The "Science of Love"

In “A Tree. A Rock. A Cloud.” by Carson McCullers, an old man speaks to a paper boy about the science of love. For the human race, love brings not only a feeling of importance but is a human emotion that binds two people.  It is perhaps more importantly nature’s way of keeping the human race alive by bringing a man and woman together for reproduction.  For the old man in this short story, love keeps him alive. Though the old man speaks about the woman he loved and married, he has come to discover that it is the love that makes him feel alive and not women.  As he says early on, “Nothing seemed to finish itself up or fit in with the other things. Women? I had my portion of them. The same.  Afterwards laying around loose in me. I was a man who had never loved.”  The wife the old man loved leads him to discover the “science of love” but otherwise is slightly irrelevant as a bonded partner.  The man articulates that it doesn’t matter what or who you love, but that the “science of love” is the key to existing.  

One of the first things the old man does is show the boy a photograph. The photograph is of a woman who was the old man’s wife, although the paper boy cannot make out her face very well. The photograph is blurred “so that only the hat and the dress she [is] wearing [stands] out clearly.” Her face is blurred though it doesn’t really matter, as the man discovers, who he loves, but just the plain fact that he loves.  In fact, the man tells the paper boy that when he looks at the picture he “couldn’t see her. I would take out her pictures and look. No good.”  The old man marries his wife after only knowing her for three days. Though it is some five years after her leaving, the old man more fully realizes that it is love he craves more than her.  He comes to realize that she “was something like an assembly line for [his] soul.” Through her, he is able to feel completely alive.  The man goes on to say that he will “run these little pieces of myself through her and I come out complete.” He is able to fully satisfy his necessity of love.  

In formulating and understanding the “science of love,” the old man discovers that he can love anything.  The old man evens buys a gold fish and “concentrated on the goldfish and [he] loved it.” Adding on this “science of love,” the man concurs that he can love anyone, even the paper boy, and indeed needs to in order to be alive.  In the beginning of the story the old man seems to be dwindling.  His face is down in a beer mug and in fact the café owner comments, “Some night you’ll go to sleep with your big nose in a mug and drown.”  By the end of the story, the old man is alive again as “his smile was bright” from interacting with the boy and proclaiming his love for him.  He will continue to thrive until he must love once more in order to exist, and will need to once again practice his “science of love.”

Olivia Elkins