Reflections on the Problem of Love

This is a translation from the French version of Lou Andreas-Salomé’s “Gedanken über das Liebesproblem”. The bulk of the work was done by an online translator tool which wishes to remain anonymous. As this is a second order translation from French and not the original German, it may not be 100% accurate. Because the text was written in German in 1900, the syntax is quite complicated with sentences spanning many lines. I kept that as it is. Occasionally and inconsistently I inserted extra em dashes (—) and semi-colons (;) to better punctuate. Editing is not my strongest element and I find it quite boring. At any rate, here is the text.

In virtue of the affective ties that link man to the world that surrounds him, with its living beings and objects, we could say, at first glance, that everything can fall into two major groups: that which is homogeneous, appealing and familiar to us, on one hand; and on the other, that which is foreign, unfamiliar and hostile to us. Or rather, our natural egoism finds itself invited to expand without having wished for it; sharing for a short while the joys and sorrows of another, whom it is invited to inhabit as if it were its own being; or, contrary to that, something causes it to harden by contracting, to retreat, to oppose the outside world with rejection, aggression and hostility. The type of this egoism, in the literal sense of the term, refers to a strong individuality which loves only itself, is obedient only to itself, and subordinates everything else to its own ends; whereas the type of expanded egoism, what we call forgetting of oneself, is the temperament of the good Samaritan, with his ideal of universal brotherhood, who discerns in every creature, however far removed from him, the great unity of all things, and feels its presence. These two fundamental instincts sharpen against each other tirelessly and inexorably throughout the course of human evolution, and the way in which the conflict between them is resolved gives each historical period its distinctive mark. As for a definitive reconciliation, it is out of question; and if one of the two conflicting principles is to be elevated, with particular force, to the status of the sole rule of conduct, such forcefulness makes sense and is justified only if the other principle, carried to its extreme, calls for a more drastic correction than usual. Every human being endowed with a healthy vitality engages in both to a greater or lesser extent, since worshipping only one of them would inevitably put one in grave danger. The most boundless form of human love requires, as its foundation, a robust sense of self-love, so that it may draw what it gives from a treasure trove of individual riches which it unquestionably possesses; and even the most tyrannical, the most triumphant of egoists is forced, in his inner solitude, to renounce a thousand promises of happiness and a thousand riches that no thief could ever grasp, but which, on the contrary, come of their own accord to the one who opens himself to them.

In daily life, it will always be difficult to delineate with any precision the boundaries which, in each individual case, separate weakness from kindness and hardiness from strength of spirit; the manner in which people must reconcile kindness and strength within themselves will always give rise to more ideas and opinions than there are grains of sand on the seashore. However, in itself, one fact is of the utmost psychological interest: that man cannot renounce either of them without mutilating himself, and that these two instincts, though apparently contradictory, must ultimately complement one another in some deep corner of the human soul. We can say that, beneath both of them, there lies a secret and fundamental longing, which they attempt to express in two different ways through their respective tendencies, without ever truly satisfying it: the desire, for the individual, to grasp the totality of the life that surrounds them, to enter into it, to be filled with it. The egoist who hoards and bends to his will everything he can, no less than the altruist who gives himself to everything he can by taking part in it—both are merely stuttering, each in his own language, the same prayer, at heart, addressed to the same God, and in this prayer self-love blends indistinguishably with self-abnegation: for ‘I want to have everything’ and ‘I want to be everything’ are, when raised to their highest possible meaning, one and the same all-consuming desire. Neither achieves their goal, for they contain a contradiction within themselves: the egoist would have to become an altruist while remaining himself, and the altruist would have to become an egoist while remaining himself to be able to truly experience the transgression of the boundaries that define his own being. We always bump against our own walls, and it is on them that we paint our picture of the world, whether we push them as far apart as possible or cram everything that is ours into the confined space between them.

Now, there is yet a third type of affective relation alongside the relation of affinity and aversion: the pursuit of gain—a relation which seems to have its origin in that very place, the depths of the psyche, where these other two are only just beginning to separate, precisely where man, driven by the most ancient and obscure of desires, is confronted with the effect that the world has upon him. In this third kind of affective impressions, the elements of the other two are still undifferentiated, mingled in a strange and contradictory manner; but it is precisely in these contradictions that the new, extraordinarily potent and fruitful element they contain is to be found: for it is this element that gives rise to the feeling, as if one were truly returning to one’s inner self, while at the same time overcoming oneself to penetrate the totality of life.

It is this element that underpins all erotic relationships. It has often been observed, not without reason, that the love between the sexes is an eternal struggle, a primordial and mutual antagonism; and, even if one goes too far in this direction when considering this or that individual case, it remains no less true that in love two alien worlds meet, two opposites, two worlds that cannot and will never be bridged; nor can we connect with what is kindred, similar, familiar, as though, as we draw near the other, moving towards ourselves and walking in our own domain. It is no coincidence that love and hate sometimes resemble one another and tend, thus, to merge into one another in the hurricane of passion. Nor is it by chance that, in Nature, sexual reproduction—this basis of the erotic reaction which is born out of it little by little—comes from the fusion of protoplasmic cells that are as different as possible, after which, on such a foundation, the differences between the sexes come to the fore, forever cementing the differentiation once it has taken place. It is no coincidence that this law applies throughout the entire animal kingdom—looming over a high number of inbred unions with the threat of sterility, degeneration and the extinction of the species—instinctively encouraging creatures to avoid mating with offspring from the same litter and to seek partners from outside their own litter within the same species. What takes hold of us in love is a rush unlike any other, set in motion by the very fact that a new, unfamiliar being—perhaps sensed, perhaps desired in advance, but never truly grasped—gives us the initial impulse, one that does not come from the familiar surroundings we know well, into which we have long since blended, and which are, quite simply, a reflection of ourselves. And so we always fear that, in love, the exhilaration will give way to disillusionment as soon as two human beings come to know one another too well and whatever remained of the allure of novelty evaporates; and that is why the first moments of the ecstasy of love, in the uncertain and flickering light of those first moments, possess not only an indescribable charm but also a violent intensity—so singularly fertile in its outburst, that it overwhelms the whole being and shakes the soul to its core, in a way that it will hardly be stirred again thereafter. It is certain that, from the moment the object of love becomes infinitely known, it has on us only the effect of a close and familiar being, but no longer, in any way, that of a symbol of uncharted possibilities and vital energies; the exhilaration of love, in the literal sense of the term, has come to an end. Of course, following this mutual unveiling which has so dangerously laid bare the lovers to one another, there may still follow a long period of deep affection; yet it bears no resemblance to the feeling that preceded it, either in its nature or in its tone, and one frequently observes the characteristic fact that, despite all the sincere friendship it contains, it is rife with moments of petty irritation. Worse still: the repetition of what once charmed us with a thousand tiny details now has a simply irritating effect, rather than leaving us at least indifferent, as would be the case between two people who, at first glance, had been nothing more than friends. Afterwards, the unpleasant realisation dawns that it was not at all our equal, our mirror image, that aroused us erotically, but that our nerves were trembling with desire for a foreign world, one in which we can never feel at home, as we do in our own comfortable and mundane everyday lives.

