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书名：The Course of Love爱的进化论

作者：Alain De Botton阿兰·德波顿
出版社名称：Penguin
出版时间：2017
语种：英文
ISBN：9780241962138
商品尺寸：12.9 x 1.5 x 19.8 cm
包装：平装
页数：240
★他不乏米兰·昆德拉的批评深度，深具罗兰·巴特尔的解构气质；但，他比昆德拉有更立体的爱情思维，比巴特尔更熨帖恋人的爱情神经。他激活我们全新的阅读体验。

★全球畅销书作家、英伦才子阿兰·德波顿新作。
★英美同步出版，版权售至加拿大、巴西、丹麦、荷兰、法国、德国等近20个国家，亚马逊畅销书排行榜作品。
继全球畅销200万册的Essays in Love《爱情笔记》，时隔20余年，阿兰·德波顿回归爱情写作领域的力作！当年的英伦青年才子，华丽转身变人夫人父，一样的犀利风趣，不一样的人生感悟。
为什么从美好爱情走来的婚姻后来一地鸡毛？
这部The Course of Love《爱的进化论》既是随笔作品，又是一部充满智慧，揭示爱情与婚姻规则的哲学、心理学、社会学著作，令我们不再徘徊于爱情与婚姻历程中的各种两难境地，让我们对生活重新燃起热情，进而明白：爱上很容易，只需一时的激情，维系爱情却很不容易，得需一生的修炼，我们该做的是打破幻想，更务实、更健康、非本能地去爱。
In Edinburgh, a couple, Rabih and Kirsten, fall in love. They get married, they have children—but no relationship is as simple as “happily ever after.” The Course of Love is a novel that explores what happens after the birth of love, what it takes to maintain love, and what happens to our original ideals under the pressures of an average existence. With philosophical insight and psychological acumen, Alain de Botton shows that our Romantic dreams may do us a grave disservice—and explores what the alternatives might be. The conclusion, as the characters gradually discover, is that love is not “an enthusiasm,” but rather a “skill” that must be slowly and often painfully learnt. 
 This is a Romantic novel in the true sense, one interested in exploring how love can survive and thrive in the long term.
继自传体小说Essays in Love《爱情笔记》细腻生动地剖析了爱情之后，时隔二十余年，英国才子作家阿兰·德波顿在The Course of Love《爱的进化论》一书中，对爱情与婚姻的本质展开了更别具一格的深刻省思。德波顿以拉比和柯尔斯腾的爱情故事为主轴，辅以哲学与心理学思考，从情愫萌芽到爱情扬帆，从步入围城到“城”中困顿，再到婚外情，直至后来通过自我探寻，超脱接受婚姻的完整历程，将爱情与婚姻的每一阶段都做了冷静且睿智的剖析，将自己丰满、深沉的思辨，通过细腻的情境，融合具象而真实的人物角色铺陈开来， 直至让人们逐渐认识到：爱的本质，与其说是一份激情热忱，还不如说是一种需要学习的技能。只有参悟了此道，我们方可有阅尽千帆的淡定，在沧海桑田后，坦然接纳婚姻。

阿兰·德波顿，英国作家，1969年出生于瑞士苏黎世，8岁就被送到伦敦上寄宿学校，四年后全家人移居伦敦。他起初学的是法语，写作以英语为主，同时通晓法、德、西班牙语。18岁入剑桥大学，正式学历为剑桥大学历史系毕业。对学校的课程他一点也不感兴趣，好在学业比较宽松，有足够的时间随心所欲地博览群书，自学成才。整个大学期间他主要依靠大学图书馆和附近一家书店，在那里他父母给他开了一个账户，随他自由买书（后来他买书之多令他父母后悔当初的慷慨）。

