120 philosophical essays you must read in your life

Chapter 109

Chapter 6, Section 13, On Love

[UK] Shelley
Do you inquire what is love?

That involuntary, powerful attraction to the things we feel, fear, and desire is love when we find a void in the valley of our own minds to call upon all things, to seek what is within us.

If we reason, we hope to be understood; if we daydream, we hope that the free-spirited child in our own head will be reborn in someone else's; Resonate together, the eyes of others blend with ours, and the eyes of others are as bright as ours.We pray that indifferent icy lips do not mock another heart's fiery mockery.this is Love.

……

When we have found the counterpart of the soul in the vast world, and found in the universe and the myriad things the confidant who can unerringly evaluate ourselves, we and the counterpart are like two exquisite harp strings, which sound with the accompaniment of a happy voice, This is the invisible, unattainable goal of love.

It is it that drives man's powers to catch its pale shadow; without it the heart, ridden by love, can never be at rest, never rest.

Thus, in solitude, or among a crowd that understands us not, we love the flower, the grass, the river, and the sky, where under the blue sky, in the trembling of the leaves in spring, we find the secret of the heart Response: There is an eloquence in the wordless wind; there is a song in the flowing stream and the rustling reed leaves.

Their mysterious connection with our souls awakens the soul within us to dance a hearty dance of ecstasy, and brings tender, mysterious tears to our eyes, like the triumphant ardor of a patriot, and Like the sound of a loved one singing for you alone.

So, Stein said, if he was in the desert, he would love the cypress branches.

Once the need and power of love die, man becomes a living grave, and what remains is only a shell.

【Together with you】

If one day you stop loving and being loved by others, then you are dead.

If one day you die, but you are still remembered and loved by others, then you are still alive.

Love resists death, love is life.

Only know how to love, but don't know how to give love freedom, this kind of love is not real love, on the contrary it is a kind of bondage and burden.

This kind of love is not love, it is precisely the abandonment and forgetting of love.

(End of this chapter)