Thus, in his love, the lover behaves far more like an egoist than like an altruist; he is demanding, greedy, driven by violent selfish desires, and utterly devoid of that generous benevolence—ever ready to manifest itself, by virtue of which, whether we share in another’s joys or sufferings on a human level, we care for others without the slightest regard for ourselves. Self-love, when it comes to love, does not expand into compassion and gentleness; quite the contrary, it contracts, hardens and sharpens itself into a dangerous weapon of conquest. But this weapon does not attempt to impose what we all do when we exploit people or things for the sole benefit of our own selfishness; it does not serve to mutilate, in the object that attracts us, that which gives purpose to its existence, to strip it of its splendour and richness; but merely to conquer it, so that we may then showcase it, esteem it, idolise it in every possible way, hoist it onto the throne and offer ourselves as a footstool to it. Thus love, in its form as Eros, contains within itself all excesses, both of egoism and of benevolence, each transformed into passions and fused into a unique feeling, whatever their differences may be. It is as though a subtle fissure has appeared in our secret lives, through which we manage to step outside ourselves, to launch ourselves, drunk and with unsteady steps, towards all the overflowing life around us—at the very moment when we are prey the most passionate forms of egoism. We are quite incapable of establishing a friendly relationship with the beloved object under the banner of that kindness which, in others, embraces human nature just like its own, celebrates it and, as a result, always remains within its own limits. Quite the contrary: it is precisely by asserting our uniqueness and our otherness that we oppose most vehemently the very things we love, and become most acutely aware of our duality and our differences; but this concentration and deepening of our most secret ‘I’ leads to such a density of being within us that we are, so to speak, compelled to spill over beyond ourselves, to step outside ourselves by coming into contact with the being we love. It is through them, spurred on and brought into focus by their touch, that all our strength pours forth, like a liberating flood, in a fecund departure from ourselves. The lover feels invincible and capable of defying the whole world, as if he had indeed conquered the world, in this profound embrace between his own being and something that has drawn him in, as if it contained within it all the magnificent possibilities and wonders of the universe. Yet this feeling is merely the psychological flip-side of the physical event, the ultimate consequences of which do indeed lead man to step outside himself, to transcend himself, while asserting himself and forging his path with greater energy than ever before: in the passion of love, if he unites with a being entirely foreign to him, it is not to renounce himself but to surpass himself once more, and to pass on his ardour to a new being, his child.

The erotic relationship is therefore a mode of being situated halfway between the individual as such, the egoist, and the creature endowed with a social sense, the creature of the herd and the fraternal animal; in this early, deep and obscure form of eroticism, these two opposing forces, which drive us as they tear us apart, still flow, undifferentiated, in a river of origins. However, it is not legitimate to conclude, as is sometimes done, that the ecstasy of love, with its physiological causes, is in fact an inferior form of relationship when compared to the gradual spiritual communion of human beings driven together by shared affinities, and ultimately of all people with all people, such that it represents merely a first, but necessary, step towards the highest stages of humanity’s development. In reality, eroticism is also a world of its own, just as much as that of social solidarity or, conversely, that of the selfish individual; it runs through all possible stages, from the most primitive to the most complex, within its own domain; and when the vicissitudes of real life cause it to stray into the spheres of the other two forces, one must not believe that it is thereby transformed or purified: it simply renounces its most intimate essence. It is true that originally, along with the simple existence of creatures, the various manifestations of their affectivity are born, because both sexes tend toward their erotic relationship; but what is subsequently built upon the foundation of a blood kinship thus determined no longer has anything to do with this relationship; the instinct that drives the sexes to seek each other out and embrace remains, in all its phases, entirely distinct from other reciprocal relationships between creatures.

One can, nonetheless, understand why a quality as inherently contradictory in its essence as that of romantic emotions is so often the subject of equally uncertain judgements; why we sometimes look down on it, calling it selfish, and at other times overestimate it, on account of its altruism, depending on whether the expression of its subservience to the body or its exuberance of spirit prevails. For this is the second contradiction of which it seems to be entirely composed: that the body’s modes of expression, like its spiritual and intellectual manifestations, are intermingled within it in strange contrasts, and yet harmonise with one another. We are accustomed to distinguishing our most violent instincts and physiological constraints from our spiritual demands, for—even though we know how closely they are linked and how the most spiritual stirrings of our souls are, in fact, secondary manifestations of what is happening—at the same time, within our bodies, these physiological processes are not so intrusive that they can claim to constantly capture our attention and reach the level of our consciousness. It is from this distraction, this indifference, that, swept away by erotic emotion, we are utterly uprooted: it fills our entire soul, more than any other, with illusions and idealisations of the spirit, whilst forcing us to collide brutally, without any possibility of evasion, with the source of such upheaval: the body. It can no longer be ignored or avoided: with every unbiased glance we cast upon the essence of eroticism, we are, in a sense, witnessing a spectacle of the earliest times, of origins—the birth through which the vast universal matrix of physiology gives birth to the psychic life, in all its splendour. However, as we have become accustomed to associating the ‘physical’ and the ‘spiritual’ with ideas as different as, for example, those of ‘egoism’ and ‘altruism’, we unwittingly attempt to interpret the phenomenon of love in as simplistic a way as possible, so that we may grasp it in the form of a coherent concept. This leads to a rather strange dualism in our conception of eroticism; it leads to two descriptions of it from perspectives so utterly opposed that, when taken to their logical conclusion, they result in assertions that seem entirely irreconcilable, yet we are nevertheless compelled to recognise as equally legitimate. For the overflow of a passion so intense that it sweeps Romeo towards Juliet is entirely legitimate, and just as legitimate, in its own way, is the criticism levelled at it, for example, by a contemporary poet—a nervous temperament who can find nothing else in the whole story but ‘the tiresome complications of adolescent love’; the image of passion is true for all those whom it seizes, who speak incoherently of the wonders of love, and just as true, in the starkness of its physiological observation, is the crude remark of the cynical Frenchman who claims that ‘love is nothing but the rubbing of two pieces of skin’.

