rilke wrote: we don't love like flowers, with only one springtime behind us; when we love a sap older than memory rises in our arms.

the vasana of sanskrit poetry, perhaps.

i remember a conversation with yen about how we are areligious and it went something like well i think yen said that we're not capable of religion because we aren't capable of (or fear) faith without reason. and i said yes, but we fall in love and that's a start, the way she and i went about it, and then she amended that to love being a willing suspension of reason and hence akin to religion.

still, we're both fond of quoting from the english patient:

katherine:

half my days i cannot bear not to touch you.
the rest of the time i feel it doesn’t matter if i never see you again
it isn’t the morality. it’s how much you can bear.


strength is neither the question nor the point. i've juggled for a long time, and then i refused the leopard. you kept your sanity, and i've been haunted since.

i think yen says somewhere that there is no one you love who will not betray you at some point – and you them – precisely because you love each other – and what we learn is not that we won't be betrayed but not to be afraid of betrayal. (add: found it.) and around the same time i was writing my my manifesto on same. and i need to hold that up myself now.

last semester elaine scarry when talking about the beauty of the lover said or at least the general thrust that i remember is that we are most capable of constructing before and after narratives about love -when a relationship ends it is perceived as a kind of awakening and intellectual error. actually i'm not sure she said that at all maybe i am making all this up although something of this sort seems to have been said when we were talking about intellectual errors - chiefly that of perceiving something as beautiful that you did not before and the reverse, of something you've thought beautiful suddenly seen to be not so.

boldwood: you were nothing to me once, and i was contented; you are now nothing to me again, and how different the second nothing is from the first!

i think that these days we sound like we're in the "after" phase. we sound burdened with hindsight, like people grown numb from the wind coming up through the abyss. nonetheless i still hold to some things..

edna st vincent millay: when i outlive this pain, i shall speak only good of you.

i shall.