Love

For most of us, love is the most absorbing subject in existence. There is an enormous range of meanings in this one little word: motherly love and self-love, fatherly love and children’s love fc their parents; there is brotherly love and there is the love of one’s home and one’s country; there is love of money and there is love of power. Love clearly includes all of these, but the love in which one can be oneself is the pre-eminent love for most of us. Love at its fullest can include an enormous range of emotions and sentiments. It can combine humility with pride, passion with peace, self­assertion with self-surrender; it can reconcile violence of feeling with tenderness. “Being in love” is love at its most intense, and is personally focused in a very special way. Our common speech reflects this fact, as we talk of “falling in love” as if it were something into which we are precipitated against our will, like falling into a pond.