. . .from Chapter 4 Love and Death, in Love and Will by Rollo May
The confrontation with death - and the reprieve from it - makes everything look so precious, so sacred, so beautiful that I feel more strongly than ever, the impulse to love it, to embrace it, and to let myself be overwhelmed by it. My river has never looked so beautiful . . .Death, and its ever present possibility makes love, passionate love, more possible. I wonder if we could love passionately, if ecstasy would be possible at all, if we knew we'd never die.
The confrontation with death - and the reprieve from it - makes everything look so precious, so sacred, so beautiful that I feel more strongly than ever, the impulse to love it, to embrace it, and to let myself be overwhelmed by it. My river has never looked so beautiful . . .Death, and its ever present possibility makes love, passionate love, more possible. I wonder if we could love passionately, if ecstasy would be possible at all, if we knew we'd never die.
from a letter by Abraham Maslow, written while recuperating from a heart attack...
. . . To love is to open ourselves to the negative as well as the positive ---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 us, not only in the way it looks but in our whole experience of what we are doing in the world. Generally, the shaking is consciously felt in its positive 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 eros. 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 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 centre 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 ever know whether it will be built up again? We give, and give up, our own centre; 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?
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.
. . . Sex and death have in common the fact that they are two biological aspects of the mysterium tremendum. Mystery--defined here as a situation in which the data impinge on the problem--has its ultimate meaning in these two human experiences. Both are related to creation and destruction; and it is therefore, scarcely surprising that in human experience, they are interwoven in such complex ways. In both, we are taken over by an event; we cannot stand outside either love or death--and, if we try to, we destroy whatever value the experience can have.
