If love is real, it does not die. By clinging to this maxim, you might avoid the whole problem of past love; past love would never have been real love. But is this bearable: to believe that your life was ruled by something unreal? Is it even possible? If I found that the object of my love was not real or presented a false appearance, nevertheless the love was real. And surely if it was real and called for devotion, it still is and does even if there is no longer any object whereon it may be fixed.
Perhaps the exercise of this devotion consists in finding a true love, or rather a true beloved, meeting and not merely seeming to meet the ideals of the same love. This transfer might preserve the piety of love, but is it true to the beloved? Is it not callous and indifferent thus to fix old, once-or-twice-or-many-times-vexed hopes upon a new object innocent of those old disappointments? Does it not make of the beloved a sort of sacrificial victim to your ideals?
If your beloved is going to love you, too, then you must let the beloved know about the old love because your love is part of you, but what happens then cannot be told in advance.
ReplyDeleteYes, that's right. Hiding past love away in addition to denying it adds a miserly reticence in self-giving to a failure of self-love. But the question is, in what way is past love a part of you? What do you have in having past love? How do you tell someone about past love? Is it something that even can be expressed?
ReplyDeleteBTW, I see that you call it "old love," but that suggests it has suffered no trauma and simply paled over time. I'm talking about love that's over, but which yet holds your promissory note not perhaps due in the present but in the whole of your life.
You're talking about making good on past promises to post on this blog, aren't you?
ReplyDelete