Written by Maria Popova
These passages appear on pages 126-127 of Traversal in the context of Mary Shelley's life.
Where does love go when it leaves?
A common question, thought out in its generality but brutally honest, cries out in the chest of every broken-hearted lover, echoes in all of civilization's love songs and chants, from cave paintings and dive bar graffiti. It is also an unusual question, in terms of the dictionary and in the way of meeting, because it puts forward two things about the life of the heart: the movement and where it goes, as if love got up and got up one day and headed somewhere else, it was left without a map, lost, lost because of the seasons and cycles, it was lost like a giant animal and a gypsy animal of the daughter of a thousand years and the daughter of Millennia. It feels like a violation of the universe—how love alone can defy the first law of thermodynamics, how this enormous force of existence can just dissipate into the slowness of the ocean.
We build sandcastles of our love and love ourselves granite castles, then watch in confusion as the waves of our evolution wash over them, along with the builder's feet. Each love we love and don't love changes the way we walk through life, changing the path we take along the personal coast. The only thing that doesn't change is that we keep moving, that we always remain potential travelers. We would not have left if we had arrived. We would not have written if we had arrived. Because of our imperfection and our confusion, because of our longing and our wanderlust, comes the driving force of all love and all change, of our science and our art, of our creation and our self-creation. Every act of creation is an act of termination.
