Who can say in what remoteness of time, in what difference of earthly shape, love first comes to us as a stranger in the jungle? We, in our human family, know him through dependence in childhood, through possession in youth, through sorrow and loss in their season. In childhood we are happy to receive; it is the first opening of love. In youth we take and give, dedicate and possess—rapture and anguish are mingled, until parenthood brings a dedication that, to happy, must ask for no return. All these are new horizons of content, which the lust of holding, the enemy of love, slowly contaminates. Loss, sorrow and separation come, sickness and death; possession, that tormented us, is nothing in our hands; it vanishes. Love’s elusive enchantment, his ubiquitous presence, again became apparent; and in age we may reach a haven that asking for nothing knows how to enjoy.
Mystery
We are all still romantics at heart. The romantics give us back our moon, for instance, which science has taken away from us and made into just another airport. Secretly we all want the moon to be what it was before—a mysterious, hypnotic light in the sky. We want love to be mysterious too, as it used to be, and not a set of psycho-therapeutic rules for interpersonal relationships. We crave mystery even as we forge ahead toward the solution of one cosmic mystery after another.