7 excerpts about love

"Do you think I am an automaton?—a machine without feelings? and can bear to have my morsel of bread snatched from my lips, and my drop of living water dashed from my cup? Do you think, because I am poor, obscure, plain, and little, I am soulless and heartless? You think wrong!—I have as much soul as you,—and full as much heart! And if God had gifted me with some beauty and much wealth, I should have made it as hard for you to leave me, as it is now for me to leave you.

I am not talking to you now through the medium of custom, conventionalities, nor even of mortal flesh:—it is my spirit that addresses your spirit; just as if both had passed through the grave, and we stood at God's feet, equal,—as we are!

"As we are!" repeated Mr. Rochester—"so," he added, enclosing me in his arms—"so, Janet, I love you. You—poor and obscure, and small and plain as you are—I entreat to accept me as a husband."

"What?" I exclaimed. "Me? I the wife of Mr. Rochester?"

"Yes, you—you strange, almost unearthly thing! I love as my own flesh. You—poor and obscure, and small and plain as you are—I ask you to marry me."

I was silent: I thought he mocked me.

"My bride is here," he said again, drawing me to him, "because my equal is here, and my likeness. Jane, will you marry me?"

Still I did not answer; and still he looked at me with that earnestness which seemed to search my soul.

"Do you doubt me, Jane?"

"Entirely."

"You have no faith in me?"

"Not yet."

"Am I a liar in your eyes?"

"I think you are playing with me."

"I ask you once more: will you marry me?"

My heart stood still. Every feeling I had was divided between hope and fear. Never had happiness appeared so near, and never had I distrusted it so profoundly.

Excerpts
[…]
The Little Prince went to look at the roses again.
“You’re not at all like my rose. You’re nothing at all yet,” he told them.
“No one has tamed you and you haven’t tamed anyone. You’re the way
my fox was. He was just a fox like a hundred thousand others. But
I’ve made him my friend, and now he’s the only fox in all the world.”
And the roses were humbled.
You’re lovely, but you’re empty,” he went on. One couldn’t die for you.
Of course, an ordinary passerby would think my rose looked just like
you. But my rose, all on her own, is more important than all of you
together, since she’s the one I’ve watered. Since she’s the one I put
under glass. Since she’s the one I sheltered behind a screen. Since
she’s the one for whom I killed the caterpillars (except the two or
three for butterflies). Since she’s the one I listened to when she
complained, or when she boasted, or even sometimes when she said
nothing at all. Since she’s my rose.”
And he went back to the fox.
“Good-bye,” he said.
“Goodbye,” said the fox. Here is my secret. It’s quite simple: One
sees clearly only with the heart. Anything essential is invisible to the
eyes.”
“Anything essential is invisible to the eyes,” the little prince repeated,
in order to remember.
“It’s the time you spend on your rose that makes your rose so
important.”
“It’s the time I spent on my rose…,” the little prince repeated, in order
to remember.
“People have forgotten this truth,” the fox said. “But you mustn’t
forget it. You become responsible forever for what you’ve tamed.
You’re responsible for your rose…”
“I’m responsible for my rose…,” the little prince repeated, in order to
remember.
[…]
Now my sorrow is comforted a little. That is to say--not entirely. But I
know that he did go back to
his planet, because I did not find his body at daybreak. It was not such
a heavy body . . . and at
night I love to listen to the stars. It is like five hundred million little
bells . . .
But there is one extraordinary thing . . . when I drew the muzzle for
the little prince, I forgot to add
the leather strap to it. He will never have been able to fasten it on his
sheep. So now I keep
wondering: what is happening on his planet? Perhaps the sheep has
eaten the flower . . .
At one time I say to myself: "Surely not! The little prince shuts his
flower under her glass globe
every night, and he watches over his sheep very carefully . . ." Then I
am happy. And there is
sweetness in the laughter of all the stars.
But at another time I say to myself: "At some moment or other one is
absent-minded, and that is
enough! On some one evening he forgot the glass globe, or the sheep
got out, without making
any noise, in the night . . ." And then the little bells are changed to
tears . . .
Here, then, is a great mystery. For you who also love the little prince,
and for me, nothing in the
universe can be the same if somewhere, we do not know where, a sheep
that we never saw
has--yes or no?--eaten a rose . . .
Look up at the sky. Ask yourselves: is it yes or no? Has the sheep eaten
the flower? And you will
see how everything changes . . .
And no grown-up will ever understand that this is a matter of so much
importance!

