"...(W)ho can say why two people become a couple, that small principality of mutual protection and regard? Couples are jigsaw puzzles that hang together by touching in just enough points. They're never total fits or misfits. In time, a pair invents its own commonwealth, complete with anthems, rituals, and lingos-- a cult of two with fallible gods. All couples play kissy games they don't want other people to know about, and all regress to infants from time to time, sine, though we marry as adults, we don't marry adults. We marry children who have grown up and still rejoice in being children, especially if we're creative. Imaginative people fidget with ideas, including the idea of a relationship. If they're wordsmiths like us, they fidget a lot in words."
~Diane Ackerman writing about her relationship with husband Paul West in her memoir, One Hundred Names for Love.
Yay, yay, yay! I found this book at the library the other day (indeed, it jumped off the shelf at me!) and I'm so excited to read it. I first heard about it from an interview with Ackerman on NPR. The book tells of her writer-husband's stroke which left him completely incapacitated and more significantly, without any vocabulary at all. She nurses him back to health, and somehow, rather miraculously, coaxes his brain into remembering it's former glory. The title refers to the names that West gives Ackerman as terms of endearments. While most people would simply call their beloved something along the lines of "honey-pie," his poor addled (yet still creative) brain christens her with monikers such as, "O Parakeet of the Lissome Star," and "Delicious Pie of the Alternate Sheepfold."
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