The Marriage Book (10 page)

COVETING

BUDDHA

THE DHAMMAPADA
, CIRCA 3RD CENTURY BC

One of the most familiar Buddhist texts, the
Dhammapada
is a collection of more than 400 sayings ranging in subject from flowers and evil to happiness and anger.

“Hell” in Buddhism is not an eternal destination but is, like other states of being, transient. Likewise, while there are no commandments, per se, in Buddhism, one of its central “Five Precepts” guides followers to refrain from sexual misconduct.

Four things does a reckless man gain who covets his neighbor’s wife—demerit, an uncomfortable bed, thirdly, punishment, and lastly, hell.

There is demerit, and the evil way to hell: there is the short pleasure of the frightened in the arms of the frightened, and the king imposes heavy punishment; therefore let no man think of his neighbor’s wife.

OTTO RANK

DIARY, CIRCA 1904

In his own version of the Ten Commandments (beginning with “Thou shalt have no God”), Austrian psychologist Otto Rank (1884–1939) took the biblical tenth commandment one step further.

Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s wife, for there are plenty of others.

JIMMY CARTER

PLAYBOY
INTERVIEW, 1976

Former Georgia governor Jimmy Carter (1924–) became the thirty-ninth president of the United States in the wake of the Watergate scandal, presenting himself as an outsider, an honest man of strong values and straight talk. His most unfortunate—and famous—example of the latter came about during the campaign, when he was interviewed by Robert Scheer for
Playboy
magazine. The article ran for a dozen pages, but the passage that follows was what people remembered. It was responsible for a 15 percent drop in Carter’s poll numbers and for what was said to be a joke circulating at the White House: “He would have been all right if he’d just kept his heart in his pants.”

Carter had married Rosalynn Smith, from his hometown of Plains, Georgia, in 1946.

I try not to commit a deliberate sin. I recognize that I’m going to do it anyhow, because I’m human and I’m tempted. And Christ set some almost impossible standards for us. Christ said, “I tell you that anyone who looks on a woman with lust has in his heart already committed adultery.”

I’ve looked on a lot of women with lust. I’ve committed adultery in my heart many times. This is something that God recognizes I will do—and I have done it—and God forgives me for it. But that doesn’t mean that I condemn someone who not only looks on a woman with lust but who leaves his wife and shacks up with somebody out of wedlock.

Christ says, Don’t consider yourself better than someone else because one guy screws a whole bunch of women while the other guy is loyal to his wife. The guy who’s loyal to his wife ought not to be condescending or proud because of the relative degree of sinfulness.

D

DEVOTION

THE DUNMOW OATH, 1510

Starting in the twelfth century, and intermittently since then, the custom in a British town called Dunmow was to bestow a “flitch” (a side) or sometimes a “gammon” (a hind leg) of bacon on married couples who convinced the town’s prior that they had been married a year and a day without arguments, infidelities, or—waking or sleeping—regrets. The practice had many iterations, but the lines below comprise the oath that, as early as 1510, the winning couples swore while kneeling on pointed stones.

Some writers have suggested that this custom was the origin of the phrase “bringing home the bacon.”

You shall swear by the Custom of our Confession

That you never made any Nuptial Transgression

Since you were married to your wife

By household brawles, or contentious strife

Or otherwise in bed or board

Offended each other in deed or word

Or since the Parish Clerk said Amen

Wished yourselves unmarried ag[ai]n

Or in a twelvemonth and a day

Repented not in thought any way

But continued true and in desire

As when you joined hands in the Holy Quire

If to these conditions without all fear

Of your own Accord you will freely swear

A Gammon of Bacon you shall receive

And beare it Hence with Love and Good Leave

For this is our Custom in Dunmow well known

Though the Sport be ours, the Bacon’s your own.

CATHERINE OF ARAGON

LETTER TO HENRY VIII, 1536

The first wife of Henry VIII, Catherine of Aragon (1485–1536) was highly educated, devout, and at one point even a successful regent in Henry’s absence. She also bore him six children, including two sons. Only their daughter Mary survived childhood, and Henry’s two great desires—for a male heir and for the divorce that would allow him to marry his mistress, Anne Boleyn—led to his break with the Catholic Church. Catherine was banished from court and remained in exile until her death (probably from cancer). But she considered herself the rightful queen and stayed devoted until the end.

My most dear lord, king and husband,

The hour of my death now drawing on, the tender love I owe you forceth me, my case being such, to commend myself to you, and to put you in remembrance with a few words of the health and safeguard of your soul which you ought to prefer before all worldly matters, and before the care and pampering of your body, for the which you have cast me into many calamities and yourself into many troubles. For my part, I pardon you everything, and I wish to devoutly pray God that He will pardon you also. For the rest, I commend unto you our daughter Mary, beseeching you to be a good father unto her, as I have heretofore desired. I entreat you also, on behalf of my maids, to give them marriage portions, which is not much, they being but three. For all my other servants I solicit the wages due them, and a year more, lest they be unprovided for. Lastly, I make this vow, that mine eyes desire you above all things.