The crude nature of these contrasts is further accentuated by a particular circumstance. This is because, in our case, our sexual life is just as precisely localised within the body and isolated from other functions as, for example, digestion is in the stomach, or respiration in the lungs; but, unlike these, it acts, from its specific physical domain, as an inner turmoil of the entire human being, which it affects with extreme violence. Its action is just as centralised and widely branching as the life of the brain—that much younger, later and more fragile branch of evolution—when cerebrality acts through the deepest constraints of the mind; distinct from the brain this time, sexual life pushes the physical organism to the forefront far more brutally and far more specifically. Eroticism thus seems to play a part, with sovereign assurance, both in the benefits of differentiation taken to the extreme—assigning to each function an increasingly isolated region—and in the benefits of an unleashing of energies even more marked by undifferentiation and homogeneity, such as is usually seen only in less perfectly organised animals. If, in this dual action, it imposes its law so clearly, it is because it represents within us the first force to have manifested itself in the living being, with the first spark of nervous energy and psychic activity—yet it does not merely accompany creatures in their gradual evolution: it is, in fact, constantly bringing new ones into the world, as if born out of the original matrix of being, and will continue to do so until the end of time.

The amorous behaviour of animal species often demonstrates to us, in a striking and humorous way, how their violent mating instincts, on the one hand, find simple and crude satisfaction, just like any spontaneous physical need, but, on the other hand, inflame their affective lives to the point of ecstatic passion, to the point of excessive fascination. As for erotic relationships between human beings, they do not always inspire such a humorous take: either we view them as so laughable that they were once classified as subjects to be avoided, as if discussing them would somehow sully us; or we treat them almost as a tragedy, viewing the excesses of eroticism as nothing but deceptive illusions and the consequences of fatal short-sightedness. What is more, even lovers themselves may experience a confused sense of this seemingly dual nature of the phenomenon of love, and this is perhaps one of the most powerful reasons for the deeply instinctive shame felt by very young and very innocent people when it comes to physical union. For this initial reserve does not always stem solely from their lack of experience or from the principles instilled in them by their educators, but springs spontaneously from within them: they sought, and indeed felt, in love the totality of their self—that of their entire being seized by this feeling—and the transition from this all-encompassing upheaval to the specialised activity of a partial bodily function, viewed from the perspective of an action to be performed, therefore unsettles them; one might say, to put it paradoxically, that all of a sudden a third party is with them, an intruder, whose involvement had not hitherto manifested itself with such autonomy: the body as such, the body as an incomplete personality, yet acting independently. And this may give the impression that, before this act, they were, at heart, closer to one another—a more complete, more direct closeness, in the absolute ecstasy of their spiritual communion.

Yet this obvious duality in the act of love stems precisely from the fact that ‘the body’ and ‘the soul’, both of them, express themselves with such shamelessness and impose themselves upon us in all our impulses, as closely intertwined as they actually are. What takes place at such a moment—the union of two human beings, by virtue of the reciprocity of their eroticism—is not the only union, nor perhaps even the authentic union that is thus brought about. For, above all, this results in a sort of ecstatic and exuberant interplay within the individual between the highest creative energies of their body and the highest exaltation of their soul. While our consciousness is usually only vaguely concerned with our physical life—as with a world we know little about and control even less, a world which, it seems, is one and the same as our consciousness, yet with which it most often gets on very badly—suddenly there arises between them such a unity of innervation that all their desires, all their aspirations, are kindled at once. Just as happens in many households where spouses, while quarrelling frequently, retain an indestructible awareness of their true unity, so body and mind experience hours and days of a new honeymoon, which imposes itself upon them with sudden, primal force: then come great days of celebration and joy, marked by the thunderous sound of drums and trumpets, and this jubilation of the whole being, which makes the nerves vibrate to its rhythm right down to their finest fibres, knows no end. Such a celebration, such a festival,
is the true epiphany of the ecstasy of love, in which the lover feels within himself the passionate embrace and union of body and soul, and finds the very same healing, the very same resurrection of his being as after a bath in divinely restorative waters.

It is therefore not wrong to say that all love brings happiness, including unhappiness in love. One must appreciate the correctness of this principle without the slightest concession to sentimentality, without taking the beloved into account in the slightest, simply and solely as the joy of loving, in itself, which, in its solemn exaltation, kindles within us, right down to the most secret recesses of our being, a hundred thousand candles, one might say, whose light completely drowns out all real and external things from us. That is also how beings endowed with a certain strength and depth of soul come to know the very essence of love even before they have loved, and (like that poor Emily Brontë, of whom Maeterlinck speaks in his latest book with a touch too much astonishment) that they would be capable of describing in advance, with convincing passion and fervour, all the bliss of love. What is added to this, in real life, through the experience of love, is nothing more than a particular kind of happiness: the happiness of redoubling, a bit like when we make an echo: the surprise and joy of hearing the objects in the outside world returning the cry of our happiness to us. For, although we imagine ourselves to be wholly filled with the other, we are, in fact, filled only with our own state of mind, incapable as we are, now more than ever—such is our ecstasy—of taking a genuine interest in the qualities of anyone else. At first glance, romantic passion is incapable of perceiving objectively what is inside another, of penetrating them—rather, it is our deepest incursion into ourselves, such that, as if surrounded by a thousand luminous mirrors, our solitude, reflected a thousand and a thousand times over, seems to stretch and expand the dimensions of a world in which everything has its place. The beloved object, for its part, is contained therein only as the occasion that sets such a universe in motion: somewhat like the way in which, in a restless dream, a sound or a scent that stirred us in our sleep and triggered that dream is woven into it.

This is why any creative activity of the spirit can be strongly influenced, and sometimes even heightened, by eroticism, even in fields that are, in practical or abstract terms, far removed from any personal interest; moreover, all activities that are fostered by a powerful and intense fusion of our various, and most often scattered, drives can find their inspiration in it, for it kindles a flame and warmth within us. Suddenly, certain combinations spring forth; certain images, hitherto dormant, take shape and come to life, for all creative power draws its necessary conditions not from the clearest, most evolved state of mind, but rather from the ability to descend from such lofty heights of evolution in order to constantly rekindle itself, in a passionate embrace, with all that is life within us, whispers and words, impulses and quests, right down to the darkest and most secret root of our being. It is precisely in this way that this life becomes fertile, and only in this way does it wrest from the depths of its being something which, being in itself a living totality, can continue to live an autonomous existence alongside its progenitor, being its creation, and yet independent of it: in precisely the same way that this process is repeated within the body, when its maturity demands reproduction.

