It is a fallacy, a dangerous myth, that this wish should be dispassionate — letting go can be as passionate as love itself, as much an act of devotion, for only a rigor of feeling can ensure not the termination but the transmutation of a relationship.
Fearful of contagion, Richard did not kiss her on the lips. After the ceremony he helped her slowly down the stairs, and onward they drove to Arline's new home, a charity hospital in Browns Mills, New Jersey.
1w ago
We are not the same persons this year as last; nor are those we love. It is a happy chance if we, changing, continue to love a changed person.
Because time is something we can measure and tenderness is not, we keep trying to ward off the singular sense of personal failure that the loss of love can bring by measuring the success of a relationship by quantity of time rather than quality of being, only to find ourselves on barren rock.
2w ago
It is not enough to understand the natural world; the point is to defend it. And to defend it, you must love it.
We forget, and need constant reminding, that the fruit of wonder as well as its fulcrum is not knowledge — none of our discoveries have kept three billion birds from vanishing between Carson's lifetime and ours — but love.
We don't know what it is like to be any creature other than ourselves — the bird, the dog, the person we love. The great triumph is to let the fantasy of understanding go and love anyway.
What emerges is a breathtaking bow before the central paradox of the human experience — the awareness that the heart's enormous capacity for love is matched with an equal capacity for pain, and yet we love anyway and somehow find fragments of that love even amid the ruins of loss.
It is also a peculiar question, lexically and syntactically, for it presupposes two things about the life of the heart: a movement and a destination, as if love rose to its feet one day and headed for an elsewhere, left without a map, got lost, lost to seasons and cycles, lost like the mammoth and the human dorsal fin and the surnames of millennia of daughters.
But hang on here while we make the turn into the final six where all will be resolved, where longing and heartache will find an end, where Laura will tell Petrarch to put down his pen, take off those crazy medieval tights, blow out the lights, and come at last to bed.
