The tragic freedom implied by love is this: that we all have an indefinitely extended capacity to imagine the being of others. Tragic, because there is no prefabricated harmony, and others are, to an extent we never cease discovering, different from ourselves… Freedom is exercised in the confrontation by each other, in the context of an infinitely

we may fail to see the individual because we are completely enclosed in a fantasy world of our own into which we try to draw things from outside, not grasping their reality and independence, making them into dream objects of our own.

Love is the perception of individuals. Love is the extremely difficult realisation that something other than oneself is real.

central to almost every tradition, especially of the West, is a dangerous warping of love in the hands of the self.

Most commonly known as the Golden Rule, it mistakes the reality of the self for the only reality, taking one’s own wishes, desires, and longings as universal and presuming that the other shares those precisely — negating the sovereign

Such gladsome recognition of the other’s otherness is the foundation of love and the foundation of morality — both requiring not a bridging of selves but an unselfing

the poetic playwright Tom Stoppard defined it as “knowledge of each other… knowledge of self, the real him, the real her, in extremis , the mask slipped from the face.” This unmasked fact is the antidote to the most dangerous fiction the Romantics bequeathed us — their model of love as union between lover and beloved, a kind of fusion of selves,

the poet Robert Graves defined love as “a recognition of another person’s integrity and truth in a way that… makes both of you light up when you recognize the quality in the other.”