Plunged once more into these creative depths of life, our mind thus unleashes, often in the very midst of erotic ecstasy, powers it did not previously possess, even as it realises that it has lost others which it had hitherto possessed. It is when it turns in this direction, inwards, that it seems at times to take on the countenance of a seer whose lips can utter more prophecies than one would have thought them capable of in their usual state; but to the outside world, in the way it passes judgement on everyday matters of clarity and order, and above all in its relationship with the beloved, whom it is utterly incapable of situating properly in relation to the rest of the world, it just as often displays the face of a smiling, surprised child. And indeed, in such a state, everything of which one is capable is concentrated within oneself, perhaps more so than ever, and germinates vigorously without being able to unfold in actions isolated from one another. One resembles a child at that moment, and indeed one has become a child once more, in that primordial equity of body and mind and that innocent awareness of both—a child who believes everything they see, for whom everything has been renewed, who, filled with boundless faith and trust, would like to shout out their joy at the world’s incredible splendour and can think of no better way to greet the wisest of reasons than by doing a somersault before it. Strange as it may seem, there are subtle little traits of character that link the lover who is sincerely and utterly enamoured to the much-celebrated childlike spirit of brilliantly creative minds. For, for a fleeting moment—a moment the lover owes to their physical existence, and thus through a different path—they brush against the depths where these exceptional beings dwell; as if stammering in a dream, they have something to say about these hidden splendours, which have, alas, made them forget so many useful and necessary things. This involuntary childishness, into which even the most rational and stunted pedant can be plunged by erotic rejuvenation, is what most strictly and most authentically distinguishes true eroticism from all forms of that pure and simple sexual appetite, whether cruder or more refined: in it, in fact, erotic arousal remains isolated and partial, and does not transform into that ecstasy characteristic of the whole human being.

A certain awareness of being the one for one another—not an object of objective appreciation like all the others, but in reality nothing more than a strange and marvellous tale—is expressed in a very significant manner in the behaviour of lovers throughout the early stages of their relationship. It seems that each of them, without even meaning to, readily lends themselves to the other’s tender idealisation, doing everything in their power to keep it alive. It would be unfair to mistake this attitude for mere affectation or a display of vanity; rather, it frequently springs from the impulses of the heart, dreamy and captivated by their object, as if they could do nothing other than create, through their very manifestation, a world distinct from the restrictive reality of their surroundings and other things, a plane other than that of the everyday existence in which they are immersed. Anything that seems to bathe the object of love in a particular atmosphere and light is not, in the everyday sense of the word, entirely real or of a tangible truth, but is shaped by a humble demand for beauty, to which one commits oneself with greater reluctance than ever before, yet with greater boldness than ever before, and thus in an entirely new type existence. There are certain things that can only be grasped when stylised, as it were, and not with realism, in their proper being; perhaps because within them a tide of feelings of such boundless poetry can only be received if contained by a form that is all the more sober. The gateway through which love enter in us differs—due to its architecture adorned with elements rich in meaning and imbued with a unique symbolism—from any other door, even that which grants access to our soul through the summit of friendship or esteem. And if one day it is no longer received in this way, it may be that it will never again find the path that leads inside us. Because, for the lover, we are not a world of reality; we are merely the setting and the director of their dreamlike, all-powerful, irresistible world.

Love between two beings will last exactly as long as they remain able to offer each other that possibility. Their mutual contact, in whatever vital sphere, must also enable them to turn inwards and free them from their burdens, just as happens in the act of physical love that unites two bodies; what brings this about within them is impossible to explain rationally, or to attribute to elective affinities that might be understood from the outside, for it may be fuelled by attractions far more essential, more secret, and more obscure than the mind is ever aware of. Just as two bodies do not merge completely with one another but do so only at specific moments, when they
give rise to new life, so too it matters not that two aspects of being press against one another across
their full extent, but only that they touch at that profound point of arousal that unleashes within them all their creative powers. When we owe this single experience to a human relationship, we no longer value it at all—and rightly so—based on the strength or extent of whatever we may still have in common with ‘the other’; in all the impulses of true love, we trust more in the immediate and irrefutable judgement of our instincts than in the most obvious calculations of our conscience and its assessment of what it sees. It is the same here as it is in the realm of art, with regard to the creative process: once again, we encounter the analogy between love and the works of the human mind. The artist, too, draws from the objects that move him so deeply, to the point of entering into a state of creative genius, only certain aspects, certain relationships between their essence and their own self, while they neglect and leave unused a great many other characteristics present in them. If something in a landscape calls for a painting or a poem, that landscape will, through this sole impulse alone, become, in a sense, everything to them when they draw inspiration from it to create something personal: everything that has ever moved them seems to converge there momentarily for their benefit, in the surge of appreciation that drives them to exaggerate its significance. The power of the love which seizes them appears to concentrate within them the strangeness of all the objects of the outside world, transforming these objects into something profoundly familiar, as if that outside world were mysteriously coming to their embrace, in a form specific to the creator, or as if their own particular being were surrendering itself to merge with it—the two being, in the soul, one and the same event. We feel ourselves living more intensely than ever when, in the physical giving of ourselves, we lose our own sense of self; thus, by virtue of the same contradiction, full of wisdom, of which all life is made, the sovereignty of the beloved appears to us at the height of its power when we reinterpret and reshape it, as demanded by the very subjectivity of our passion, in harmony with our enthusiasm. In reality, we do not lose ourselves in them any more than we strip them of everything they contain for our own use: we draw from them only what precisely we needed in order to become completely at one with ourselves.

