Human love, human trust, are always perilous, because they break down.
The greater the love, the greater the trust, and the greater the peril,
the greater the disaster. Because to place absolute trust on another
human being is in itself a disaster, both ways, since each human being
is a ship that must sail its own course, even if it go in company with
another ship. Two ships may sail together to the world’s end. But lock
them together in mid-ocean and try to steer both with one rudder, and
they will smash one another to bits. So it is when one individual seeks
absolutely to love, or trust, another. Absolute lovers always smash one
another, absolute trusters the same. Since man has been trying
absolutely to love women, and women to love man, the human species has
almost wrecked itself. If now we start a still further campaign of men
loving and absolutely trusting each other, comrades or mates, heaven
knows the horror we are laying up.
And yet, love is the greatest thing between human beings, men and women,
men and men, women and women, when it is love, when it happens. But when
human love starts out to lock individuals together, it is just courting
disaster.
Man-and-woman love is a disaster nowadays. What a holy horror
man-and-man love would be: mates or comrades!
What is it then that is wrong? Why, human beings _can’t_ absolutely love
one another. Each man _does_ kill the thing he loves, by sheer dint of
loving it. Is love then just a horror in life?
Ah no. This individuality which each of us has got and which makes him a
wayward, wilful, dangerous, untrustworthy quantity to every other
individual, because every individuality is bound to react at some time
against every other individuality, without exception--or else lose its
own integrity; because of the inevitable necessity of each individual to
react away from any other individual, at certain times, human love is
truly a relative thing, not an absolute. It _cannot_ be absolute.
Yet the human heart must have an absolute. It is one of the conditions
of being human. The only thing is the God who is the source of all
passion. Once go down before the God-passion and human passions take
their right rhythm. But human love without the God-passion always kills
the thing it loves. Man and woman virtually are killing each other with
the love-will now. What would it be when mates, or comrades, broke down
in their absolute love and trust? Because, without the polarised
God-passion to hold them stable at the centre, break down they would.
With no deep God who is source of all passion and life to hold them
separate and yet sustained in accord, the loving comrades would smash
one another, and smash all love, all feeling as well. It would be a rare
gruesome sight.
Any more love is a hopeless thing, till we have found again, each of us
for himself, the great dark God who alone will sustain us in our loving
one another. Till then, best not play with more fire.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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