Mundane Musings

Sun (Auckland), Volume I, Issue 245, 6 January 1928, Page 5

Mundane Musings

This Love Business

Cupid is always represented as a golden-haired baby boy, most delightfully undressed, save for the slender protection of a “property” bow and a quiver full of arrows slung aeross his dimpled shoulders, while from out of his podgy back there sprouts a pair ol the whitest and softest and fluffiest of tiny wings that ever carried a cooing dove to her lover. Believe me, love is no more like that innocent bafc>y boy than I am! How different would life be if only he were! When you are very, very young he hides himself under a pair of butterfly wings, and flutters, tantalisingly, just out of your reach. From rose bush to honeysuckle, breathlessly you pursue him, two great velvety rainbow-hued wings of pink and blue and gold. Stung Then you abandon the chase in despair, only to find that the lovely thing has quietly settled on your arm. Even as your hand closes over him he has disappeared, and in your finger there is the cutest, most stinging little arrow that ever warned you never again to chase butterflies of pink and blue and gold! Or, he comes to you in the guise of a godlike hero from a fairy tale, a veritable knight in silver armour, who leads you to the Island of Romance where the apple blossom never fades, and everybody is most foolishly, deliciously young. You listen adoringly to the fairy tales of your beautiful silver-clad knight, never dreaming that his armour is really only made of tin, after all, and thin tin at that, and his shining sword is but a tinsel one that buckles up at the first breath of a dragon. And the Dragons of Disillusion are rampant on the Isle of Romance. Again, the imp of. mischief toddles by your side, gentle as thistledown, guileless as a lamb, and even while you fondle him he turns into a roaring lion that springs upon you, claws out your very heart and leaves you, bruised and lacerated. An Unfair Trick But the worst is yet to conic, for immediately he assumes his deadliest and most effective disguise, that of the “Perfectly Ordinary Person,” and tenders you the disinterested hand of platonic friendship. He pats your shoulder kindly, and takes you by the hand in the most brotherly manner possible, and you are well content —until you begin to realise that you are treading in strangely familiar paths. Here, again, is out-of-season apple blossom. Here are skylarks and golden buttercups. With dread foreboding you turn to the figure beside you, only to find that he too has assumed the gay trappings of fairy knighthood forsooth, and, without even lingering to test whether his sword is of tinsel or of sharp and trusty steel, you turn and flee in righteous terror.

One day somebody will catch this infinite nuisance whom men call Love, and the very life will be shaken out of him. But in the meantime he’ll con-

tinue to turn the earth topsy turvy with his butterfly wings, and his tincan armour, his tenderness and cruelty, weakness and strength, his agonising ecstacy. Why doesn’t somebody do something about it?