for/pq

But the next day, standing in the meadow, he invites Anna to visit the trailer, and she hesitates, thinking the offer is a commitment on his part, even a tentative one. It implies too much knowledge of the other—his home could be a capsule of the past or of a possible future. Her own hesitation at breaking their formality is interpreted by Rafael as shyness, or modesty, or a desire not to take the relationship further. And in some way this is not a misinterpretation of Anna. For she too has lived a stranger’s life. There are layers of compulsive secrecy in her. She knows there is a ‘flock’ of Annas, and that the Anna beside this unnamed river of Rafael’s is not the Anna giving a seminar at Berkeley on one of Alexandre Dumas’ collaborators and plot researchers, is not the Anna in San Francisco walking into Tosca’s or eating at the Tadich Grill on California Street.

This description of the five elements that make up our image of love, however superficial it may be, does seem to demonstrate love’s contradictory, paradoxical, mysterious nature. I discussed five, but they can be reduced to three: exclusivity, which is love for only one person; attraction, which is one’s fate freely accepted; the person, who is a soul and a body. But these elements cannot be separated; they exist in constant struggle and reconciliation with themselves and with others. Contrary, as though they were the planets of the strange solar system of the passions, they revolve around a single sun. This sun, too, is twofold: the couple. There is continual transmutation of each element: freedom chooses servitude, fate becomes choice, the soul is body and the body is soul. We love a mortal being as though he or she were immortal. Lope said it better: “To call what is eternal temporal.” Yes, we are mortal, we are the children of time, and no one is spared death. We know not only that we will die but that the person we love will die. We are the playthings of time and accident; sickness and old age disfigure the body and cause the soul to lose its way. But love is one of the answers that humankind has invented in order to look death in the face. Through love we steal from the time that kills us a few hours which we turn now into paradise and now into hell. In both ways time expands and ceases to be a measure. Beyond happiness or unhappiness, though it is both things, love is intensity: it does not give us eternity but life, that second in which the doors of time and space open just a crack: here is there and now is always. In love, everything is two and everything strives to be one.