Love
Among the more curious questions that can be asked about love is this: when one feels romantic love does he feel it in breaks, with interruptions or change?”
Poetry and song seduce one into thinking love continues without interruption. “Love is not love which alters when it alteration finds.” Wrote Shakespeare in one of his tempests and is never shaken.” He continued, and Elizabeth Barrette Browning wrote of her constancy to her husband Robert in such lines as this:” What I do and what I dream include thee.” Some of the greatest opera also praise the ever-lasting love by some heroes and heroines dying for it.
In reality, love probably goes on with breaks and interruptions. First, it is difficult to suppose that one can experience anything continuously. Sleep interrupts wakefulness, and sleep itself is interrupted by dreams and nightmares. The feeling one has for his lover during wakefulness may be blotted out or intensified by sleep. In either case, the feeling changes. When one is awake, he cannot fix his eyes or his attention constantly on a single object. He must blink, if nothing else. More likely he will look to something else for variety or from necessity. His mind may turn to the stock market or he may become fascinated by the operation of pile driver on his way to work. His focus for much of his day is on work. As he closes the door to his office, his thoughts may turn to his love, but sitting at his desk, his eyes fix on the print and figures there.
Pain and pleasure, either one, can distract a love from concentrating on his love. Pain calls everything to itself. One can forget one’s love for a period even over a stubbed toe. The pleasure of too much food or drink can be totally absorbing. The pleasure even of one’s love may become boring periodically. Often the greatest distraction is oneself. At times the preoccupation with self, the worry over self, the development of self, the delight in self admits no other thought.
Lovely as love might be, one can neither live nor love continuously. At best, a love can only echo the words of the poet Ernest Dawson, and say, “I have been faithful to thee in my fashion.”