Love

Proverbs about love almost never describe it. They describe what it does to perception. The Arabic al-qird fī ʿayn ummih ghazāl — “in its mother’s eye, the monkey is a gazelle” — is the cleanest example: love is not really the subject. The mother’s eye is.

The eye keeps coming back. Hebrew called the beloved ishon eino, the little man of the eye — the tiny figure reflected in a pupil when you stand close enough — and English inherited it as the apple of the eye. Arabic calls the beloved qurrat al-ʿayn, the coolness of the eye: the one whose presence eases you as a tear eases a burning eye. Brazilian Portuguese turns the organ against itself — o coração vê o que os olhos não veem, the heart sees what the eyes don’t. In one of these proverbs love bends the eye, in one it lives there, in one it soothes it, in one it overrules it. Across languages, the consistent observation is that love distorts. The disagreement is whether the distortion is a flaw, a gift, or simply a fact.

Other proverbs in the archive measure love by what it costs. The Polish świeca, co innym świeci, sama się spala — the candle that shines for others burns itself up — is about devotion that consumes the one who gives it. The Russian druz’ya poznayutsya v bede, friends are known in trouble, comes down from a line of Ennius preserved by Cicero, and holds that friendship only becomes visible under strain. The Mongolian shuvuu üürtee, khün nutagtaa — the bird to its nest, the person to their homeland — is love of place, and its word for homeland, nutag, means not the nation but your own stretch of valley and river. It is said by a people who move camp with the seasons.