflicts will arise again soon enough: one of the children will become unhappy; Kirsten will make a short-tempered remark in response to something careless he has done; he will remember the challenges he's facing at work; he will feel scared, bored, spoilt, and tired.
No one can predict the eventual fate of this photo, he knows: how it will be read in the future, what the viewer will look for in their eyes. Will it be the last photo of them all together, taken just hours before the crash on the way home, or a month before he found out about Kirsten's affair and she moved out, or the year before Esther's symptoms started? Or will it merely sit for decades in a dusty frame on a shelf in the living room, waiting to be picked up casually by William when he returns home to introduce his parents to his fiancée?
Rabih's awareness of the uncertainty makes him want to hang on to the light all the more fervently. If only for a moment, it all makes sense. He knows how to love Kirsten, how to have sufficient faith in himself, and how to feel compassion for and be patient with his children. But it is all desperately fragile. He knows full well that he has
no right to call himself a happy man; he is simply an ordinary human being passing through a small phase of contentment.
Very little can be made perfect; he knows that now. He has a sense of the bravery it takes to live even an utterly mediocre life like his own. To keep all of this going, to ensure his continuing status as an almost sane person, his capacity to provide for his family financially, the survival of his marriage and the flourishing of his childrenâthese projects offer no fewer opportunities for heroism than an epic tale. He is unlikely ever to be called upon to serve his nation or to fight an enemy, but courage is required nevertheless within his circumscribed domains. The courage not to be vanquished by anxiety, not to hurt others out of frustration, not to grow too furious with the world for the perceived injuries it heedlessly inflicts, not to go crazy and somehow to manage to persevere in a more or less adequate way through the difficulties of married lifeâthis is true courage; this is a heroism in a class all its own. And for a brief moment on the slopes of a Scottish mountain in the late-afternoon summer sunâand every now and then thereafterâRabih Khan feels that he might, with Kirsten by his side, be strong enough for
whatever life demands of him.
ALAIN DE BOTTON
was born in 1969 and has written more than fifteen books spanning both fiction and nonfictionâamong them
How Proust Can Change Your Life
and
The Art of Travel
. His thoughtful and pioneering works, on subjects that range from religion to art, from our working lives to how we travel, have been described as a philosophy of everyday life. He also founded and runs The School of Life, a global organization dedicated to a new vision of education.
Alain de Botton's first book, the bestselling novel
On Love
, was published when he was twenty-three years old. Over two decades later, Alain returns to fiction and to the love story with
The Course of Love
.
MEET THE AUTHORS, WATCH VIDEOS AND MORE AT
ALSO BY ALAIN DE BOTTON
The News: A User's Manual
Art as Therapy
How to Think More About Sex
Religion for Atheists: A Non-Believer's Guide to the Uses of Religion
A Week at the Airport
The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work
The Architecture of Happiness
Status Anxiety
The Art of Travel
The Consolations of Philosophy
How Proust Can Change Your Life
On Love
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This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author's imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2016 by Alain de Botton
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First Simon & Schuster hardcover edition June 2016
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Interior design by Ruth Lee-Mui
Jacket Design by Alison Forner
Jacket Art: Linocut by Tess Hines © Tess Hines/Mary Evans Picture Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Botton, Alain de, author.
The course of love : a novel / Alain de Botton. â First Simon & Schuster hardcover edition.
pages cm
I. Title.
PR6054.E1324C68 2016
823'.914âdc23
ISBN 978-1-5011-3425-8
ISBN 978-1-5011-3443-2 (ebook)