Such men are usually incapable of loving or of being loved, and they
go through life without really knowing either pain or bliss.
There is no true love save in suffering, and in this world we have to
choose either love, which is suffering, or happiness. And love leads us
to no other happiness than that of love itself and its tragic
consolation of uncertain hope. The moment love becomes happy and
satisfied, it no longer desires and it is no longer love. The
satisfied, the happy, do not love; they fall asleep in habit, near
neighbour to annihilation. To fall into a habit is to begin to cease to
be. Man is the more man--that is, the more divine--the greater his
capacity for suffering, or, rather, for anguish.
At our coming into the world it is given to us to choose between love
and happiness, and we wish--poor fools!--for both: the happiness of
loving and the love of happiness. But we ought to ask for the gift of
love and not of happiness, and to be preserved from dozing away into
habit, lest we should fall into a fast sleep, a sleep without waking,
and so lose our consciousness beyond power of recovery. We ought to ask
God to make us conscious of ourselves in ourselves, in our suffering.
What is Fate, what is Fatality, but the brotherhood of love and
suffering? What is it but that terrible mystery in virtue of which love
dies as soon as it touches the happiness towards which it reaches out,
and true happiness dies with it? Love and suffering mutually engender
one another, and love is charity and compassion, and the love that is
not charitable and compassionate is not love.
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