Now I found myself instantly fascinated, which was not too comfortable since it was my role to fascinate as our conversation went on. She had fully expected to read my thoughts and she could not. And she was blocked from knowing what was going on upstairs. She did not like it. However, to put it more Biblically, she was deeply grieved. And being shut out, she tried to make sense of my appearance, not at all concerned with the superficial eccentricity of my frock coat and my messy hair, but the subtle sheen of my skin and the electric blue of my eyes. There are forces within us that refuse to be so simply categorized. They overlap too much, and they are not yet fully enough understood. As we try to understand the role of emotion in our lives, we know that feelings and moods often act as motivational factors. Our feelings and moods cause us to want or need certain things; they cause us to do certain things in order to bring about what we desire. Our age is by no means the first to experience the banalization of love, and to find that without passion, love sickness. Love cannot grow without passion. Two people find fulfillment in love, and especially the sexual expressions of love. They must recognize the other self as similar to one’s own, and live with the concept of resonance. When you strike a chord on a piano which is perfectly attuned to another in the same room, the second piano echoes the chord. #RandolphHarris 1 of 8

In interpersonal resonance, the mutual echoing of two natures depends upon the recognition of similarities, and takes place through sympathetic imagination—the process of taking the role of the other, and imagining not only how they other feels, but why one feels as one does. This is what we are after: a way of looking at the deepest, most total expression of love. If two people feel their kinship as human beings, as actualized selves, then in their expressions of relatedness they will tune themselves in. Love (or affection) is expressed by the physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual coming-together of two healthy, happy, total, and confident human beings. Love is the center of the vitality of a culture—its heart and soul. Love can pierce brutal as well as gentle hearts, to their death or to their healing delight, anguish and joy, anxiety—these are the warp and woof of which the fabric of the human soul. To love means to open ourselves to the negative as well as the beneficial—to grief, sorrow, and disappointment as well as to joy, fulfillment, and an intensity of consciousness we did not know was possible before. When we fall in love, as the expressive verb puts it, the World shakes and changes around us, not only in the way it looks but in our whole experience of what we are doing in the World. #RandolphHarris 2 of 8

Generally, the shaking is consciously felt in its beneficial aspects—as the wonderful new Heaven and Earth which love with its miracle and mystery has suddenly produced. Love is the answer, we sing. Aside from the banality of such reassurances, our Western culture seems to be engaged in a romantic—albeit desperate—conspiracy to enforce the illusion that that is all there is to love. The very strength of the effort to support that illusion betrays the presence of the repressed, opposing pole. This opposing element is the consciousness of death. For death is always in the shadow of the delight of love. In faint adumbration there is present the dread, haunting question: Will this new relationship destroy us? When we love, we give up the center of ourselves. We are thrown from our previous state of existence into a void; and though we hope to attain a New World, a new existence, we can never be sure. Nothing looks the same, and may well never look the same again. The World is annihilated; how can we know whether it will ever be built up again? We give, and give up, our own center; how shall we know that we will get it back? We wake up to find the whole World shaking: where or when will it come to rest? #RandolphHarris 3 of 8

The most excruciating joy is accompanied by the consciousness of the imminence of death—and with the same intensity. And it seems that one is not possible without the other. This experience of annihilation is an inward one and, as the myth rightly puts it, is essentially wat love does to us. It is not simply what the other person does to us. To love completely carries with it the treat of the annihilation of everything. This intensity of consciousness has something in common wit the ecstasy of the mystic in one’s union with God: just as one can never be sure God is there, so love carries us to that intensity of consciousness in which we no longer have any guarantee of security. This razor’s edge, this dizzy balance of anxiety and joy, has much to do with the exciting quality of love. The dread joy is not just the question of whether the love will be returned in kind. Indeed, the real dialectic is within the person oneself and the anxiety is not essentially quieted if the love one does respond. Paradoxically, the object of our affection is sometimes more anxious when the love is returned than when not. For is one loves unrequitedly, which is even an aim in some love writing, or from a safe distance, like Dante and the whole Stylist movement in Italian literature, one can at least go on about one’s customary daily tasks, writing one’s Divine Comedy or one’s sonnets or novels. #RandolphHarris 4 of 8

