It must ha' been ...

There is a curious lull in life right now, last couple weeks were crazy and I was sick which made it worse and suddenly when this week dawned, the frenzy went away...
And as I do with most of my un-frenzied moments I pick up a book that I have wanted to read for a long time, but didn't because the time was not right. Last such lull got me thru Swann's Way. This time is it good ol' DHL.
He (or his characters) talk at length about love, most despise it. The book is of a time when the industrial revolution was new, and romanticism had been replaced by world weary cynicism. Idealists and puritans fought over what is the crux of the relationship between man and women was ...
In a conversation one of Clifford's high brow friends exclaims

"I like talking to women, and when I know a woman thru a
conversation the desire vanishes. I cannot have sex with a woman I have a conversation with."

It baffled me as it baffled Connie, she has a very holistic view of love and sex .... a view which drives her to and contradictorily, also away from the gamekeeper. All encompassing view of a person, and of love, someone without boundaries, within and without.

It is idealistic and a little naive, or is it wise? To know that one cannot compartmentalize one's angelic and animalistic urges, and it is possible to love someone with all of you, or maybe until all of you loves someone something, it is not really love?

And what is love anyway? Like Auden says, is it a selfish exposition of the way it makes 'you' feel? is it what you want? is it what you give? is it desire? tenderness? passion? or all of them together? how much of it is you and how much of it is the one you love? or it is the connection between the two people, a connection that transcends explanation, understanding? It is as Joesph Campbell says, a way to experience something greater than you and your loved one, it is knowing that the whole is much much more than sum of parts?

I am not thru yet, thru the book I mean, it evokes in me a faint understanding of what it is like to be in love. Though that love is no more and I see clearly the faults, I know that it was love.

And perhaps for the first time in my life truly understand what they mean when they say 'don't cry because it is over, be glad it happened.'