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.