Sensitive people with so much love to give

There is a general confusion at Yale about Valentine's Day, due, it seems, to a literal reading of the history of St. Valentine himself. Far from being some majestic love-angel, St. Valentine was simply a poor priest suffering from epilepsy. In 269 A.D., he helped several martyrs escape the persecution of the Roman Emperor Claudius "Goth-Killer" II, though sadly, he himself did not escape. The emperor ordered his execution, but only after beating the old man mercilessly with clubs. Amidst public jeering and general mockery, Valentine was beheaded on the 14th of February.

SHAWN CHENG/YH

Unfortunately, Yale students perennially choose to emulate this model of love, and not that of the heart-shaped cherub more popularly associated with St. Valentine's Day. Or if the Yale love-seeker must be likened to Cupid, it is a cupid that has shot itself in its own fat foot and limps off muttering something about a screw date. Of course, there are many explanations for the rites of self-clubbing and self-mockery in Yale's love scene, but they have all been exhausted by our frustrated amorists stewing in CCL cubicles and Old Campus doubles. One well-respected theory holds that if Yale students had dedicated more of their lives to the quest for love and less to the quest for knowledge, they probably wouldn't be here in the first place. Another postulates that long exposure to artificial light and extended periods of time squinting over textbooks cause long-term musculoskeletal disfigurement; this too may hinder the chances of spontaneous love union.

Still, in the spirit of Valentine's Day (if not of St. Valentine—after all, he died celibate), I chose to ignore these various excuses and undertake a grand-scale mission to find the locus of love at Yale. Oh, the naysayers laughed, they said it couldn't be done. One man even threatened to punch me in the face—I think he misunderstood my intent. Nevertheless, with St. Valentine's battered, twitching visage smiling down upon me, I began the great quest for love at Yale. I would search everywhere on campus and in New Haven, looking for that elusive love locus, asking the big questions: Does it exist? Where can I find it? And, most importantly, where can I find it in one night (like next Wednesday)?

Zuleikha, that dirty whore

Though Yale may not be our nation's center for love, it is one of the greatest centers of love scholarship. We have on staff, for instance, Love Professor Beatrice Gruendler. "The best place to find love at Yale?" she pondered. "A lot of love resides in Arabic writings, though the first Islamic century [seventh century A.D.] is unequalled when it comes to creativity in the love lyric." Gruendler, it should be noted, is a professor of Arabic literature in the Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations Department and teaches a seminar about love and the erotic in classical Arabic literature. "Oral tales," she continued, "adumbrate the exploits of amazon-like heroines in female-dominated counter worlds, while exegetical tales condemn illicit love, for instance between Joseph and Zuleikha (Potiphar's wife)." Ah, we all know about Zuleikha, that cheap dangler, and poor Potiphar, but professor, where is there more love: in the Arabian cultures of the Middle Ages, or at Yale today? "Hard to say," she said. "In medieval Islam, a number of lovers died of despair, most famously Qays, called al-Majnun (the Madman)." It was true, I consented, that Yale has no such examples of passion (though the incest bit is perhaps more difficult to rule out). How, then, could Yale recapture the desire of that past era? Gruendler recommended a manual on secular love by the Andalusian courtier Ibn Hazm (who died in 1064), The Dove's Neck Ring (HQ19 I2513 1953 [LC]). So the quest for love at Yale led back to the library. This seemed problematic.

No learned discourse on love could be complete, however, without the opinion of Professor Howard Bloch, who also teaches a course about love; perhaps he could suggest an alternative? And so I asked again, "Where is the best place to find love at Yale?"

"The library," he said. "From the letters of Abelard and Heloise, to Paolo and Francesca in Dante's Inferno—love is all mixed up with reading."

So what could Yale do to emulate those lost love-filled times, those salad days as it were? He responded lightly, unaware of how damning his words were, "Revive and practice the lost art of conversation, maintain good grooming." On both accounts, Yale was doomed.