Thus love and creation are, at their very root, one and the same: in all creation, it is the work that springs alive from the all-powerful love aroused by its object, from the overwhelming delight found in it; in its deepest sense, it is an act of love; and, likewise, all love is an autonomous creative act, the pleasure of creating, sparked by the human being one loves, but undertaken for love’s sake, and not for their sake. That is why eroticism—just like the creative faculty of the mind—must undoubtedly, in its very essence, be understood as an intermittent state, which comes and goes, and about which neither its intensity nor the bliss with which it overwhelms you can, in any given instance, reveal anything regarding its likely duration. They are just as capable of guaranteeing a certain longevity as they are of burning out like tinder-fire, precisely because of their greater violence. However, just like all states that go beyond the bounds of the average, the emotion known as passionate love cannot conceive of its own end, cannot imagine its own death and disappearance, and its certainty of a fuller, more carefree life makes it more exuberant than even the most tried and tested loyalty, provided that the latter is not erotic. For all our outbursts, the most passionate ones—be they pleasures, pains or passions—erase within us all sense of time, by virtue of their strength, which surpasses all others; it is precisely these, fleeting as they are, that are consequently constantly as if veiled and surrounded by profound eternities, and it is only this quasi-mystical enhancement, in our world of perpetual change, that imbues their happiness with such delight and their suffering with such tragedy. Of course, we cannot constantly maintain such a high standard, either in love or in creativity; we constantly find ourselves slipping back into that state of mediocrity, less pronounced, in which all things speak to us clearly only through a scattering of isolated relations, without ever, in any respect, managing to carry us to the perfect harmony that arises from enthusiasm. We are therefore perfectly capable of producing, in one field or another, work of a good standard; but in those fields where our whole being must be mobilised for creative action, we can only waste away our superficial gifts through the way we use them. Thus, for the artist who brings only a divided heart to their task—because it sometimes brings upon them the torments of impatience, especially in these moments of emptiness—yet retains, to a certain extent, control over their hands, their eyes, their thoughts or their well-honed technical skills. It is the same for the man of desire who, in full awareness, uses his body as a machine for love, without feeling inwardly inclined towards or eager for such activity. For what underlies both states, once they manifest themselves in all their strength and fervour, is not some exceptional mood, the product of exaltation or a specific form of arousal, the onset of which we need not, in truth, await: on the contrary, it is simply a perfect presence within ourselves, a return to our inner selves, in the mysterious harmony of all our faculties, a moment of rest, a chance to catch our breath after all the chaotic, incoherent and isolated acts of life. It is for this reason that this moment lifts us to such heights and makes us so happy; for this very reason that, in love as in creation, it is better to give up than to settle for a worthless achievement. It is better to settle ourselves, in a spirit of waiting and self-denial, before the door of our own self, our home, our hearth, and patiently do what we have to do, until everything within us is ready for the celebration and opens willingly—rather than forcing that door and behaving, in an unprepared home, like a trespasser full of himself. Rather, let us be carried along by the peaceful certainty that the fleeting moments of the highest happiness—in love as in creative work—are also in keeping with the laws of Nature, and that we are on the path to that happiness with every step we take towards our true moments of celebration. Lovers, too, can find no firmer ground on which to anchor their hopes than when they feel that their return to themselves and their journey towards one another are one and the same act, and that all of us, time and again, find ourselves outside ourselves, out on the street, wandering aimlessly. Notwithstanding, such periods of creative drought are extremely difficult to bear, particularly as they do not necessarily coincide for both partners. But for the creator forced to endure them in solitude, they represent the height of misery, hell on earth, and may well plunge a mind enslaved by its nerves and unstable moods into melancholy and a loathing of existence. For it is by no means a quantitative difference that separates, in these two states, the bliss of one from the gloom of the other: it is felt as a difference in nature; the world of creation and love signifies a return to one’s native land, an entry into paradise; that of the inability to create, or of dead love, is, on the contrary, an exile where the gods abandon you and from which it seems that no path, however narrow, leads back to lost happiness, as if it had irrevocably fallen, as in a dream, into the desert of Nothingness. An understandable despair, since neither reason, master of itself, nor the will are sufficient to summon it back, and thus it can neither be invoked nor recovered; of course, our various faculties, in their isolated deployment, are more easily trained and mastered by us than tamed at the moment of their dark and total crystallisation—that of an experience whose intensity extends to the whole being. In the place where immediate life takes shape in silence, the impulses of our will no longer have access; this act, the highest we know, this life of life which nevertheless seems to mobilise us more than ever—better yet, to make us equal to ourselves for the first time—we do nothing but undergo it, nothing but receive its grace: it must seize hold of us.

Yet, the intermittent nature of any romantic passion, like that of creativity, would lead to less dangerous crises were it not for the misunderstanding associated with it. The artist who paints a meadow is well aware that for him its value lies solely in spurring him on to create, while he could not care less whether the unintentional and generous praise it receives is, from a different perspective, justified, whether it is judged on its true worth or not, and how much grass it yields each year. The lover, on the other hand, easily comes to believe that the praise he bestows on the object of his love has objective value, thereby shifting the centre of gravity of that object’s value. He allows himself to be swept away by the sudden surge of passion that washes over him, in the fervour of his love, just as bubbles rise in boiling water, wanting to confirm and validate it at any cost in every one of the other’s qualities; and the other, for his part, accepts all of this with alarming complacency. The result is the abrupt and all-too-familiar fall from the clouds of adoration to the banality of reality—the first, the very first disappointment. The unfortunate passion, until recently pampered like a queen from an operetta by the ecstasy of happiness, is then reduced to the status of a Cinderella who is only allowed to keep her place on condition that she shows herself to be docile and willing to perform the mundane tasks of daily life: life and love fall out, then make sad concessions to one another, for which they pay the right to continue to exist: love is granted a brief honeymoon period, after which it resigns itself to taking off its festive clothes, donning the most modest of work clothes and making itself very small in its corner. But this disheartening ending—which, with a little experience, anyone can foresee in any love story—stems from the fact that, at the outset, the glitter of love is taken too seriously, and that subsequently its right to a festive attire of its own, and to make its own plans for its days of celebration, is largely neglected. The glitter taken too seriously: for even at the very height of amorous ecstasy, when the beloved seemed to be the object of such exquisite names and appeared to dream of nothing but him, the latter was by no means, as he likes to imagine, the content, the goal, the centre of the erotic state, but merely its trigger; in fact, they were, from the outset, situated on the outermost periphery of the lover’s circle of existence, that lover so passionately enamoured, and condemned to influence him only indirectly. As for another form of communion between two beings, it is better achieved anywhere else but in eroticism, whose principal benefit lies precisely in its influence on the broader and freer blossoming of our own self, in the space it opens up for our strengths, whereas with other feelings—far more impersonal and dull, such as pity, a sense of duty and respect, it leaves the task of sacrificing part of one’s human self for the benefit of another.

