The Selfish Heart

A few days ago I listened again, after years, to “La ballata dell’amore cieco (o della vanità)” by Fabrizio De André. If you grew up in Italy you know it by heart whether you wanted to or not; for everyone else, the story goes like this.

It happens at least one in the life of a man: he falls madly in love with a woman who does not care for him at all. She doesn’t want his love: she wants to see what it can be made to do. She challenge him: Bring me your mother’s heart, to feed my dogs, he does. Not enough. Then she asks for the blood in his veins, and he gives her that too. And while his life runs out, De André closes the scene on both of them and hands each one an ending. The man dies happy, still in love. The woman watches him die happy and is seized by dismay: nothing is left to her, not his love, not what he owned, only the dried blood of his veins.

The ledger

The standard reading of the song is all about her, and it’s right as far as it goes: the subtitle says vanity, and the vanity is entirely hers. She’s the monster of the piece. But this time, call it deformazione professionale, I did to the song what I do to any system that behaves strangely: I ignored the narrative and ran the ledger.

De André exaggerated the scale on purpose. At normal scale this mechanism is invisible, so he built a grotesque, a caricature where the numbers are finally big enough to read. At the end of the song, the woman, the one who was loved more than anyone has ever been loved, holds exactly nothing. The author itemizes it himself: not his love, not his good, only his withered blood. The man spent everything, and he still received what he actually desired. Look at his verbs: he wanted to love her, and he did, completely, at every step. Every act of devotion paid him the moment he performed it, in the only currency a feeling accepts, the feeling itself. He dies content not because the deal went wrong but because, for him, the deal had already closed. She was never the recipient of that love. She was the occasion for it.

Seventeen years late

While the last verse closed, I realized I had met this exact idea before, because I’m the one who wrote it down. Seventeen years ago, in a book of poems I wrote back then (yes, there’s still plenty of stuff you don’t know about me), there’s a six-line sonnet titled “Il Cuore egoista” (the selfish heart). Every line is devotion and every line begins with vorrei, I want: I want to hold you, heal you, see you smile, never let you go. The last line catches the heart in the act: vorrei, vorrei… ancora non penso abbastanza a te, which translates to: I want, I want… and still I don’t think about you enough. I understood it at the time: even at peak devotion, the grammatical subject of every sentence I could produce was me. I just never wrote the essay. The ballad came to collect.

The incentive

So here’s the thesis, without anesthesia: love is the most selfish feeling we have, because everything we do for the person we love, we do because doing it makes us feel good. Better than not doing it. That’s the entire engine.

It shouldn’t even be controversial, because the mechanism isn’t unique to love: nothing we do is free of an internal incentive, and the incentive just isn’t always visible from outside, because the currency is internal. Love isn’t the exception to the rule, it’s the rule at maximum volume, and the only case of it that doesn’t feel like self-interest from the inside. The 3am drive because she called, the plans you cancel, the thing you give up before being asked: each one is a choice between two versions of you, the one who did it and the one who didn’t, and you pick the first because the first feels better. To you. The value never leaves your body. You’re not transferring anything to her; you’re manufacturing a feeling in yourself, with her as the occasion. The gift is the receipt.

I know the objection: “but I genuinely want her happiness, not mine”. Sure. And why do you want it? Sit with that question one second longer, past the indignation: because her happiness makes you feel… exactly. The chain always closes on the same node. Wanting someone’s good is a beautiful thing to want; it is also, unavoidably, a want, and wants belong to the one having them.

Hunger doesn’t pretend to care about the sandwich’s wellbeing. Love is the only feeling that swears it’s about someone else, which is why catching it red-handed feels like a scandal instead of a tautology.

When the payment stops

If you want proof, don’t study love while it works; study it while it dies. A selfless devotion would be unconditional on how it feels: it would keep going after the pleasure is gone. It never does. When doing things for the other person stops feeling better than not doing them, the things stop, every time, and we’ve even built a soft vocabulary to cover the withdrawal: the spark faded, we grew apart, I fell out of love. Translate it: the internal incentive dried up, and the behavior followed it out the door.

Notice that nobody calls that selfish. Ending the devotion when it stops paying is considered natural, even healthy, even brave. But if withdrawing love when it no longer feels good is legitimate self-interest, then supplying love while it felt good was the same self-interest, in nicer clothes.

Better to love than to be loved

Which brings us to the paradox De André hid in plain sight in the finale, the one most listeners walk past on the way out. The loved one ends with nothing. Not only because she was cruel: because being loved pays nothing by itself. The entire feeling happens inside the other person; you can be its object for years and never hold a gram of it. When the lover goes, everything goes with him, because there was never anything outside of him.

So if love is selfish, and it is, the conclusion is not the one the moralists want. The conclusion is that loving is the better position. The lover collects on every act, instantly, in full, regardless of what comes back; the loved one is, at best, the occasion of someone else’s feeling. If love were selfless, loving would be the cost and being loved would be the prize. It’s exactly the reverse: the prize is the feeling, and the feeling belongs to whoever feels it.

The blind man of the ballad is not a model; he’s a unit of measure. Even at the absurd extreme, where love receives nothing back and costs everything, the feeling still paid the one who felt it. At normal scale, where loving costs you a Saturday and some pride, the math only gets better.

Next time someone tells you, with some pride, how much they are loved, quietly check what they’re actually holding. And next time you catch yourself doing something for the person you love, skip the part where you call it a sacrifice. Enjoy it for what it is. Vorrei, vorrei: at least now you know who for.