It was written, by a soul more pristine than mine, that a coherent set of words about love was one of those things - a practical impossibility. And so it shall remain. I cannot talk about the love that is objective, that belongs to no one. There is only, for me, mine - a love of no particular woman at any time, but a love of love.
What are its contours, and where does it begin? A poet would say that one heart is the eminent domain, that it alone is necessary. For me, this has never applied. I think of love before I feel it; for myself, to love a woman is to love any of the possible futures that Fate could reserve for us. That is where it begins: in the thought that come sackcloth and ashes, or champagne on ice, her company is devoutly to be wished more than that of any other living, breathing, being.
Love for me is the realisation that come any hole, we shall overcome. It is a discourse on possibility; that no ambition is too far to conquer together, nor that any tragedy insurmountable. In the smallest terms, it becomes a statement of my absolute faith in another human being.
Butlove is not love if it does not encompass soul and body also; the mind is too apt to demolish what it has built up to serve alone as a bulwark against the outside world...
There are those pleasures of the body that are unique to lovers; the shoulders for support, the eyes for tenderness, the hands for warmth, the lips to impart the most important messages. When in love, and at no other time, perhaps, the dual nature of our powers is evident. Any nature, even the most irascible, is altered for the good, and however short the idyll lasts, the lighter hues of the atmosphere are borne in our sight.
Physically and intellectually, love is amenable to a description, but what of love in the soul? It is like the intermingling of one thousand thousand elements with a result that is combustible, but with a resulting explosion inwards. An implosion of two bodies, a falling not to death, not to another world, but of one soul onto another such that the two could not now, or ever, be distinguished.
But we are human, and fallen, so this expectation is not met, and my heart's heart remains bereft.