4 Small Rivers

Y It’s Valentine’s day, the day of the year when Hallmark Cards and the flower industry, restaurants and chocolate makers – and de Beers – hope we get out our credit cards and do some serious damage to our bank accounts. Why? Y

Y It all, lest we forget, began nearly 2,000 years ago. Roman emperors, like the Greeks (the Spartans, particularly) before and others since, liked their soldiers to be bloodthirsty, tireless, brave. They concluded that one good way to achieve this was to have a steady supply of frustrated, family-less young men. Rising against this was Valentinus. He urged marriage. Against the rulings of Emperor Claudius, who tried outlawing marriage (!), Valentinus secretly married the youngsters. For this, he was killed, probably in one of those spectacularly cruel ways the Romans delighted in. http://www.historychannel.com/exhibits/valentine/?page=history

But, as always, there’s another story: Lupercalia, which began at the ides of February, February 15, was a fertility festival dedicated to Faunus, the Roman god of agriculture, as well as to the Roman founders Romulus and Remus. Implication, then, that the Christians tried to replace a festival of fertility (naughtiness!) with one focused on marriage? Y

Y As a young ‘un, in England, Valentine’s day was a/ St. Valentine’s day, and b/ focused only on lovers and wannabes. An especially important idea was the delivery of an anonymous Valentine … a message, delivered as a card, or a teddy bear or … but with no identification of the sender. I still find mystifying the idea of sending Valentines to one’s kids. Y

Y Good commentary, on today’s NPR, on the day. Yes, let’s carve time out of our too-busy-to-stop-and-smell-the-roses lives to celebrate this important idea: LOVE. “Valentine's Day is essentially a day focused on the exciting beginnings of love. But philosopher Alain de Botton argues that Valentine's Day for grown-ups could be seen as a striving to be more worthy of love.”

http://www.alaindebotton.com http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4498778 He argues that there’s too much focus on the beginning of love. That love stories typically focus on the coming together of two young lovers; they face obstacles, persevere, reunite and then ‘they live happily ever after’. Awww.

But wait. This may have been the end of the cute stuff of movies, the end of the Romeo and Juliet. Shakespeare plays don’t deal as much with the humdrum challenges of daily life in the ‘ever after’: the taming of the shrew doesn’t count. But real life, real love, is so much less dramatic, and so much more interesting. Y