Love for love's sake only?

By Ananya Mukherjee
Singapore

“I have sought love, first, because it brings ecstasy - ecstasy so great that I would often have sacrificed all the rest of life for a few hours of this joy. I have sought it, next, because it relieves loneliness--that terrible loneliness in which one shivering consciousness looks over the rim of the world into the cold unfathomable lifeless abyss. I have sought it finally, because in the union of love I have seen, in a mystic miniature, the prefiguring vision of the heaven that saints and poets have imagined. This is what I sought, and though it might seem too good for human life, this is what--at last--I have found.”---Bertrand Russell

A very wise man said that, and having transferred his profound confession of one of the most intriguing of human emotions, am left with a few lingering afterthoughts for you and me.

Whenever I hear old chronicles of love, they begin with an old world hesitation, then gradually develop into an act of submission with restrictions, and move on to tales of sad endings with age-old anguish of being apart or together. And often it leaves me wondering if there is really such a thing such as a spiritual craving supported by an eternal destiny in this persuasion of that single metaphysical release, that one connection coined “us”, that thing called love.

Or is it because there are phases of accepting this ethereal phenomenon complacently as a natural state and then suddenly perhaps as an unanticipated offshoot of a different pursuit, realizing what a wonderful thing it is to have happened to us, that makes it so delicate, so unpredictable?   

On the month of another valentine’s day, when each of you celebrate your love, do Tagore’s lines resonate with your thoughts?  

“As I stare on and on into the past, in the end you emerge,
Clad in the light of a pole-star piercing the darkness of time:
You become an image of what is remembered forever.

You and I have floated here on the stream that brings from the fount.
At the heart of time, love of one for another.
We have played along side millions of lovers, shared in the same 
Shy sweetness of meeting, the same distressful tears of farewell-
Old love but in shapes that renew and renew forever.”