It is a tragedy unpreceded by a romance, unless you take seriously the possibility of falling in love at first sight. But Dante did take it seriously. He declared Beatrice to be the perfect woman, credited her with his own spiritual improvement, and dedicated dozens of poems to her, not to mention his entire life, past, present, and future. And yet, aside from her good standing in the community, he knew virtually nothing about her—nothing of her turn of mind, nothing of her preoccupations and dreams, nothing of the topography or temperature of her inner world. There was, in short, nothing that could have given rise to his love for her, except for the instantaneous response of his “vital spirit.”
It is easy to dismiss as ludicrous the notion that anyone could find love this way. To its many detractors, the idea of love at first sight is at best foolish, at worst dangerous, and either way utterly fantastical—a gauzy, outdated fiction sustained into modernity by Hollywood screenwriters, hack novelists, and hopeless romantics. According to these critics, what we think of as a profound emotional experience is instead a shallow response to mere physical beauty—for what else could so capture our attention in the first few moments of meeting someone? Likewise, what we think of as a sign that we have found the right person is nothing of the sort. We would be less impressed by couples who plunge precipitously into love, they argue, if we consistently tracked the outcome. Plenty of relationships begin quickly and with passionate conviction only to fizzle just as fast; others end years or decades later, after those who fell rapidly in love fall gradually out of it. We do not know the answer to the alternate-universe question that La Vita Nuova tempts us to ask: would Dante and Beatrice have been happy together?
This skeptical outlook is a useful corrective to a long-standing fairy-tale vision of love, which, in addition to excluding all kinds of people from the ranks of possible lover and beloved, also excludes most of what is required for serious, sustained, grown-up relationships. “We are daily bombarded with messages that tell us love is about mystery, about that which cannot be known,” the scholar and activist bell hooks wrote in All About Love. “We see movies in which people are represented as being in love who never talk with one another, who fall into bed without ever discussing their bodies, their sexual needs, their likes and dislikes. Indeed, the message received from the mass media is that knowledge makes love less compelling.” Yet in reality, hooks argues, knowledge—a deep, intimate, sometimes hard-won understanding of both one’s partner and oneself—is “an essential element of love.”
I agree entirely with all of this. And yet, indisputably, love is mysterious, and one of its many mysteries is that we do sometimes know very early that, as Dante put it, our bliss has appeared. “At first sight” might be an overstatement, but quibbling with the idiom is beside the point. Regardless of the exact duration of a fleeting exposure—a first glance, a first interaction, a first conversation, a first date—we can sometimes recognize, incredibly quickly, that we have found our beloved. The moment he saw her in the grocery store, Bill, that grown-up finder of a falling star, knew that he had met his future wife. My mother asked my father to marry her on their second date. For them, as for many people, love appeared as suddenly and as obviously as an idea coming to mind. Eureka: I have found him; I have found her.
But what is it that we are registering when this happens? Despite what the critics say, it can’t simply be physical beauty. We have all admired the look of a stranger for whom we feel nothing else, which means that we are perfectly capable of being instantly drawn to someone’s appearance without being instantly drawn to them more generally. When the latter happens, then, we must be responding to something more than their surface features. You could argue that this “something more” is just an unusually intense degree of attraction, but that restates the problem rather than solving it: what is it that we perceive, in this one person over and above even other very attractive people, that we find so compelling? And, just as puzzling, how do we do so? Through what as-yet-unfathomed part of ourselves can we obtain enough information about someone to conclude so quickly that we are meant to be together?
People have been trying to answer these questions for a very long time. Consistent with his overall account of knowledge, Plato believed that we can identify our beloved by memory. For him, there was no such thing as love at first sight; there was only love that we recognize because we saw it once before, long ago, before our own lifetime began. (Some couples genuinely experience their connection this way, feeling, from early on, as if they have known each other forever.) Setting aside all the other questions this theory raises, it does have the virtue of offering a plausible mechanism for how people fall in love so rapidly. A glancing interaction with a stranger can teach us only so much, but we know from experience that a recollection, however faint or fleeting, can instantly summon powerful emotions.
Many of Plato’s contemporaries, however, had a different explanation for how we fall in love at first sight. In Roman as in Greek mythology, passion was often depicted as imposed from the outside, by Cupid or Eros, who used their bows and arrows to send love winging through the air as swiftly as a glance. As monotheism came to dominate the West, gods and their weapons gave way to sorcerers and mischief-makers, often armed with potions—some of them applied, in keeping with the idea of love at first sight, directly to the eyes, as Oberon and Puck do to Demetrius, Titania, and Lysander in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Across the centuries, a great many other thinkers and writers, from Boccaccio to Yeats, agreed that passion was generally delivered this way—that, as the latter wrote, “love comes in at the eye.” Dante, however, disagreed. In his telling, the eyes are the last to know; they recognize the beloved only when the “vital spirit” alerts them.
Of all these explanations, the mythological one is the most evocative, simultaneously elevating and mocking our mortal intimacies: love feels sometimes like a private miracle, sometimes like a lowercase act of god. In terms of metaphorical richness, I am not sure that account can be bested, even if we have to scrub the tarnish of familiarity off the arrows to remember how golden they are, and how pointed. But it was Dante who made falling in love at first sight seem modern. To explain it, he turned not to our past life but to our current one, and not outward to the gods but inward to the brain, the body, and the psyche—all the places we now routinely look to try to make sense of ourselves. Together, those various parts form a kind of distributed information-processing apparatus whose conclusions, he tells us, are only belatedly made available to his conscious awareness.