Admittedly, this seems to be a sad conclusion and like the promise of an ever-deepening isolation for anyone who would try to extricate themselves from it by means of love. Nonetheless, it is only this conclusion that restores love to the fullness of its rights, rather than robbing it after an initial and brief exhilaration of its splendour, only to lump it together with the petty necessities of life. For even when it acts merely as an indirect stimulus, using the beloved, so to speak, merely as tinder rather than the fire by which they would warm themselves, they retain in return, this more limited power—for as long as they wish, and as far as they can the use it—in all areas of life. It can act without stopping just as in the union of bodies: just as in that union a being prey to love brings forth new life through contact with the other, and discharges their creative power into them, so too can all works of life, all fertility and all the beauty of one’s innermost being spring forth from that contact alone. It may well remain forever ‘the stimulus from without’—integrated, moreover, into one’s own ego—only that for the other, it represents their whole being: their point of union with life, their constant fusion with the ‘outer being’ of things, without which it would remain forever inaccessible to the lover. It is the language through which life speaks to them and suddenly takes on a miraculous eloquence, as if it were speaking the language of angels, finding within them precisely the words and intonations they need. To love is to know someone whose colours must cover everything before they reach us, so that they cease to be alien and terrifying, or cold and empty, and instead, like the ferocious beasts in Paradise, lie tamed at the feet of life. Many of the most beautiful love songs keep alive within them—at the very heart of the eroticism directed towards the beloved—something of that all-powerful sensation, as if the beloved were not merely themselves, but also the whole world, but also the whole of the universe, even the leaf quivering on the branch, even the ray of light that makes the water sparkle, a magician of the transformation of all things, and transformed in all things: for, in effect, for this love, the image of its object fragments into a hundred thousand copies of itself, into an immense richness that fertilises everything around it, and ensures that, whatever the end of its journey, it walks the paths of love, without ever, however, leaving its sweet native soil.

If this is the case, surely nothing threatens the passion of love more than the moment when a human being, foolishly blinded, seeks to embody for another something better than such mediation, a form of taking care that is creative in the highest sense of the term—or, instead of this, seeks its opposite: to artificially trace their own being on the nature of the other, in order to merge essentially with them and not merely with the illusions of love. Only the person who remains entirely true to themselves can, in the long run, remain an object of love, because only they are capable of symbolising life for the other person, of being perceived as a life-giving force. There is, therefore, nothing more unfitting in love than adapting to one another, polishing oneself against the other, and that whole system of endless mutual concessions, made solely by people who are compelled, for purely practical and impersonal reasons, to endure their life together, whilst mitigating that compulsion as rationally as possible. And the more two people have attained the height of refinement, the more disastrous it is to graft one onto the other in the name of love, to turn one into a parasite on the other, when each must take firm root in their own particular soil in order to become a whole world unto themselves for the other. It is therefore a most singular sight—and yet by no means a rare one—to witness what happens after a long life of visibly happy love, when death separates two partners: after a period of sincere despair and disarray, the survivor suddenly begins to flourish in an entirely new way. It sometimes happens that women who, having sacrificed themselves excessively for their partner, had reduced themselves to being nothing more than his ‘other half’, are surprised – even as grieving widows – to experience this strange ‘Indian summer’ of their own nature, which had been crushed and was already almost forgotten.

In fact, the ‘halves’ still feel, each as much as the other, uneasy and cramped in their shared living, however finely they may have adapted to one another; no doubt they now say ‘we’ instead of ‘I’, but this ‘we’ scarcely occupies any more space to warrant a slice of existence than the ‘I’ did; and let it not be thought that this is only the case with insipid personalities: the same is true of rich natures, for even the richest of them are exhausted when one of the partners is content to naively extract from the other everything that the other contained, in order to put into them, in its stead, that which constitutes their own nature, until they have exchanged their very persons. Or perhaps they might have become to one another fellow human beings bound in brotherly unity, were they not lovers, dragging along the memories and aspirations of those seeking love, which have, by mistake, been transformed from two delightful and fruitful surprises into two deadly platitudes. Indeed, to re-establish a genuine connection between them, they already know each other all too well—to the point of disgust, for even the most exquisite food becomes repulsive in the long run. And when that moment comes, love has fled far from them, overcome by nausea, leaving behind two bundled up fools, consumed by many cravings they dare not speak of, now nothing more than two halves that fit together perfectly—all too perfectly, alas—one to the other. For, at the very heart of passion, it is never a question of ‘getting to know one another perfectly’: however much they may have progressed in this knowledge, passion constantly re-establishes between them that fertile contact which cannot be compared to any relationship of sympathy, and restores them to their original relationship: the violence of the upheaval that each of them causes in the other, and which limits any attempt to grasp that partner objectively. Love fills both their egos with too much happiness, splendour and flourishing for them to return to the serenity of knowledge—love which finds itself, to its shame, compelled to admit that, while it condemns any attempt at reasoned ‘knowledge’ to failure and replaces it with a heap of chimeras, intoxicated by the beauty of its own inventions, it is not only in the initial intoxication of the senses that it erects such obstacles; later, too, it ceaselessly thwarts knowledge and leads it astray once more. Indeed, love has always been and always will be one of the forces of lightness within the human soul, leading it down paths other than those its wisdom could ever have imagined. It is terrible to say, but, deep down, the lover couldn’t care less about knowing ‘who’ their partner really is. Blinded by their scandalous egoism, they are content simply to know that the other person does them a favour that is utterly beyond comprehension. One has no idea how one arrives at this state: ultimately, the two lovers remain a mystery to one another. Worse still, it is surely the very opposite of a rational economy: life may well have served them many other drinks than love, but it has never quite managed to sober them up completely, for a little love, coming into the mix, always causes some degree of confusion between illusion and reality—just as excusable as back then, in the intoxication of their bodies, now, just as before, their judgment is still prone to a slight warping, owing to the fact that the effects still seem vastly disproportionate to their cause: immense, ever-present. This embarrasses them, so they persist in idealising one another a little, and it is only in the long run that they do so by taking on the air of
impartial judges. All in all, everyone is happy.

Even when they’ve grown old together? Yes, I’m afraid so, even then. Admittedly, the ecstasy of love and its sensual delights must have long since subsided and become a rare occurrence, until the moment they precede them on the path to the great sleep. Yet their past clings to them just as closely as their now peaceful present, and it is not a world of entirely different feelings that nourishes their ageing love. For them, this ecstasy is a part of their memories, close and familiar, as if it were still, so to speak, sharing the home of their love. She once occupied the first place and the best of rooms in that home, the one where they had enough space to live, before so many other extensions were added: stately rooms, quiet corners in which to work, and spacious balconies. And now this little room is still part of the building, although it is a little old-fashioned and faded, and is always full of all sorts of random stuff – those trinkets that bring a strange smile to the faces of the elderly. ‘Do you remember?’ they say to one another when they catch sight of it, and settle down to reminisce over these relics. It’s like a return to childhood memories. Almost as distant now as those early years, just as innocent, and equally imbued with unfathomable richness. Memories full of foolishness, yet they sometimes feel that this very foolishness, with all its exuberance, was the well from which they drew the essence of life. ‘Happy in our foolishness, we dreamt of one another, with no other aim than to enjoy ourselves more fully; we did not renounce ourselves for the sake of the other; we merely found solace in one another; whereupon our days were all imbued with richness, and surrounded us in the form of beautiful children, and in all our works we brought forth life.’

