Lovers never attain to a love of self abandonment, of
true fusion of soul and not merely of body, until the heavy pestle of
sorrow has bruised their hearts and crushed them in the same mortar of
suffering. Sensual love joined their bodies but disjoined their souls;
it kept their souls strangers to one another; but of this love is
begotten a fruit of their flesh--a child. And perchance this child,
begotten in death, falls sick and dies. Then it comes to pass that over
the fruit of their carnal fusion and spiritual separation and
estrangement, their bodies now separated and cold with sorrow but united
by sorrow their souls, the lovers, the parents, join in an embrace of
despair, and then is born, of the death of the child of their flesh, the
true spiritual love. Or rather, when the bond of flesh which united them
is broken, they breathe with a sigh of relief. For men love one another
with a spiritual love only when they have suffered the same sorrow
together, when through long days they have ploughed the stony ground
bowed beneath the common yoke of a common grief. It is then that they
know one another and feel one another, and feel with one another in
their common anguish, they pity one another and love one another. For to
love is to pity; and if bodies are united by pleasure, souls are united
by pain.
And this is felt with still more clearness and force in the seeding, the
taking root, and the blossoming of one of those tragic loves which are
doomed to contend with the diamond-hard laws of Destiny--one of those
loves which are born out of due time and season, before or after the
moment, or out of the normal mode in which the world, which is custom,
would have been willing to welcome them.
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