The Gravity of Love

As the story beings, you would be excused for thinking it is a rehash of Sleeping Beauty. At long last, the King and Queen finally have a daughter and invite lots of people to a christening party, but, alas, the King forgets to invite his own sister to the party, and double alas, the King’s sister is a witch, who decides to show up uninvited to the party and curse the child. But, (plot twist!) instead of a death curse, the curse is lightness:

Light of spirit, by my charms,
Light of body, every part,
Never weary human arms—
Only crush thy parent’s heart!

Not a very nice sister. Instantly, the child becomes Light. What does it mean to become light? Therein lies the tale.

The first manifestation of lightness is exactly what you expected; the child has no weight. Propel her upward, there is no tendency to fall, so you have to get ladder to pull down the kid from hovering up at the ceiling. Set her down and a gust of wind will blow the child off into the bushes over yonder. When she gets older and wants to dive into the lake, she can’t do it because diving into a lake requires being susceptible to gravity’s pull. On the plus side, she can float all day on top of the lake, simply by lying down on the water.

Being immune to gravity would be a cute little fairy tale, but MacDonald isn’t done with lightness yet. The child also lacks gravity of demeanor. She laughs. She laughs a lot. Indeed, she only laughs. Growing up, the child never once cries, never once is angry or depressed. Instead, she is perpetually happy, and laughing. No matter what.

Macdonald has a fun time thinking about the full implications of lightness:

“Well, what’s the matter with your child? She’s neither up the chimney nor down the draw-well. Just hear her laughing.”
Yet the king could not help a sigh, which he tried to turn into a cough, saying—
“It is a good thing to be light-hearted, I am sure, whether she be ours or not.”
“It is a bad thing to be light-headed,” answered the queen, looking with prophetic soul far into the future.
“‘Tis a good thing to be light-handed,” said the king.
“‘Tis a bad thing to be light-fingered,” answered the queen.
“‘Tis a good thing to be light-footed,” said the king.
“‘Tis a bad thing—” began the queen; but the king interrupted her.
“In fact,” said he, with the tone of one who concludes an argument in which he has had only imaginary opponents, and in which, therefore, he has come off triumphant—”in fact, it is a good thing altogether to be light-bodied.”
“But it is a bad thing altogether to be light-minded,” retorted the queen, who was beginning to lose her temper.
This last answer quite discomfited his Majesty, who turned on his heel, and betook himself to his counting-house again. But he was not half-way towards it, when the voice of his queen overtook him.
“And it’s a bad thing to be light-haired,” screamed she, determined to have more last words, now that her spirit was roused.
The queen’s hair was black as night; and the king’s had been, and his daughter’s was, golden as morning. But it was not this reflection on his hair that arrested him; it was the double use of the word light. For the king hated all witticisms, and punning especially. And besides, he could not tell whether the queen meant light-haired or light-heired; for why might she not aspirate her vowels when she was exasperated herself?
He turned upon his other heel, and rejoined her. She looked angry still, because she knew that she was guilty, or, what was much the same, knew that HE thought so.
“My dear queen,” said he, “duplicity of any sort is exceedingly objectionable between married people of any rank, not to say kings and queens; and the most objectionable form duplicity can assume is that of punning.”

The Light Princess is light indeed, lacking all relationship to gravity, physical, mental, or spiritual. Had the story stopped when the child was young, we’d have an amusing little tale to tell children who could then run around pretending they had no weight, laughing all the time.

But, eventually little princesses grow up and young princes stop by to visit. At this point we realize something startling. Love is a serious thing.

Generally when we think about young love, we imagine depressed angsty teenagers discovering the joy of life and becoming free of the cares of this earth as they dwell upon the divine attributes of the beloved. When we imagine older people falling in love, we talk of how it makes them young again, light-hearted and bubbly. Twitterpated, as one wise owl described this state of being.

But, what if someone had no gravity to begin with? What if it was impossible to become more light-hearted? Can such a person fall in love? The prince falls in love with the princess, but the princess is incapable of love. Love, real love, requires gravity. You can hear this moment of realization in ever rom-com movie ever when at long last the feckless young lad and lass suddenly realize that their comedic romp is actually a quite serious affair and the background music shifts keys. George MacDonald was there first.

Since this is a fairy tale, it has to end with the prince and princess living happily ever after, so how does the change happen? The evil sister (using a serpent, of course) drains the lake in which the princess has whiled away her life, and as the lake drains, the princess begins dying. The solution hinges on a poem found in the bottom of the lake:

Death alone from death can save.
Love is death, and so is brave—
Love can fill the deepest grave.
Love loves on beneath the wave.

The Christological overtones of the first line are obvious; the young prince must voluntarily give up his life to save the princess from death. Love is indeed death, and thus love is indeed brave. (And, can we just admire the pun on grave?)

When the prince gives up his life (or, goes to his grave) for the princess, she suddenly discovers gravity of spirit. Her tears flow and with them comes the rain refilling the lake (the deepest grave of the poem), thereby baptizing the princess and the land and suddenly prince and princess are drawn back up out of the waters into life. The Princess is no longer light.

All too often, we think of love and happiness and laughter as something opposed to seriousness, nd in doing so, we miss the whole point of joy. We love not because we lack gravity; we love because we realize how important other people are. We find joy in things because we realize that those things are grounded and real.

Laughter has the same problem.  We think of laughter as something like what the Light Princess is doing before she discovers gravity.  But there is another kind of laughter, a better and richer kind of laughter. We laugh not because we do not see the importance of an object; we laugh because we actually think the thing is too important and serious not to be filled with joy about it. I was at a conference last week in which the organizer noted with pleasant surprise that the discussions during the conference were among the best he had ever heard and there was so much more laughter than he had ever heard at a conference. I have heard people say things like that many times as if a serious discussion and much laughter were somehow at odds. But, don’t they do together?

The Light Princess cannot love because she lacks an awareness of the importance of love, the importance of life and death. You can imagine the polar opposite story in which the princess cannot love because she lacks the ability to find joy in life. As MacDonald notes in the concluding paragraph, we need to find something in between:

So the prince and princess lived and were happy; and had crowns of gold, and clothes of cloth, and shoes of leather, and children of boys and girls, not one of whom was ever known, on the most critical occasion, to lose the smallest atom of his or her due proportion of gravity.

The due proportion of gravity. A perfect phrase. In our rush to see life as either comedy or tragedy, we sometimes lose sight of the due proportion of gravity. Too much or too little gravity destroy laughter and love.

Related Posts
Kundera, Milan The Unbearable Lightness of Being “Bearing Life”
Buckley, F.H. The Morality of Laughter “Laughing at the World Around You”