It is when the love is realized that it may literally break the limb’s strength, as with Anthony and Cleopatra, or Paris and Helen, or Queen Akasha and Lord de Lioncourt, or Heloise and Abelard. Hence, human beings are afraid of love. And, all the saccharine books to the contrary, there is reason to be afraid. In common human experience, this relationship between death and love is perhaps most clear to people wen they have children. A mortal may have thought very little about death—and prided oneself on one’s bravery—until one becomes a parent. Then one find in one’s love for one’s child an experience of vulnerability to death: the Cruel Imposter can at any time take away the child, the object of one’s love. In this sense love is an experience of greater vulnerability. Love is also a reminder of our own mortality. When a friend or member of our family ides, we are vividly impressed by the fact that life is evanescent and irretrievable. However, there is also a deeper sense of its meaningful possibilities and an impetus to risk ourselves in taking the leap. Some—perhaps most—human beings never know deep love until they experience, at someone’s death, the preciousness of friendship, devotion, loyalty. If we never died, could we love passionately? #RandolphHarris 5 of 8

This is one of the reason, mythologically speaking, why the love affairs among the immortal gods on Mt. Olympus are so insipid and boring. The loves of Zeus and Juno are completely uninteresting until they involve a mortal. Love has the power to change the course of history only wen Zeus comes down to Leda or Io and falls in love with this mortal woman who can years to have a child because she knows she will not live forever. Love is not only enriched by our sense of mortality but constituted by it. Love is the cross-fertilization of mortality and immortality. This is why the daimon Eros is described as midway between gods and men and partakes of the nature of both. I have been speaking, to some degree, in ideal terms. I am fully aware that this degree of involvement will be called neurotic by many of my colleagues. This is the day of cool relationships—one should never become involved to a degree which prevents one’s moving out at any moment! However, I submit that this involvement is neurotic only if frozen, or fixated; only if the partners demand that they live always on this level. While none of us lives on the level I am describing for very long, it remains a kind of backdrop, an ideal situation which out to be somewhere in the relation lending meaning to the drab and dull days which also come. #RandolphHarris 6 of 8

There is a virginal quality of every genuine love experience. It seems that each time is new; we feel convinced that nobody every experienced this before, though in our conceit we are sure that we shall remember it forever. When I was lecturing on this theme at a university, two different young men came up to tell me privately that they understood me because they were in love, but the expressed genuine concern that the other students would not understand. Such presumption—that nobody as ever been in love but me and I never before!—is, I fear, par for the course. There are so many lights that can be cast on love, and it throws on the human problems in love than all our glib talk about the art of loving, about love as the answer to all our needs, love as instant self-actualization, love as contentment, or love as a mail-order technique! There is an aura of over-seriousness in the above paragraphs that indicated our deep concern for the preservation and respect of really human love. Loves most beautiful moments come when neither partner is involved in the mundane, everyday workaday affairs of life, when they forget everything, including themselves, and are concerned only with the pleasure and greater joy of the other person. Wholesome love is spontaneous, unrehearsed, and certainly unself-conscious celebration of one’s chemistry and commitment to another person. #RandolphHarris 7 of 8

We know that human beings who experience their love in satisfying and growth-producing means are happier, healthier, and more loving people generally. This should continue. It is important that our society examine its own attitudes toward the important area of love. Are they reasonable in the light of modern scientific findings? Are they in keeping with what we understand about human selfhood? A loving relationship, as with any intimate shared experience, needs and deserves privacy, uninterrupted opportunity. It is a challenge to consider the fact that enlightening our children produces adults who respect knowledge and truth; keeping then in the dark usually produces adults who gear the light and truth. It is part of the normative behavior of our people to find someone with whom we believe we can share a happy and productive life and make this decision public. Achievement motivation is a is a powerful force in many societies of the World, especially those with high levels of technological development, affluence, and success orientation. Heavenly Father provides us with the conditions we need to progress within his plan. If we keep his commandments, the Heavenly Father will help each of us. Our lives are in God’s hands and our days are known and shall not be numbered less. God ensures that eventually all things work for the good of those who loves him. #RandolphHarris 8 of 8