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Out of the author’s deep experience of Rome came the trilogy, Roman Ruminations, “The Psychology of the Human as Enculturated Animal”. Its three volumes are: Loneliness, Instinct, and Love.
Love:
The culture of the Mediterranean is an erotic one, from food to art. Even Mediterranean religion and philosophy are erotic.
Rome is the supreme shrine of the Christian love-cult. In Rome, we venture upon excursions into the artifacts of Christian history and into the contemporary practices of Christian love devotion. What are morality and sanctity, love style?
Whatever our pretensions to culture, we are, deep down, just naked animals, and naked in our needs, one of which is love. Needy, we want romance, we are Romantics. We drift into fantasies and illusions in our desperate search for love.
Deprived, frustrated, we suffer longing and jealousy, we inflict cruelty. Haunted by our failures, we may end up with broken hearts.
Yet, love has its lighter side, in the misunderstandings between the sexes, odd matches, and jousting for dominance. The author relates his own misadventures in love and finally gets straightened out by a sybil.
Still naked in our needs, we want the shared life, acceptance, affirmation, and the bliss of intimacy. Eros, our Mediterranean angel, guides us past sex to love and marriage, with home and family. Our needs are met; we find fulfillment.
Reviewed by K.C. Finn for Readers' Favorite
Love is a work of non-fiction in the memoir and relationships subgenres, and it forms volume three of the Roman Ruminations collection penned by Norman Weeks. It is best suited to the general adult reading audience. In this charming reflection on the nature of relationships and how they change as we get older, the author examines his life through the lens of Mediterranean culture. In this rich hub of historical and modern practice that all focus on the theme of love, from the birthplace of Eros and Casanova to the religious overtones of faith and love, every aspect is deftly explored.
Norman Weeks describes the Roman Ruminations series as “The Psychology of the Human as an Enculturated Animal” and it couldn’t be more apt in this volume, where our basest desires for love, closeness, companionship, hedonism, and stability are explored. The author adds to this detailed history with his contributions to the tapestry of human experiences, many of which have relatable overlappings with most people’s lives. They are also held up and critically examined for us to contemplate. The work is bold and confidently authored to springboard us into deeper thinking about our own life experiences. Readers of all ages will see themselves reflected in different aspects of the ruminations. I would certainly recommend Love to fans of the existing series, and the series in general to anyone wishing to explore memoir-style writing that also has an intellectual, psychological, and sociological aspect to it.
