Free The Course of Love by Alain de Botton

someone to look beyond our adult self in order to engage with—and forgive—the disappointed, furious, inarticulate child within.

Sex and Censorship
    They’re in a café they sometimes go to on a Saturday, ordering scrambled eggs, catching up on the week and reading the papers. Today Kirsten is telling Rabih about the dilemma faced by her friend Shona, whose boyfriend, Alasdair, has abruptly been relocated to Singapore for work. Should she follow him there, Shona wonders—they’ve been together two years—or stay in the dental surgery in Inverness, where she’s only just been promoted? It’s a pretty weighty decision by any measure. But Kirsten’s exegesis is proceeding rather slowly and not always linearly, so Rabih also keeps an eye on the events covered by the Daily Record. Some peculiar and macabre situations have been unfolding recently in venues with highly lyrical place names: a history teacher has beheaded his wife with an ancient sword in a house outside Lochgelly, while in Auchtermuchty police are searching for a fifty-four-year-old man who fathered a child with his sixteen-year-old daughter.
    â€œMr. Khan, if you don’t stop thinking that everything I tell you is merely background noise which you can shut out at will, I promiseyou that what happened to that poor woman in Lochgelly will come to seem to you like a day at Disneyland,” says Kirsten, who then jabs him hard in the ribs with a (blunt) knife.
    But it isn’t just the case of incest in Fife and Shona’s predicament that are preoccupying Rabih. There’s a third claim on his attention as well. Angelo and Maria have owned their café for thirty years. Angelo’s father, originally from Sicily, was a detainee in the Orkney Islands during World War II. The couple have a twenty-one-year-old daughter, Antonella, who has lately graduated with distinction from her course in catering and hospitality at North East Scotland College in Aberdeen. Until something more substantial turns up, she’s helping out in the café, rushing back and forth between the kitchen and the seating area, carrying as many as four orders at a time, issuing constant warnings that the plates are very hot as she maneuvers gracefully among the tables. She’s tall, strong, good-natured—and extremely beautiful. She chats easily with the patrons about the weather and, with some of the regulars who have known her since she was a girl, about the newest developments in her life. She’s single right now, she informs a couple of animated elderly ladies at the table opposite, adding that she genuinely doesn’t mind—and saying no, she’d never try one of those Internet dating things; that’s not her style. She is wearing a surprisingly large crucifix on a chain around her neck.
    As Rabih watches her, and without quite meaning for it to happen, one part of his mind leaves behind its normal responsibilities and starts to conjure a sequence of wayward images: the narrow stairs behind the espresso machine which lead up to the flat above; Antonella’s small room, cluttered with still-unpacked boxes from college; a shaft of morning light catching her jet-black hair and throwing her pale skin into relief; her clothes discarded in a pile bythe chair and Antonella herself lying on the bed with her long, muscular legs spread wide open, wholly naked apart from the crucifix.
    In the West, we owe to Christianity the view that sex should only ever rightly occur in the presence of love. The religion insists that two people who care for each other must reserve their bodies, and their gaze, for each other alone. To think sexually about strangers is to abandon the true spirit of love and to betray God and one’s own humanity.
    Such precepts, at once touching and forbidding, have not entirely evaporated along with the decline of the faith that once supported them. Shorn of their explicitly theistic rationale, they