The Purest Definition of Love, The Qualities of Lasting Relationships, and Time Cheating Help – The Marginalian

There are few things in life that cause us more suffering than the confusion of love, all the wrong places we come to following a broken compass, we mistake a lot of things for love: admiration, desire, psychological connection, the same thing.

This is why knowing if you really love someone can be so difficult, why it requires the rigor of theory, the precision of dictionary definition, and the courage to face the ravages of time.

In In Volume Calculations (public library) – his original startling calculation and confusion of time and love, in the middle Einstein dreams again Ulysses – The Danish writer Solvej Balle gives the best description of love I have come across since Iris Murdoch half a century ago:

The sudden feeling of sharing something mysterious, the feeling of wonder at the presence of another – the one person who makes everything easier – the feeling of being silenced and thrown into chaos at the same time.

Describing a couple united by this kind of love, Balle captures the essential qualities of a lasting relationship:

They had an intimacy that I couldn't help but see. It is not the kind of unspoken awareness that shuts other people out, the restraint of a couple in the first throes of love that constantly needs to communicate by look or touch, or the fragile intimacy that makes an outsider feel like something disturbing and gives you the desire to simply leave the couple alone with their delicate alliance. They had an air of peace about them… [They] they had clearly decided to spend the rest of their lives together, it was that simple, so what could they do but see what the future would bring.

The future, however, may bring what the present cannot foresee, cannot bear to contemplate. People die. Lovers stop loving each other. Sudden and mysterious phase shifts of feeling happen without warning or explanation, the way one person's love can turn to stone overnight, leaving another buried in painful confusion and loneliness. Because of this, living with the basic fear of loss and love may still be the purest measure of our existence. What makes it possible – the only thing that makes it possible – is to reject the glass-half-empty view of life, to see that death is a sign of the good fortune of living and of all loss a sign of the good fortune of having it, that these are miracles that did not owe us but nevertheless overcame the laws of possibility in order to live and love.

There are moments when we remember this, moments that interfere with this real vision – moments that Balle describes as those when “the ground beneath one's feet collapses and all at once it feels as if all predictions can be suspended, as if the existing red alert has just been calculated.” You write:

It is as if this way of responding to emergency situations exists when it is standing in the back of the mind, like a low voice, which is not usually heard, but it kicks in when a person is faced with the unpredictability of life, the knowledge that everything can change in an instant, that something that will not happen and that we do not expect at all, however it is possible… That the idea of ​​the world is collapsing and the laws of nature. That we are forced to admit that our expectations for the continuity of the world are at a shaky level. There are no guarantees and behind all this we consider false exceptions, sudden ruptures and unimaginable violations of normality.

It seems strange to me now, how someone can be confused by something that doesn't happen. When we know that our entire existence is based on extraordinary events and unexpected understandings. That we would not exist at all if it were not for these curious events of fate. That there are people on what we call our planet, that we can walk around in a rotating space in a vast space full of inexplicably large bodies made up of elements so small that the mind simply cannot comprehend how small they are and how many they are. That in this immeasurable dimension, these infinite elements can still hold themselves together. That we can stay afloat. That we exist at all. That each of us exists as one of indescribable possibilities. The unimaginable is something we always carry with us. It has already happened: it is impossible, we have come out of the cloud of unbelievably coincidental things… We are used to living with that knowledge without feeling dizzy every morning, and instead of wandering around with caution and trembling, in constant surprise, we behave as if nothing happened, we take the surprise of everything as normal and we find a mysterious, mysterious, truly remarkable life.

This, of course, is why life is impossible and love is life against possibility; that is why our moral obligation to the universe is to love each other while we are still alive and because we are still alive.