Love 'n biscuits

With questions this monumental and the stakes this high, I realized I had to go straight to el capitán—the man known to intimates as Dean Lothario, BR '68, GRD '72. Besides, no one was left. As soon as he received my letter begging to know the best place at Yale to find love, he fired off a prompt response—assured and determined. It read:

Dear Nathaniel: I have been reading that the library is the land of love. Give it to Yale students to be into the love of learning. Love,

Richard Brodhead

Coy yet devastating! Did he mean to mock our failings in the art of love, or was he hinting at the existence of some greater portal of pre-connubial bliss, one that is standing seven floors high, right in front of our faces? Maybe the library should be taken seriously. Either way, he was certainly alluding to the upcoming feature film The StaXXX, which promises to be a cinematic realization of the ordinary Yale student's search for love of the romantic variety (or some such related variety). Perhaps the Dean (and the various love academics) meant to lead me to those wily auteurs.

When I contacted these visionaries, however, they had a surprisingly different take on the matter. Far from identifying the Sterling Memorial Library as Yale's great love womb, they pointed to a smaller, more intimate locale: the Popeye's bathroom. Of course it was yet another false lead. That bathroom has been locked for three years.

(Across the street from Popeye's, the Holiday Inn has not yet sold out its rooms for Valentine's Day. In fact, any room you might want for any day is "very much available," according to Margaret, who was working the desk. They cost $125, even the penthouse suites. That is about equal to the cost of 400 Popeye's biscuits. A room filled with biscuits and two lovers on Valentine's Day costs about $250.)

Bile or sweet, sweet shedah?

Despondent after all my failed searches for love in New Haven, I found myself in the Akhenaten room at the Alexandria Café, where owner Fayez Ghaly offered some consolation and tabouleh.

"Valentine's day is a Wednesday? It's hard to do something on Wednesday. On Saturday, however, we have a belly-dancer." I saw his point.

"After she leaves," he continued, "we turn it into a nightclub, play some American music. Very nice." They have very nice tabouleh too, I should add.

"Did you know that St. Valentine is not just the saint of love, but also the patron saint of epilepsy?" he asked, before going back behind the counter for a moment. He came back shortly holding a tattered photocopy of an ancient Egyptian love ode. "It is not my favorite, certainly, but it is a good one:

Without your love, my heart would beat no more;
Without your love, sweet cake seems only salt;
Without your love, sweet `shedeh' turns to bile.
O listen, darling, my heart's life needs your love;
For when you breathe, mine is the heart that beats."

I don't know what shedah is, but Ghaly's poem was right—I could not let it turn to bile. Love must still be alive in New Haven, and not in the Sterling Memorial Library, either. In fact, just because love at Yale might be a rare and broken commodity did not mean that there was no love in New Haven itself. Then it came to me, like Paolo to Francesca, like an arrow to the aorta. It came in a lover's sweet whisper—delicate but confidant. And to think, it has always been right there.

Q-Pac: all eyez on me

Quinnipiac College is about 15 minutes away by car, but how much closer that is than the Empyrean! If you are true of heart, you can even walk to it—just go down Whalley until you run into Mount Carmel Avenue. Before turning right, pick up a smooth Chianti at Amity Wine and Spirits, or maybe some André (Brut or Pink, depending on the mood), then walk around Clark's Pond. There, in the shadow of Sleeping Giant Mountain, great slabs of black marble embossed with golden letters declare, "Quinnipiac University—Harwood Gate. Visitor's Entrance."

Many lonely and lovelorn individuals I knew expressed great interest in the trip. Unsurprisingly, many others were saddened by Yale's love atmosphere and wanted to learn, once more, how to love. On the night of the planned mission, though, an odd thing happened: all of the women backed out just before the love caravan departed. One pleaded fatigue, another that she had too much work, and yet another that, fittingly, she had to go to the library. As one of the girls, Sloppy Jones*, CC '03, put it, "We had better things to do."

