,P. It was a magnificent cool evening and a soft gentle breeze blew off the sea when they arrived back at the beach hut, and Dan did not want to go to bed. As the time that he and Liliana would have together grew shorter, he wanted to draw out, and make the most of every moment he could spend with her. Dan knew that once Liliana was gone he was going to feel an emptiness that would be more painful than anything he had ever experienced in his life.

LOVE IS....

1001 ways to look at love

compiled and edited by

Peter T. Stuart

Preface

How many times have you asked yourself, your lover or your dearest friend, "what is love?" If you are at all like most of us you have said it many times, and most often the answer has probably left you more confused than before you asked the question. In this little book I have compiled 1001 ways by which men and women, in the course of the history of the written word, have attempted to define this illusive and powerful force which we are told "makes the world go around."

Since this is a collection of quotations, "and there is no new thing under the sun," I would like to preface these aphorisms, proverbs and paragraphs with some quotations which set the tone of my work and describe the enormity of the task which faces any writer who sets out to say that "Love is...."

In his autobiography, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, Carl Jung says that "Man can try to name love, showering upon it all the names at his command and still he will involve himself in self-deceptions. If he possesses a grain of wisdom, he will lay down his arms and name the unknown by the more unknown, ignotum per ignotius that is, by the name of God. That is a confession of his subjection, his imperfections, and his dependence; but at the same time a testimony to his freedom to choose between truth and error."

Any attempt to say what love is in the English language presents unique problems since in English there is only one word to express what in truth is a "many splendored thing." In Spanish, for example, there is the verb amar, to love, and one can say to another te amo, I love you, but this is rarely done. The most common way that this sentiment is articulated between men and women is to use the verb querer, to want, by saying yo te quiero, which translates literally as I want you. Since the object of wanting is getting, this may be a more precise and honest expression of erotic love than the English I love you. The problem of making distinctions between the different types of love has also, throughout history, been addressed by writers, and the following quotations lend insight into the magnitude of this issue:

In his book, Love and Will, Rollo May says "There are four kinds of love in Western tradition. One is sex or what we call lust, libido. The second is eros, the drive to procreate or create © the urge, as the Greeks put it, toward higher forms of being and relationship. A third is philia, or friendship, brotherly love. The fourth is agape or caritas as the Latins called it, the love which is devoted to the welfare of the other, the prototype of which is the love of God for man. Every human experience of authentic love is a blending, in varying proportions, of these four."

Dr. May's definitions of the differing types of love is all well and good, and if used by anyone afflicted by the state of "falling or being in love," it will serve as a useful antidote to the unpleasant symptoms described by Blaise Cendrars when he s ays:

"Love is masochistic. These cries and complaints, these sweet alarms, this anguished state of lovers, this suspense, this latent pain that is just below the surface, and almost unexpressed, these thousand and one anxieties over the loved one's absence, this feeling of time rushing by, this touchiness, these fits of temper, these long daydreams, this childish fickleness of behavior, this moral torture where vanity and self esteem, or perhaps honor, upbringing and modesty are at stake, these highs and lows in the nervous tone, these leaps of the imagination, this fetishism, this cruel precision of the senses, whipping and probing, the collapse, the prostration, the abdication, the self-abasement, the perpetual loss and recovery of one's personality, these stammered words and phrases, these pet-names, this intimacy, these hesitations in physical contact, these epileptic tremors, these successive and ever more frequent relapses, this more and more turbulent and stormy passion with its ravages progressing to the point of the complete inhibition and annihilation of the soul, the debility of the senses, the exhaustion of the marrow, the erasure of the brain, and even the desiccation of the heart, this yearning for ruin, for destruction, for mutilation, this need of effusiveness, of adoration of mysticism, this insatiability which expresses itself in hyper©irritability of the mucous membranes, the errant taste, in vasomotor or peripheral disorders, and which conjures up jealousy and vengeance, crimes, prevarications and treacheries, this idolatry, this incurable melancholy, this apathy, this profound moral misery, this definitive and harrowing doubt, this despair - are not all of these stigmata the very symptoms of love in which we can first diagnose, then trace with a sure hand, the clinical curve of masochism?"

However, about the time that we think that we have placed boundaries on and have a grasp of this cosmos called love we find that there are still new dimensions and ramifications.

A.R. Orage in his book On love: With Some Aphorisms and Other Essays, tells us in words that are "Freely adapted from the Tibetan" that "You must learn to distinguish among at least three kinds of love (though there are seven in all): instinctive love, emotional love, and conscious love. There is not much fear that you cannot learn the first two, but the third is rare and depends upon effort as well as intelligence."

"Instinctive love," Orage says, has chemistry as its base while "Emotional love is often the mutual attraction of disaffinities and biological incongruities....The emotional lover soon becomes the object of indifference and quickly thereafter of hatred."

Finally, Orage goes on to say, is the "conscious love that rarely obtains between human beings, but can be best illustrated in the relations of man to his favorites in the animal and vegetable kingdoms. The development of the horse and dog from their original state of nature; the cultivation of flowers and fruits....are... primitive forms of conscious love" in its undeveloped, egoistic, utilitarian state. "The conscious love motive, in its developed state, is the wish that the object should arrive at its own native perfection, regardless of the consequences to the lover. 'So she become perfectly herself, what matter I?' says the conscious lover. 'I will go to hell if only she may go to heaven.'" Isn't this is just another way of saying "Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends?"

The Definitions:

1. "Love is inviting someone into the personal recesses of one's desire. That recess is not always the other person's. A willingness to go along with the fantasy of the other is a sign of requited love, either whole or in part."

Eugene Monick

Phallos, Sacred Image of the Masculine.

"Love is shared insanity."

Eduardo Fuller

Conversation on the Hampstead Heath

20. "Love is lonely and poetic and mysterious and whether we recognize it or not we climb into bed wrapping our identities closely around us, not knowing what we want from each, and fearing both that it might be too much and not enough. Each of us hopes to be acknowledged, succored and validated, and waits for the other to make the first move, and if we often accept an orgasm instead of what we hoped for, at some level we know the real gift is being known."

Merle Shain

Some Men Are More Perfect Than Others

Gene McCoy © July 1998

© 1997 ginofso@gte.net