Lovers Rock

"Some things you do for money, some you do for love, love, love."
--The Mountain Goats

"Love releases us into the realm of divine imagination, where the soul is expanded and reminded of its unearthly cravings and needs. We think that when a lover inflates his loved one he is failing to acknowledge her flaw --"Love is blind." But it may be the other way around. Love allows a person to see the true angelic nature of another person, the halo, the aureole of divinity.

"Certainly from the perspective of ordinary life this is madness and illusion. But if we let loose our hold on our philosophies and psychologies of enlightment and reason, we might learn to appreciate the perspective of eternity that enters life as madness, Plato's divine frenzy.

"Love brings consciousness closer to the dream state. In that sense, it may reveal more than it distorts, as a dream reveals--poetically, suggestively, and admittedly, obscurely. If we were to appreciate truly the Platonic theory of love, we might also learn to see other forms of madness, such as paranoia and addiction, as evidence of the soul's reaching toward its proper yearnings. Platonic love is not love without sex. It is love that finds in the body and in human relationship a route toward eternity.

"In his book about love, 'Convivium'--his answer to Plato's 'Symposium'--Ficino, who is credited with coining the phrase, "Platonic love," says concisely, "The soul is partly in eternity and partly in time." Love straddles both dimensions, opening a way to live in both simultaneously. But incursions of eternity into life are usually unsettling, for they disturb our plans and shake the tranquillity we have achieved with earthly reason."
--Thomas Moore

"Whether we fall in love with a human demigod or with a deity, we feel that they can return us to a primordial state of oneness, that then our inner electric can run its full circuit, that we can at last be whole. Only the thinnest rind of skin stands between us, only events slender as neurons.

"Only the fermenting mash of personality keeps us from crossing the boundary that organisms cherish to become one appetite, one struggle, one destiny. Then, when we finally reach that pinnacle, we feel more than whole: we feel limitless."
--Diane Ackerman