Sensuality is, so to speak, but a distorted, narrow and
localized love; the body is the object of its contemplation, and it
[sensuality] sees nothing beyond the possession of the object.
But love does not stop at the body--that would be its tomb; it crosses
the limits of it, to rise to the soul in which it is utterly absorbed.
Thus love transfigures the being by consuming its personality, whence it
comes that he who loves, no longer lives his own life, but the life of
the being whom he contemplates.
Let the vulgar continually confound these two things in their
manifestations; let lovers themselves fail to distinguish accurately
between tenderness and sensuality; for me this confusion is henceforth
forbidden, and I can from the first glance boldly separate them, thanks
to the lessons taught me by the inflections of the head.
But let us return to the shoulder. Am I not right in saying that in this
agent I possess the organic criterion of love? Yes, I maintain it. But
let us follow the action of this organ in its various manifestations.
One thing at first amazed me, in view of the part which I felt I must
assign to the shoulder. Whence comes, if the designation of that role be
in conformity with truth,--whence comes the activity so apparent, so
vehement indeed, which the shoulder displays in a movement of anger or
of mere impatience? Whence comes its perfect concomitance or relations
with moral or physical pain? Lastly, whence comes that universal
application which I just now perceived clearly and which, until now, I
had confined to such narrow limits? But if the elevation of the shoulder
is not the criterion of love, if, on the contrary, that movement is met
with again just as correctly associated with the most contradictory
impressions, what can it mean?
Here I was, once again, thrown far back from the discovery that I was so
sure I possessed.
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