1991年，阿兰·德波顿发表处女作小说《爱情笔记》，对爱情进行了哲学式的探讨。此后的《爱上浪漫》和《亲吻与诉说》更是继续着对爱情进行哲学探讨。
1996年，完成《拥抱似水年华》；2000年，《哲学的慰藉》出版，运用欧洲哲学的智慧医治现代人的焦虑不安;之后的《旅行的艺术》以及《幸福的建筑》又从哲学、美学和心理学的角度重新审视了人们对旅行、对建筑的看法。
2011年，德波顿被选为英国皇家文学院成员；2015年，出版《新闻的骚动》。

Alain de Botton is the author of Essays in Love, The Romantic Movement, Kiss and Tell, How Proust Can Change Your Life, The Consolations of Philosophy, The Art of Travel, Status Anxiety, The Architecture of Happiness, The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work, A Week at the Airport, Religion for Atheists, The News: A User’s Manual, and latest novel The Course of Love, among many others. Alain is a bestselling author in 30 countries. He lives in London, where he runs The School of Life and Living Architecture.
Infatuations

The hotel is on a rocky outcrop, half an hour east of Málaga. It has been designed for families and inadvertently reveals, especially at mealtimes, the challenges of being part of one. Rabih Khan is fifteen and on holiday with his father and stepmother. The atmosphere among them is somber and the conversation halting. It has been three years since Rabih’s mother died. A buffet is laid out every day on a terrace overlooking the pool. Occasionally his stepmother remarks on the paella or the wind, which has been blowing intensely from the south. She is originally from Gloucestershire and likes to garden.

A marriage doesn’t begin with a proposal, or even an initial meeting. It begins far earlier, when the idea of love is born, and more specifically the dream of a soul mate.

Rabih first sees the girl by the water slide. She is about a year younger than him, with chestnut hair cut short like a boy’s, olive skin, and slender limbs. She is wearing a striped sailor top, blue shorts, and a pair of lemon-yellow flip-flops. There’s a thin leather band around her right wrist. She glances over at him, pulls what may be a halfhearted smile, and rearranges herself on her deck chair. For the next few hours she looks pensively out to sea, listening to her Walkman and, at intervals, biting her nails. Her parents are on either side of her, her mother paging through a copy of Elle and her father reading a Len Deighton novel in French. As Rabih will later find out from the guest book, she is from Clermont-Ferrand and is called Alice Saure.

He has never felt anything remotely like this before. The sensation overwhelms him from the first. It isn’t dependent on words, which they will never exchange. It is as if he has in some way always known her, as if she holds out an answer to his very existence and, especially, to a zone of confused pain inside him. Over the coming days, he observes her from a distance around the hotel: at breakfast in a white dress with a floral hem, fetching a yogurt and a peach from the buffet; at the tennis court, apologizing to the coach for her backhand with touching politeness in heavily accented English; and on an (apparently) solitary walk around the perimeter of the golf course, stopping to look at cacti and hibiscus.

It may come very fast, this certainty that another human being is a soul mate. We needn’t have spoken with them; we may not even know their name. Objective knowledge doesn’t come into it. What matters instead is intuition, a spontaneous feeling that seems all the more accurate and worthy of respect because it bypasses the normal processes of reason.

The infatuation crystallizes around a range of elements: a flip-flop hanging nonchalantly off a foot; a paperback of Hermann Hesse’s Siddhartha lying on a towel next to the sun cream; well-defined eyebrows; a distracted manner when answering her parents and a way of resting her cheek in her palm while taking small mouthfuls of chocolate mousse at the evening buffet.
Instinctively he teases out an entire personality from the details. Looking up at the revolving wooden blades of the ceiling fan in his room, in his mind Rabih writes the story of his life with her. She will be melancholy and street-smart. She will confide in him and laugh at the hypocrisy of others. She will sometimes be anxious about parties and around other girls at school, symptoms of a sensitive and profound personality. She’ll have been lonely and will never until now have taken anyone else into her full confidence. They’ll sit on her bed playfully enlacing their fingers. She, too, won’t ever have imagined that such a bond could be possible between two people.