Love is dead without possibility of resurrection when, unlike all living things, there is no galvanism to awaken the slumbering nerves, no wave of blood to rouse the heart. But love also has swoons and syncopes and, like the rotifer, may die provisorily and desiccate, awaiting a beneficial rain to restore it to life. Whoever denies this virtue in love, then believes that love is baser than the rotifer and has never known the most elementary physiology of life and affection. There is for love, as for any other organism, a real death and an apparent one; the former is inexorable, the latter curable, like any other malady, by having recourse to skill and knowledge.
How often has a love apparently dead resuscitated as live as ever, probably more alive than before; and this, heralded as a miracle, is one of the usual mysteries of the heart, for life was not extinguished, but only latent, as no dead, really and truly dead, with the exception of Lazarus, has ever been seen to rise again. A nerve was still sensitive, a desire could still be resuscitated, and the apparently dead comes to life again. Physicians remark that apparent death is much more frequent in cases of hysteria, catalepsy and in all forms of neurosis; it is then natural that many loves, alive but believed to be dead, have been interred through a most cruel mistake, since an organism more nervous, more cataleptic and more hysterical than love is difficult to find in the entire world of the living. In our case, however, the burial is less dangerous, because love itself opens every coffin, every grave, overturns every clod and appears to you saying: "Do not weep; here I am!"
Very rarely does love die a violent death, and cases called by that name are wounds, ruptures, syncopes and nothing more. Real death occurs through senility and after long illness. Duty frequently commands not to love him or her who suddenly has seemed base and infamous to us; but love, sentenced to death, weeps, despairs, but does not want to die. Sent back to prison, without light, without food, it defies hunger, darkness, cold, but does not die. The public, perhaps, believes that it has disappeared from the face of the earth, as has happened with illustrious prisoners plunged into the stillness of a castle; but love lives in those depths and groans, convulsed by a prolonged agony, until at last, with him who feels it, it dies a merciful death.
If the appearance of a new creature on the path of life seems to kill love violently, it is because it was not true love; and if it really were such, the battle will be relentless and long, and the Prince of Affections will die, as in other cases, a lingering death. When we shall once and forever have ceased to call love that which is the desire of the flesh and the pride of possession, that sentiment will appear to us as a much more beautiful thing, greater and more honorable than is ordinarily supposed; many miracles will at last be explained as very simple physical phenomena, and many obscure mysteries will be exposed to light.
To cause love to gush forth from the rock of indifference is a fascinating prodigy; to rouse it from its slumber is a desirable power; to sow the path of our life with love and desires may be the splendid pride of every living creature; but to cherish the conquered love, to preserve it pure and bright, to bring it impunely through the cyclones of life, the fogs of November and the frost of December, to guide it, healthy and robust, from the spring of youth to the border of the grave that it may die, like the Mexican victim, amid choruses of admiration and adorned with flowers of eternal freshness, is one of the highest ambitions to which we can aspire. It is as beautiful a thing as to create a work of art; it is as useful an achievement as to become rich; it is as great a feat as to reach glory. It is said by many that the most natural way for love to die is to transform itself into friendship; but several times already I have made clear to the reader what I think of sexual friendships. Perhaps, in some very rare cases, neither of the two lovers remembers that the beloved one belongs to the other sex: but how can the loves of the entire past be forgotten? How can we suddenly obliterate the ardent remembrances of the many years of love? If for a dead love the sweet custom of friendly visit can be substituted, if a man and a woman can forget that they are man and woman, what name will this new and singular affection deserve? Perhaps that of automatic habit; and I will send this psychical phenomenon back to the laboratory of the physiologist, that he may study it together with the unconscious and reflected motions.
CHAPTER VIII THE DEPTHS AND THE HEIGHTS OF LOVE
Whenever I see a flower that opens and shows its cheerful petals on the border of an abyss, the same thought ever recurs to my mind: there is love, which always seems to live between two infinities, height and depth. While its aspirations carry it aloft, while it seems to ask of heaven space and light, it projects its roots into the most intricate mazes of the rocks, into the most somber mysteries of the abyss. Star that glitters in the infinity of the ideal, root that dissolves the stones in the infinity of depth, it reaches all altitudes and all profundities, is the most human of passions and always placed among the divine passions; it is inmost in us and the most ethereal. Thought on the summit of a mountain, strength in the valley below, it guides the poet when he ascends to paradise, accompanies man when he plunges into the hot sea of sensuality; virgin and father in heaven, lover and spouse on earth. If to live means to exist in the most beautiful form of life, then love is richness, luxury, splendor of life; love is whatever is divine in human beings.
No one will ever be able to say where love penetrates when it lifts the bottom of human nature, where pearls and corals are intermixed with mud. It is a diver that brings to light strange and unknown things and reveals to the astonished eye of the observer new things never before conceived; it is the most daring and the most fortunate of excavators. How many simple natures of young girls, how many vulgar talents of men are perturbed, agitated and renovated by the contact of the new god, who seems to evoke from the abysses all silent passions, all dormant ideas, all the phantoms of heart and thought! The deep simmering of psychical elements at the contact with love almost always announces the birth of a second moral nature and, revivifying life, marks a new era in it. Of our birth we are always ignorant, and of our death almost always unconscious; between the "to be" and the "not to be" only one third and great thing is possible—"to love." While the common people judge from the hair on the face and from the deepened voice that a boy has become a man, a tremendous profound earthquake warns him that he must love, that he already loves; and while mothers behold with affectionate trepidation the rounding of their daughters' form to womanhood, another profound earthquake warns the girl that she must love, that she already loves.