Mechaieh mentioned the other day that the penultimate chapter of Hardy’s Far From the Madding Crowd contains one of the loveliest descriptions of marriage in all literature. I think she must have meant this passage:
He accompanied her up the hill, explaining to her the details of his forthcoming tenure of the other farm. They spoke very little of their mutual feeling; pretty phrases and warm expressions being probably un-necessary between such tried friends. Theirs was that substantial affection which arises (if any arises at all) when the two who are thrown together begin first by knowing the rougher sides of each other’s character, and not the best till further on, the romance growing up in the interstices of a mass of hard prosaic reality. This good-fellowship — CAMARADERIE — usually occurring through similarity of pursuits, is unfortunately seldom superadded to love between the sexes, because men and women associate, not in their labours, but in their pleasures merely. Where, however, happy circumstance permits its development, the compounded feeling proves itself to be the only love which is strong as death — that love which many waters cannot quench, nor the floods drown, beside which the passion usually called by the name is evanescent as steam.
I have been reading and enjoying an author new to me, and last night I came upon something I think is worthy to be set beside that. Louis L’Amour is not generally known for the beauty of his words but … well, look. This is from Ride the Dark Trail, one of his Sackett novels. I’ll type in the whole passage, because there are several bits I like:
“Aunt Em, you’re quite a woman”
“Always wanted to be six feet high,” she said, “my brothers were all six-footers and I aimed to be as high as them. I never quite made it.”
“You stand tall in any outfit, ” I said. Ã’d like to have known your husband.”
“Talon was a man … all man. He walked strong and he thought right, and no man ever left his door hungry, Indian, black man, or white. Nor did he ever take water for any man.”
“He was a judge of land,” I said, “and of women.”
“We had it good together,” Em said quietly, “we walked a quiet way, the two of us, and never had to say much about it to one another.”
She paused. “I just looked at him and he looked at me and we knew how it was with each other.”
Hours later, well down the trail to Brown’s Hole, I remembered that. Well, they’d been lucky. It was not likely I’d ever find a woman like that, but no matter what any man says, there’s nothing better than two, a man and a woman, who walk together. When they walk right together there’s no way too long, no night too dark.
Note: It occurs to me to notice both how heterosexist both of those passages are, and how intrinsic that *isn’t* to what either one is saying. The last paragraph of the L’Amour passage is easily de-genderize – just remove three words. The last sentence of the Hardy paragraph doesn’t refer to gender at all; the preceding sentence can’t be made gender neutral but it actually implies that two men or two women might actually have a better shot at achieving “the only love as strong as death.
Hardy actually hit on a truth — that camaraderie arises when people work together, but it is (or was) less likely between a man and a woman who usually associate not for labour but merely in their pleasure. He just didn’t know where to go from there, to suggest that perhaps men and women could indeed labour together.
I would venture that a man and a woman, working toward the same objective(s), might develop that camaraderie even if their individual tasks toward their objective were decidedly different. I also have this strange idea that it works better if there aren’t servants around to blur the distinction of who does what.