So there they are, sitting there, talking about love without ever ceasing to exaggerate. For even today they thrive on exaggerations and are quite forced to do so: otherwise, they could not explain to themselves—explanations have never been their strong point, after all—how it is that one becomes increasingly secure within oneself as a shared love grows, and that two beings become one only if they remain two…

As they rarely remain ‘two’, since unity is more often than not synonymous with mutilation, aversion to the overpowering grip of romantic passion is only becoming more widespread. People fear being confined, of no longer retaining, in one way or another, the freedom to determine their own course, or other possibilities for growth and change, and they view with growing suspicion the ‘life sentence of love’, with its traditional fidelity. Because nowadays we no longer conceive of ourselves as a whole that is as overwhelmingly immutable as before, at a time when were content with allowing ourselves to be bound by a stable idea, a rational image of the nature of our being, and tried in all good faith to confirm it through our actions. Also, a sense of identity with others, however well-founded it may be, does not seem to offer us any sort of guarantee. That is why we are easily led to believe nowadays that love everywhere breaks down into fleeting impulses, games and weariness; and that our predecessors knew how to love better than we do, being more secure in their inner lives, which were less complicated, or, to be more precise, less taxing on their nerves, given their complexity. Yet it is not difficult to see that we are mistaken on this point and that these apparent flaws and obstacles actually serve, in many respects, to further genuine love. For, at the very core of our being, it is linked to the enrichment of human flourishing and essentially follows its progress and its consequences. In comparison with former times, there are precisely a hundred new spheres today in which people can connect, a hundred more subtle signs of recognition, a hundred quieter greetings and calls to one another, the number of which grows as the individual cultivates their difference more fully and which open up to lovers just as many worlds within which they can engage in fruitful interaction. The loyalty of days gone by involved a fair measure of primitive resignation regarding the real, living presence of love: the need to know that it was present, vibrant and pulsating, in every one of our experiences was just as absent as the need to don, on any given occasion, a particularly pompous and solemn hairstyle; it was enough that it existed, once and for all, that it was an ‘object of possession’ and safely locked away. People today already know full well that human beings never ‘possess’ one another, that they win or lose one another at every moment of their lives, and that love does not ‘exist’, if it exists at all, except in its real and spontaneous expression. For this reason, it is now more difficult to draw the line between frivolity or playfulness and the genuine upheaval of love, although the two are no more closely intertwined than they were in the past; on the contrary, it is more important than ever to know whom one loves and how one loves them. But whereas in the past even a rather mediocre and cold relationship—and therefore one that was rather barren for the soul—might well have sought to sustain itself for a lifetime on the basis of its supposed conformity to God’s will, it happens nowadays that a relatively rich and deep romantic bond is abandoned without having lasted much longer than a ‘playful love’ of old, because one realises that, after all, all things considered, it is not what one might expect from love—and that it is therefore better to go their separate ways. Admittedly, such a view of things involves a certain degree of cruelty, but this is in no way different from the cruelty that drives us to overcome all shortcomings once they have been recognised, and it often arises, in fact, from taking existence extremely seriously. We come to realise that love, if it claims to be more than a pastime of the senses or the imagination, must contribute to the realisation of that great purpose of existence that demands our highest desires and our most sacred hopes, and that it must conquer, starting from its own domain, one by one, all the elements of life. The love that comes closest to perfection will always be the one that comes closest to it in most respects and areas, until the very essence of a human life is shaped by the Other, and they are even able to be everything to one another: lovers, spouses, brother and sister, friends, parents, comrades, children at play, stern judges, compassionate angels…

For our conception of love changes in step with the subtle transformations of our personal development. If we descend to the realm of the most primitive of living beings, we see that tiny amoebae mate and reproduce by sinking into one another in pairs, merging completely into a single being, which, in turn, splits into amoeba-offspring. We find it natural that we can no longer do the same in the realm of physical relations, where our differentiated body is content to sacrifice a particle of itself to copulation, to engage in it only in accordance with a strictly defined function, and, for the rest, to persist in its own being. But when it comes to the soul, the strange thing is that it always seems to us that the behaviour of the amoeba is more worthy of us, as it were, compelling us to merge, to disappear completely into one another. It really does seem as though such a viewpoint indicates that our spiritual differentiation lags behind that of our bodies. Otherwise, we would regard as an irrefutable truth that our soul demands of romantic passion the very same thing as our body: not a merging into the other, but quite the opposite—through contact with the other, a fertilisation, a strengthening of our very selves, to the point of a fruitful overflow of our being. For this fertility itself is no longer, as in the amoeba, a fragmentation of the self, but is already, in its own right, a partial function—a secretion, in the highest sense of the term, a state of transgression of boundaries. It is in this spirit that the artist, being, too, more than an amoeba, detaches his work from himself, without, however, losing himself permanently in the object that has thus fertilised his imagination.

This analogy, which brings together physical and spiritual forms of expression in the experience of love, cannot be emphasised strongly enough, since these are simply two aspects of a single process. Just as aesthetic excitation has its roots in movements of the imagination, from which the artist’s entire being is ultimately drawn, so too is erotic excitement rooted in sexual life; and, just as the creative act must never stray beyond the imagination, the centre of its fertility, however abundant the material incorporated within it may be, and even if it claims to encompass the entire universe, so too does the erotic process never stray beyond the sphere of sexuality, however numerous the faculties of the mind to which it extends, and however far-reaching its effects may be. It does it an injustice to reduce it to a crude, narrowly defined physiological effect, whilst refusing to attribute to it everything else that is ascribed to others on the basis of emotional factors; but it does it just as much of an injustice to attempt to distort, morally or aesthetically, its sexual nature. For eroticism is what it is by virtue of the elemental energy with which it overcomes all apparent dissociation and all apparent differences in nature between physiological and spiritual manifestations, serving to emphasise the physical element within spirituality, and vice versa. Its physiological realm already encompasses everything else, including the total upheaval of the soul, in its entirety, just as the electrical discharge bursting forth from a storm cloud produces at once the lightning, the thunder and the downpour, which, mingled together, shake us and deafen us. It would be just as worthwhile, and just as feasible, to observe in the physical state of amorous ecstasy the games that shake our entire mind, as it would be to study, conversely, in the most ethereal waves of adoration of that mind, the sensual ardour that accompanies them. Both elements may well mix with great intensity and in very different ways, the essential fact remains that together they constitute the entirety of a single phenomenon; it is precisely this that allows eroticism to be just as present in the absolute realm of blind desire as in the contact between two human beings, within the most spiritualised realms of existence: if they love one another, it is the same spark of eroticism that leaps from one to the other and gives life to the intellect, just as it once gave life to the body.