So it was a disheartened, though resilient, group of Paolos that made the trip to Hamden. After all, we knew we had nowhere else to go. That is, if there was no love to be found at Quinnipiac, we would have to return to a cold, cruel campus, the kind of place where a girl like Primpy McSkitters*, CC '03, backs out of love quests and justifies her act of self-debasement by saying things like, "Perhaps quests with a specified purpose of love-looking seem juvenile and primitive." Maybe you're right, Primpy. Maybe love is juvenile and primitive. But don't you dare ever say that to Mr. Ghaly.

Or to anyone at Quinnipiac, for that matter. That place is a love paradise, for God's sake. Amorists roam free, leaping over its thin frozen streams and dashing in groups of two or more into the woods, where, undoubtedly, they frolic with wood sprites and suck necter out of the elms. Off to the shoulder of Mount Carmel Avenue, we even glimpsed the first moments of new love transpire on a dock perched over Clark's Pond, under the new moon. Awed, Brandon Gay, CC '02, spoke for all of us when he noted, "This is, like, college."

It didn't take long to find the first temple of love; it was called Room 12-A in a section of campus known as the "Hill." Chris, Dwayne, and Scott live there. Dwayne, short and stumpy with thinning red facial hair, gave us the low-down. "Basically, just go talk to someone. That's all it takes." Ah—a student of Love Professor Bloch. "And sometimes," he added with intrigue, "they're hungry."

Wow. Inside, the dance floor was heaving so much that the more cautious moved their backs to the walls, just in case the floor broke through. Techno numbers like "I Need a Miracle" and "Oh oh oh oh oh" had the throng singing every "oh," and the volume from the stacks of speakers made the walls bend. When we showed some reticence to get onto the dance floor at first, perhaps intimidated by all the oh-faces, Scott took issue.

"Listen," he said, "I'm white and uncoordinated, but I'm out there." That much was certainly true. "What you just got to do is go out there, bob your knees," he demonstrated, "and nod your head. And when a girl goes by, grab her ass." A girl next to him flashed a smile. "Just make sure it's not my girlfriend."

We nodded and grinned at Scott—but he had us all wrong. The love we wanted wouldn't stand goosing. So I decided to confide in a more reasonable person, the kind, hospitable freshman, Marina. We told her that we had come to Quinnipiac looking for love.

"Oh boy. You're gonna find it," she said.

Love's bounty bequeathèd

In fact, it found us: the arrow hit a perplexed Josh Jelly-Schapiro, CC '02. Hard.

"I was just minding my business," he recounted later, "trying to see how the Q-Pac peoples were going about their loving ritual. I was standing against the wall, nodding my head a little bit, and a girl came up to me asking if I danced. I said, `Well, of course I dance, I dance a little bit'—and then she got all up in my business. I was definitely taken aback."

This is not to say that the night was free of ominous moments. At one point, for instance, a girl walked up to me from several feet away and whispered in my ear, "You better get out of my way before you're in trouble." I still do not know what that meant, but it was certainly menacing. Maybe it was nymph-speak for "Will you be my Valentine?" We received similarly cold responses when we admitted that we had come from Yale—though it wasn't like we were fooling anyone. Most people said they guessed it by our dress (no button-downs) and hair (not short with frosted spikes coming out of our foreheads). When, however, we explained that we were searching for a place that could offer us love, a love locus as it were, they nodded compassionately. "It must be pretty tough there," one woman said. "People are always at the library, huh?"

Yes, we sighed. They are. Still, for those many Yale students who do not find true love before Valentine's Day (that's Wednesday), do not beat yourselves with a club or lapse into epileptic fits. There is, I suppose, hope. A reflective Jelly-Schapiro, almost recovered from his love assault, put it best; when I asked him to describe the potential for love in New Haven and at Yale, he waxed poetic. "Love can grow up through the cracks in the streets," he said. "And often times, those weeds coming out of the sidewalk are even more beautiful than the daffodil growing up all its life in the sunny meadow." *Names have been changed.

Photos by Erin Lewis and Rebecca Rosenthal. Photo composite courtesy Quinnipiac University. Graphics courtesy Kids' Domain.

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