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DankBlunderwood t1_j6kik7w wrote

Reply to comment by chuckletits in The letters of T. S. Eliot to Emily Hale that were kept sealed from 1956 to 2020 have been released for free online by RunDNA

He is very clear in the letter that he did love her before he left for England. What he's saying is that he was naive about matters of love and continued to idealize her even as he outgrew those feelings. Eventually his "love" was nothing more than the memory of having loved her once. As an older and wiser man he realized marrying her would have meant living the prosaic life of a professor, never excelling at anything, which was most important to him.

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ymcameron t1_j6lwbgz wrote

His feelings were made of jade. What I mean by that: I knew a girl who I had a huge crush on. She was just so cool and gorgeous and good at everything. I’d get so nervous anytime she was in the room. When I did talk to her, I was honestly a little intimidated by her intensity and the sort of things she spent her time doing. The more I got to know her the more I realized we really didn’t have anything in common, but I still felt these intense feelings towards her, not all of them pleasant. I somehow felt upset at her for not being like I wanted her to be. I realized I’d built up this idea of her in my mind and was more attracted to that than I was to her. She was named after a jewel, and so after I had a moment of clarity about how I was feeling, I renamed the idea of her after a different jewel, Jade. Now whenever I start to have these parasocial feelings or start to put someone up on a pedestal I stop and remind myself that those things aren’t real, they’re just made of jade.

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grubas t1_j6l1ezd wrote

Yup. It becomes a memory of love, he was fond of her still, but he couldn't grow with her.

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