X

The "X" Factor

In algebra, X stood for the unknown, what you did all that work to find out.

The "X Factor" is that mysterious (but essential) aspect of so many things--friendship, falling in love, personal aesthetics, why we like certain people more than others, and lots more attractions and preferences that are hard to describe sometimes.

It's the sine qua non,  the essential ingredient, that little tiny dab of cinnamon without which apple pie would be, well, not apple pie. It's often the trace elements, the little-bitty, the almost-invisible qualities that make things what they are and that set one person apart from others.

I'm reading a unique novel called On Love, by Alain de Botton.  What makes it stylistically unusual as a novel  is that each chapter is divided into numbered paragraphs that both tell the story and reflect on the meaning of love and how humans choose each other.

As for falling in love, the narrator believes that his meeting Chloe was a happy accident of fate, with a probability factor of 1 in 989.7.  Then he muses continuously on what makes her the object of his affection and vice versa.

A couple of snippets:

"Desire had turned me into a relentless hunter for clues, a romantic paranoiac, reading meaning into everything.  But whatever my impatience with the rituals of seduction, I was aware that the enigma lent Chloe a distinctive appeal.  The most attractive are not those who allow us to kiss them at once (we soon feel ungrateful) or those who never allow us to kiss them (we soon forget them), but those who know how to carefully administer varied doses of hope and despair."

"What is so frightening is the extent to which we may idealize others when we have such trouble tolerating ourselves--because we have such trouble....I must have realized that Chloe was only human, with all the implications carried by the word, but could I not be forgiven for my desire to suspend such a thought?  Every fall into love involves the triumph of hope over self-knowledge.  We fall in love hoping that we won't find in another what we know is in ourselves, all the cowardice, weakness, laziness, dishonesty, compromise, and stupidity."