Soliciting self-pity

If chivalry is dead, I presume on the day before the Feast of Saint Valentine, one is compelled to notice the rape of romance. You may have a favorite case of your own, and if you don't you really ought to have one. Mine involves a custom piously observed, so I'm told, in certain schoolrooms across the country. The corny practice requires every child to send and receive at least one Valentine tomorrow, neatly ensuring you always know what you're going to get. In the nostrils of romantics, this opposition to Forrest Gump's "box of chocolates" philosophy carries an odor of Disneyland fantasy.\nI don't think I've been around too long, but I can remember when Feb. 14 was a day of sheer anxiety. How could it be otherwise? The day is nothing if not one ridden with anticipation and tension over whether you will receive a Valentine at all, and if so, whether you have a secret admirer in waiting. And that merely covers the anticipation. Will your own arrow hit its mark? Will the sureness of its aim be reciprocated? It is all a very agonizing affair, and it is valuable -- indeed, essential -- to be borne in childhood precisely because they are such resounding features of life after childhood.\nI mention all of this because so much time seems to be invested in making people feel as protected as far as possible. I say "as far as possible" because we're all sure of one thing: The calm of life is never assured. And before you object that youth should be insulated at all costs to preserve their blissful innocence, it should be stated that this juvenile delusion is hardly limited to children. How can this possibly be justified?\nAnd yet, attempts to justify are being made. We might be getting a glimpse of what a world without romance, devoid of drama, bereft of adventure, would look like. It will be free of pain -- a world in which we will have managed to evolve into a risk-free nirvana where authentic emotion cannot be measured, let alone appreciated. This promises to destroy the entire value of tomorrow's inherently dicey and unsafe nature, and much else besides.\nThis is the "brave new world," I suppose. In the original novel of the same name, in case you've forgotten, the protagonist, known only to us as The Savage, rebukes The Controller, whose sole ambition for his society is the quiet life. That intense exchange warrants special attention today. "But I don't want comfort. I want God. I want poetry. I want real danger. I want freedom. I want goodness. I want sin." The Controller counters The Savage by arguing that the latter is, in fact, claiming the right to be unhappy. And when The Savage readily accepts this possibility, the social engineer par excellence rehearses the innumerable pitfalls of that emancipation: inconveniences, pains, diseases and terrors of every kind. After a pregnant silence, The Savage utters simply: "I claim them all." \nSo should we.