Katharine the Quene

SAMUEL JOHNSON

LETTER TO THOMAS LAWRENCE, 1780

Nearly three decades after the death of his wife, Elizabeth, in 1752, the great British author Samuel Johnson (1709–1784) still kept her wedding ring in a small wooden box, on the inside cover of which he had written “Eheu!” (Latin for
alas
). She had been twenty-one years older than Johnson and the subject of some contemporaneous ridicule. But this was his condolence letter to a friend, a doctor named Thomas Lawrence, upon the death of Lawrence’s wife.

For more of Dr. Johnson, see
Infidelity
;
Triumphs
.

The loss, dear sir, which you have lately suffered, I felt many years ago, and know therefore how much has been taken from you and how little can be had from consolation. He that outlives a wife whom he has long loved, sees himself disjoined from the only mind that has the same hopes and fears and interest; from the only companion with whom he has shared much good or evil; and with whom he could set his mind at liberty to retrace the past or anticipate the future. The continuity of being is lacerated; the settled course of sentiment and action stopped; and life stands suspended and motionless, till it is driven by external causes into a new channel. But the time of suspense is dreadful.

JOHN BUTLER YEATS

LETTER TO OLIVER ELTON, 1917

Born in Ireland, educated at Trinity College Dublin, and trained as a barrister, John Butler Yeats (1839–1922) gave up law after a year for a career in painting. Several of his portraits—most notably of the Irish separatist John O’Leary—hang in the National Gallery of Ireland. Yeats was married in 1863 to Susan Pollexfen, whom he outlived by two decades. Together they had six children, including the poet William Butler Yeats (see
Encouragement
;
Youth and Age
).

Oliver Elton was a British literary scholar, author of many books of essays, criticism, and translation.

I am an old dusty sundried conservative in some things, marriage for instance. Marriage is the earliest fruit of civilization and it will be the latest. I think a man and a woman should choose each other for life, for the simple reason that a long life with all its accidents is barely enough for a man and a woman to understand each other; and in this case to understand is to love. The man who understands one woman is qualified to understand pretty well everything.

EZRA POUND

“THE RIVER-MERCHANT’S WIFE: A LETTER,” 1917

There are many beautiful and, apparently, more accurately translated versions of this poem by the eighth-century Chinese writer Li Po (alternately spelled Li Bai, Li Bo, or—in the Japanese transliteration Pound used—Rihaku). Arguably, none is more transcendent than that of American poet Ezra Pound (1885–1972).

While my hair was still cut straight across my forehead

I played about the front gate, pulling flowers.

You came by on bamboo stilts, playing horse,

You walked about my seat, playing with blue plums.

And we went on living in the village of Chokan:

Two small people, without dislike or suspicion.

At fourteen I married My Lord you.

I never laughed, being bashful.

Lowering my head, I looked at the wall.

Called to, a thousand times, I never looked back.

At fifteen I stopped scowling,

I desired my dust to be mingled with yours

Forever and forever and forever.

Why should I climb the look out?

At sixteen you departed,

You went into far Ku-to-Yen, by the river of swirling eddies, And you have been gone five months.

The monkeys make sorrowful noise overhead.

You dragged your feet when you went out.

By the gate now, the moss is grown, the different mosses,

Too deep to clear them away!

The leaves fall early this autumn, in wind.

The paired butterflies are already yellow with August

Over the grass in the West garden;

They hurt me.

I grow older.

If you are coming down through the narrows of the river Kiang, Please let me know beforehand,

And I will come out to meet you,

As far as Cho-fu-Sa.

EDWARD VIII

ABDICATION SPEECH, 1936

Born to be king, Prince Edward (1894–1972) ruled Great Britain for only a year before abdicating so that he could marry the American divorcée Wallis Simpson. Edward made the following announcement by radio the day after Parliament endorsed his decision. Taking the throne, his younger brother, Albert, became George VI and named Edward the Duke of Windsor. No other British ruler had before or has since abdicated.

These paragraphs represent roughly half of Edward’s speech.

At long last I am able to say a few words of my own. I have never wanted to withhold anything, but until now it has not been constitutionally possible for me to speak.

A few hours ago, I discharged my last duty as King and Emperor, and now that I have been succeeded by my brother, the Duke of York, my first words must be to declare my allegiance to him. This I do with all my heart.

You all know the reasons which have impelled me to renounce the throne. But I want you to understand that in making up my mind I did not forget the country or the empire, which, as Prince of Wales and lately as King, I have for twenty-five years tried to serve.

But you must believe me when I tell you that I have found it impossible to carry the heavy burden of responsibility and to discharge my duties as King as I would wish to do without the help and support of the woman I love.

And I want you to know that the decision I have made has been mine and mine alone. This was a thing I had to judge entirely for myself. The other person most nearly concerned has tried up to the last to persuade me to take a different course.

I have made this, the most serious decision of my life, only upon the single thought of what would, in the end, be best for all.

RICHARD FEYNMAN

LETTER TO ARLINE FEYNMAN, 1946

Richard Feynman (1918–1988) shared the 1965 Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on quantum electrodynamics. Unrivaled in his generation for his brilliance and innovation, he was also known for being witty, warm, and unconventional. Those last three qualities were particularly evident in this letter, which he wrote to his wife Arline nearly two years after her death from tuberculosis.