Each minute is a knife blade of separation: How to trust our life to the blade that may slit our throat? The remedy lies in finding a balm that heals forever the wound inflicted upon us by time’s hours and minutes. Ever since it appeared on earth, the human being has been incomplete whether because it had been driven out of paradise or because it is a passing stage in the evolution of life. Almost from the moment of birth, humans flee from themselves. Where do they go? In endless search of themselves. A human being is never what he is but the self he seeks. Once he catches up with himself or believes that he has, again he separates himself, leaves himself behind, continues his pursuit. He is the child of time. And time is his essence and his infirmity. The cure lies only outside time. And if there is nothing or no one outside time? Then he is doomed and forced to live with the terrible truth. The balm that heals the wound of time is called religion; the knowledge that we must live for a lifetime with our wound is called philosophy.

Is there no way out? Yes, there is: at certain moments time opens just a crack and allows us to glimpse the other side. These moments are experiences of the merging of subject and object, of I am and you are, of now and forever, here and there. They are irreducible to concepts, and we can express them only through paradoxes and the images of poetry. One of these experiences is love, where sensation merges with sentiment and the two with spirit. It is the experience of complete otherness: we are outside ourselves, hurtling towards the beloved. And it is the experience of the return to our origin, to the place that does not exist in space and is our native land. The beloved is, then, both terra incognita and the house where we were born, what is unknown and what is recognized. It is helpful here to quote not a poet or mystic but a philosopher such as Hegel, the great master of oppositions and negations. In one of his juvenilia he says: “Love excludes all oppositions and hence it escapes the realm of reason … It makes objectivity null and void and hence goes beyond reflection … In love, life discovers itself in itself, devoid now of any incompleteness.” Love does away with excision. Forever? Hegel does not say, but in his youth he probably believed so. It may even be said that his entire philosophy and in particular the mission he assigns to dialectics – an illusory logic – is simply a gigantic translation of this youthful vision of love into the conceptual language of reason.