One Hundred and Nine

Only fools say it’s better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all. Love is an illusion, the last illusion left in Pandora’s box when all the others are gone. I’ve always known it, and always striven not to know - striven to believe, or suspend my disbelief, in love.

I was a child and she was a child
In this kingdom by the sea
But we loved with a love that was more than love
I and my Annabel Lee.

A love that’s more than love is all that remains of what we used to call religion, which Marx called the sigh of the oppressed and the heart of a heartless world.

The sea is calm tonight.

Listen! you hear the grating roar

Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,

At their return, up the high strand.

Begin, and cease, and then again begin,

With tremulous cadence slow, and bring

The eternal note of sadness in.

Sophocles long ago

Heard it on the Ægean, and it brought

Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow

Of human misery; we

Find also in the sound a thought,

Hearing it by this distant northern sea.

Ah, love, let us be true

To one another! for the world, which seems

To lie before us like a land of dreams,

So various, so beautiful, so new,

Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,

Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain.

We are like pebbles which the waves fling on the sandy shore. We rise from the sea, that eternal nothing from which all things are born, filled with love for this world so new and beautiful to us; but soon we learn it doesn’t love us as we love it. How could it, when it doesn’t know and love itself as we do? Our mission, the reason why we’re here, is to teach it how to love. Or so we think.

She and I loved each other with a love that was more than love. In loving her I loved the world as I knew it could and should be, because with her I was the man I could and should be. And if I could do that, anyone could. Or so I thought. But now the world’s as dead to me as she is. The man I was with her is dead, and I hate what I’ve become as much as I hate what the world's become.