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21 The plot turns out as Mr. Knightley predicts. After some misadventures, Harriet ends up with Robert Martin, Mr. Elton with a woman closer to his social position (though inferior in brains and poise; the Equation often requires certain trade-offs). Emma and Mr. Knightley wind up together—again obeying the Equation: the two of them are the richest and most eligible people in their district. Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina offers an example of how the Equation expresses itself internally. Konstantin Levin, upstaged at a ball by the dashing Count Vronsky in his pursuit of the lovely young Kitty Scherbatsky, muses: Yes, there’s something unpleasant, even repulsive in me.

The great Japanese novelist Natsume Soseki said that what attracted him to his wife when he first met her was that she did not seem to be ashamed of her bad teeth. Even the apparent exceptions don’t disprove the rule. The playwright Arthur Miller was not conspicuously handsome, yet he married Marilyn Monroe, one of the most beautiful women of her time. Somehow this comes as no great surprise; Miller’s brilliance and fame were a match for her beauty. ) Sometimes people are indeed quite explicit about such trade-offs, as we see in the story about the actress who proposed a union with another playwright—George Bernard Shaw—on the grounds that a child with his brains and her looks would be a magnificent specimen.

As Freud observed, ‘‘At the height of being in love the boundary between ego and object threatens to melt away. ’’30 Biology would seem to bear this out. It portrays the survival of the self—whether it is a one-celled organism or a human being—as an intense struggle to hold a hostile universe at bay. The organism must protect itself from things that would destroy it; it must also destroy things itself in order to survive. Wherever it looks, it sees nothing but enemies—either creatures that it must fear or ones by which it is feared in turn.