“Surely, dear heart, for when I saw for the first time that look in your
eyes, which was not joy alone but pure fire, I learned something about
you I never knew before. I realized that you yourself are a far more
complex and interesting personality with infinitely more potentialities
than ever I had dreamed of. Do you think now I would ever stop telling
you stories like that?”
“I don’t remember a word of it except the perfect rainbow circle. The
rest was silence. But it had somehow a world of meaning for me. I know
we swam. I know we couldn’t fly, but you made me think we did, which is
quite as good for me.”
§ 80
“Dear, why has it taken us twenty years to love each other as we do now?”
“It was our ignorance, which was so dense that it did not know it
was ignorant. That’s the blackest kind. What we knew was that we had
affection for each other, and for our children, but the lack of passion
was not clearly sensed, because there was no article in our creed of
love that declared passion to be a necessary factor in our marriage. We
knew the phrase ‘all in all to each other’; we identified ourselves in
countless superficial ways in addition to the really solid identification
represented in our children, but while we did it with our intellects we
really did not do it with our hearts. We have not been truly united,
truly fused, until this day.
“It needn’t have taken us twenty years, or even one year, for there
are people who instinctively soar in the same ecstatic flight in their
honeymoon, that we achieved only after twenty years of external devotion
and watchfulness. But those whose early married life is instantly
complete in total physical and emotional fusion think everyone else is
the same as they are and they don’t know what they _have_ any more than
we did not know what we did not have. A colour-blind man in a world
of people all colour-blind would not suspect his affliction. Possibly
it wouldn’t be an affliction. He might only laugh at the extraordinary
persons who say they can see colours in things visible, just as we now
consider people freaks who say they can see colour in sounds.”
“Do you think, dear, that most people are blind to the kind of love we
see now?”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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