It was on that day when the sun's radiant beams
Were dimmed with sorrow for their Maker,
That I was captured, offering no defense,
For your beloved eyes had already conquered me, my Lady.

It never seemed the time to guard myself
Against Love's sudden blows.
I walked in confidence, unsuspecting, and so my suffering
Began amid the world's public mourning.

Love found me unarmed
And opened the way to my heart through my eyes,
Which have since become the passage and the gateway of my tears.

It seems to me that this brings him little honor:
To wound me with his arrow in such a state,
While never revealing his bow to you, who were already armed.

Love, unconquerable
Waster of rich men, keeper
Of warm lights and all-night vigil
In the soft face of a girl:
Sea-wanderer, forest-visitor!
Even the pure Immortals
cannot escape you,
And mortal man,
in his one day’s dusk,
Trembles before your glory.
Surely you swerve upon ruin
The just man’s consenting heart,
As here you have made bright anger
Strike between father and son––
And none has conquered but Love!
A girl’s glance working
the will of heaven:
Pleasure to her alone who mock us,
Merciless Aphrodite.

(The first pages)

AMOR

In Yucatan, you never see the water. It flows underground, beneath a fragile sheath of earth and limestone. Occasionally, that delicate Yucatec skin blossoms in eyes of water, in liquid ponds — the cenotes — that attest to the existence of a mysterious subterranean current. For me, love is like those hidden rivers and unexpected streams of Yucatan. On occasion our lives come to resemble those infinite chasms that would be fathomless if we did not find, at the very bottom of the void a flowing river, at times placid and navigable, wide or narrow, at times steep, but always a liquid embrace that helps keep us from disappearing for ever into the deep gulf of nothingness.

While love may be that river which flows and sustains life, love and its most treasured qualities — goodness, beauty, affection, solidarity, memory, companionship, desire, passion, intimacy, generosity, and the very will to love and be loved — are still not necessarily free of the one thing that seems to negate love: evil.

In political life, it is possible to convince oneself that one is acting out of love for a community while driving that community into destruction and inspiring hatred from both within and without. I do not doubt, for example, that Hitler loved Germany. But in Mein Kampf, he made it clear that the notion of loving his country was inseparable from the hatred of all those things that he perceived to be at odds with Germany. The kind of love that is cultivated out of hatred for others was made explicit in a regime of evil that has no parallel in all of history.

From the beginning, Hitler declared that he would practice an evil brand of politics in order to achieve good. He made no attempt to hide this, unlike Stalin, who wrapped himself in a flag of humanistic Western ideology — Marxism — to perpetrate an evil comparable to that of Hitler, but that did not dare utter its name. Hitler’s love of evil led him to a Wagnerian apocalypse against the backdrop of a Berlin in flames. Stalin’s love of evil was translated into the slow collapse of a Kremlin built of sand, washed away by the waves, slow but constant, of the same history that the Dictatorship of the Proletariat hoped to embody. The Nazi regime collapsed like a horrid, wounded dragon. Soviet Communism dragged itself to the grave like a sickly worm. Fafner and Oblomov.

The Marquis de Sade also proposes a love of evil that seeks carnal pleasure as a way of grounding the body’s pain and its subsequent disappearance from earth. Sadistic love, the Marquis tells us, may be a bad thing for the victim, but represents a supreme good for the executioner. De Sade, none the less, did not intend actually to put his monstrous evil-as-good vision into practice. He was not a politician, he was a writer who was constantly being locked up in prison and was thus incapable of acting except in the kingdom of fantasy. There, he was the monarch of creation. And he warns us: ‘I am a libertine, but I am neither a delinquent nor an assassin.’

There is another covert form of evil which presents itself as love. This consists of imposing our will upon another person ‘for his own good’ — that is, for the love of someone whose liberty we rob in the name of love, effectively leading him away from the path of his own destiny. This is one of the eternal themes of literature and for me, the person who captures it with the utmost clarity is one of the great au- thors who blazed through my youth, François Mauriac.

