Maria Popova at The Marginalian:
Few things in life cause us more suffering than the confusions of love, all the wrong destinations at which we arrive by following a broken compass, having mistaken myriad things for love: admiration, desire, intellectual affinity, common ground.
This is why knowing whether you actually love somebody can be so difficult, why it requires the rigor of a theorem, the definitional precision of a dictionary, and the courage to weather the depredations of time.
In On the Calculation of Volume (public library) — her startlingly original reckoning with the bewilderments of time and love, partway between Einstein’s Dreams and Ulysses — Danish author Solvej Balle offers the best definition of love I’ve encountered since Iris Murdoch’s half a century ago:
The sudden feeling of sharing something inexplicable, a sense of wonder at the existence of the other — the one person who makes everything simple — a feeling of being calmed down and thrown into turmoil at one and the same time.
more here.
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