This sovereign autonomy with which eroticism creates a world that it possesses entirely, in all its manifestations, both physical and spiritual, explains its many conflicts with other realms of feeling and with the principles that opposed to it, upon which human judgements are based. This, for example, explains the fact, so often noted with indignant contempt, that one can both love and despise at the same time. I shall set aside here the very common case of ‘contempt’ arising solely from one’s upbringing, whereas love in fact confirms our personal assessment of things. It is, in fact, quite possible to love someone—in other words, to receive from them all that fertilising and life-giving influx that love radiates—while at the same time rejecting them, with all the powers of vigilance and conscience at the disposal of our mind and soul. Just as there are human beings who have completely ignored erotic emotion, and others who are almost entirely ignorant of it, it may naturally also happen that someone attracts us erotically, in the deepest, darkest recesses of our being, without this attraction having gone far enough or risen high enough to stir other parts of our inner self as well. It remains, then, a violent intoxication, an intoxication of our whole being, but only within the confines of certain areas, while in all other respects it gives way to disillusionment and sobering up. If this conflict takes place in highly sensitive areas of the psyche, if very strong tendencies and value judgements stand in opposition to it in the conscious orientation of our personality, we speak of a struggle between love and contempt; and, curiously enough, we expect every honourable man, without further scrutiny, to master his passion—even though no one, not even he himself, is capable of guessing which gods, deep down, are vying for his heart, and on which side the worst defeat will lie, the mutilation with the most serious consequences: for, certainly, man does not live by his basic instincts alone, nor, even less so, by reason alone.

Put more generally, the question would be as follows: why is it that the object of our affection so often suits us far less well than most of the people to whom we direct our other affections, and why, despite this, must it be the only one that matters to us? In almost every romantic relationship with another, there is something that makes you silently ask yourself this question; yet, in many unusual cases, it is the person concerned who is struck by it and cannot explain it to themselves. It so happens, then, that one may develop a passionate infatuation for someone whose outward appearance speaks a completely different language and, in a sense, symbolises something entirely different from what their true nature reveals once one gets to know them a little better. It seems that their gait, their mannerisms, their smile, their tone of voice—in short, everything about them, right down to the smallest details—suggests a person quite different from who they really are. If it is merely a fleeting infatuation, it matters little; but if, like any genuine passion, it is certainly attached to the physical appearance of the beloved, yet interprets this as the sign and symbolic language of the inner self, then they become the victim of a conflict just as tragic as that between love and contempt, even if their esteem for the object of their love were extreme. As for their physical reactions, they never make a mistake: on this point, their instincts cannot lead them astray, and they are certain of this. But it may happen that what they see and sense in the other person is now reflected solely in that individual’s physical appearance—appearances that may stem from afar, perhaps from distant ancestors and family traits, or perhaps from a childhood buried deep within the soul beneath more recently acquired character traits; in short, all these riches are no longer to be found within the other. In relation to the mind, the body is the more conservative of the two, and many things are imprinted upon it only slowly, only to fade away just as slowly. I believe that, if we take into account how eroticism imbues everything physical with a charge of phantasy—even when that physicality does not arouse a crude sensual appetite—and how this charge can cause the curve of a nape to upset us forever, or the sound of a voice to disappoint us forever—the body can play an extraordinarily tragic role. Admittedly, it appears to the instinctive wisdom of eroticism—and quite rightly so—as the irrefutable One and the Whole, in which not a single line has been etched without intention; yet what it expresses with such eloquence and authenticity does not always relate to an immediately perceptible reality, but is often, at least for a certain time, at odds with the mood and structure of the person’s inner self, and—to put it in the worst possible light—bears witness to nothing more than an inner life that has already passed away, of which only the lines of the body retain a reflection. In such cases, what we love is like the light from those stars, so distant that it only reaches us long after their death. We thus love something that exists and yet does not exist; yet, even then, our love is not in vain; for, even then, the last ray of that extinguished light—barely still visible and perceptible—may perhaps set our whole being ablaze, in a way that the rest of reality, however rich it may be, could never have kindled to such an extent.

And, finally, a little of that tragedy – for which, in this particular case, we must pay the price of our soul being set ablaze – is typically intertwined with any erotic passion, precisely because it is linked to the body. We love erotically only that which expresses itself physically, in the fullest sense of the word—that which has, so to speak, taken on bodily symbols—and this is a very indirect path leading from one being to another. This implies that, for this reason alone, we never truly come together but merely physically trace this encounter, whilst within us, through this physical connection, the radiant image of the other takes shape in a fertile way, thereby liberating and activating all our faculties. This is also why one may well continue to love someone who is maimed or disfigured in one way or another, but only because they once revealed themselves to us in their intact physical form; on the other hand, it would be difficult to fall in love with them straight away—a love that would pierce through this disguise of their physical being. For love is as much that which dwells within us in its most physical form as it is that which is most spiritual, most disembodied – at least in appearance; it is wholly bound up with the body, yet within it fully grasps a symbol, an image of the whole of the human being and of all that slips into us through the gateway of the senses, and creeps into the secret of our soul, in order to awaken it.

To remain eternally strangers to one another, whilst remaining eternally close: this, then, is the law of all love, the nature imposed upon it, from which it never departs: for it is not only in that extreme case, which we have already mentioned, nor in contempt, nor in unrequited love, but wherever human beings love, that one merely brushes very lightly against the other, then leaves them to their own devices. It is always an unattainable star that we love, and every love is, at its very core, a tragedy—yet it is only in this capacity that it can bring about its immense and fertile effects. One cannot delve so deeply into one’s own self; one cannot draw from the very depths of life – where all forces still lie intertwined, all opposites still undifferentiated – without also feeling within oneself both happiness and torment, in their mysterious connection. For what arises in a person is not only beyond all biases and divisions of egoism or self-abnegation, of the sensual or the spiritual, but also beyond that sense of well-being, so painstakingly and laboriously fenced in, which we spend our entire lives trying to protect from all suffering, as if it were our worst enemy. Only one who knows that happiness and torment are one and the same, in all the most intense experiences, all the fertile moments of our lives: the creator. But long before him, a human consumed by love stretched out his hands imploringly towards a star, without asking whether it was pleasure or pain he was begging from it…

(Neue Deutsche Rundschau, 1900.)