Thérèse Desqueyroux, Le Désert de l’amour, Le Næud de vipères, Le Baiser au lépreux and Le Mal itself are all novels about a perverted evil that, intending to do good, either destroys or debases the ability to love through the manipulation of religion, money and, above all, social convention and hypocrisy. Thérèse Desqueyroux, at the height of this drama about good intentions paving the way to hell, kills in the name of an old offense and at the price of her own health, in order to save family face. Society, family and honor thus determine, in the name of love owed to those institutions, the heroine’s erotic slavery and crime of passion.

The praise of love as the supreme reality or aspiration of human beings cannot and should not disregard the fraternity of evil even though, in essence, love overcomes evil in the majority of cases. It can crush it, but it will never vanquish it fully. Love needs a cloud of doubt to hover above, against the evil that preys upon it. Inevitably, though, the cloud and the rage of the heavens will dissolve into pleasure, tenderness, and sometimes even blind passion or the fleeting happiness of love as men and women experience it. The most ardent romantic passion can languish and fall into habit or irritation with the passage of time. A couple begin to know each other because, first and foremost, they know so little of each other. Everything is surprise. When there are no surprises left, love can die. Sometimes love yearns to recover the wonder of its earliest moments but inevitably comes to realize that, second time around, the wonder is nothing more than nostalgia.

Some people perceive the notion of habit as a terrible burden — a conclusive, repetitive, tedious desert whose only oasis is death, television or separate bedrooms. But then again, aren’t there also many couples who have discovered, through habit, the truest and most lasting form of love, the love that is best able to welcome and protect the companionship and support that also signify love? And doesn’t another kind of desert exist as well, one that is fiery by day but frozen by night? I mean the desert of endless passion, so excruciating that the great protagonists of romantic love have preferred premature, passionate death at the very height of the love experience to the slow loss of passion through the monotony of day-to-day life. Can Romeo and Juliet grow old together? Maybe. But young Werther cannot end his days watching Big Brother on television as his only form of vicarious participation in passions less lethargic than his own.

Love wishes to be, for as long as possible, the pinnacle of pleasure: desire blossoming from inside and extending out to the hands, the fingers, the thighs, the waist, the open flesh; caresses and an anxious pulse; the universe of love-blessed skin, the lovers reduced to the discovery of the world; voices that speak in silence; the interior baptism of all things. It is when we think of nothing at all in the hope that this moment will never end. Or when we think of everything possible, precisely so as not to think of this, thus giving the pleasures of the flesh their freedom and their longest brevity; when we concede that St Augustine was right, love is more bestiarum, (in the manner of animals), but with one difference: human beings are the only animals that make love face to face (variations notwithstanding, of course). For the animal, there are no exceptions. For us, the animal exception is the human rule.

When is the felicity of love greatest? In the act of love or when the imagination leaps forward dreaming of what the subsequent lovers’ encouter will be like? The exhausted joy of memory and then, once again, abundant desire, enhanced by love, a new act of love: is this felicity? The pleasure of love leaves us stunned. How is it possible that the entire being, without any kind of waste or abandon, can lose itself in the flesh and the gaze of the beloved, and at the same time lose all notion of the exterior world? How is this possible? How can one pay for this love, this pleasure, this illusion?

“Out of my thoughts! You are part of my existence, part of myself. You have been in every line I have ever read, since I first came here, the rough common boy whose poor heart you wounded even then. You have been in every prospect I have ever seen since – on the river, on the sails of the ships, on the marshes, in the clouds, in the light, in the darkness, in the wind, in the woods, in the sea, in the streets. You have been the embodiment of every graceful fancy that my mind has ever become acquainted with. The stones of which the strongest London buildings are made, are not more real, or more impossible to displace with your hands, than your presence and influence have been to me, there and everywhere, and will be. Estella, to the last hour of my life, you cannot choose but remain part of my character, part of the little good in me, part of the evil. But, in this separation I associate you only with the good, and I will faithfully hold you to that always, for you must have done me far more good than harm, let me feel now what sharp distress I may. O God bless you, God forgive you!”

Blessed be the day

Blessed be the day, the month, the year,
The season, the hour, and the very moment
When I first beheld
The two beautiful eyes that forever enchanted me.

Blessed be the first sweet suffering
That I felt when Love took hold of me;
Blessed be the bow and the arrows
With which I was pierced,
And the wounds that reached the depths of my heart.

Blessed be every verse I have ever spoken
In praise of my lady's name,
And every sigh, every tear, and every longing.

Blessed be every page
On which I found my glory, and every thought
Devoted to her alone, with no other sharing its place.