Nowadays, we have (unfortunately) more than enough enthusiasts to talk about love and among them, I am surely one of the less indicates to bark over it, be it as a subject or an object. However, in the spirit of our wholesome gathering in the midst of what used to be dystopian or surreal in our naive way to understand the world - I'd like to recall a beautiful piece from Plató called "The Symposium", one of the most eloquent conversations in the matter of love, and in which - and in time- a lot of clichés came to precipitate from.
The year is somewhere circa 380 B.C. and "The Symposium" invites us to a peculiar gathering of experts that "do a lot without doing a thing", Philosophers and poets who get tasked to prepare a speech about love while a comrade celebrates a recent theater award.
The diversity of approaches initially magnifies the topic: Love as a virtue, as a remedy, as the act of doing good deeds, love in the god above love in the man, etc. Towards the end Socrates takes the cherry in the discussion: it takes it out of place. Sharing a tale closer to a down to earth idea of love, we have the greatest take away, a love that happens in the act of giving birth in/from oneself and more important, an act that happens in beauty; a time when beauty had little to do with the aesthetics. Without digging dip on the book, I'd like to share (and rescue) instead some words of Aristophanes, the comedian, for he is not Socrates but not because of it, is farther than him from the truth, the one and only that we will never get to know. His speech is focused on the type of love that complements each other, and which I recall when I think in both of you, Aisha and Scott:
[ARISTOPHANES SPEAKS]
"(....) And when one of them meets with his other half, the actual half of himself whether he be a lover of youth or a lover of another sort, the pair are lost in an amazement of love and friendship and intimacy, and one will not be out of the other’s sight, as I may say, even for a moment: these are the people who pass their whole lives together; yet they could not explain what they desire of one another. For the intense yearning which each of them has towards the other does not appear to be the desire of lover’s intercourse, but of something else which the soul of either evidently desires and cannot tell, and of which she has only a dark and doubtful presentiment. Suppose Hephaestus, with his instruments, to come to the pair who are lying side by side and to say to them, ‘What do you people want of one another?’ They would be unable to explain. And suppose further, that when he saw their perplexity he said, ‘Do you desire to be wholly one; always day and night to be in one another’s company? For if this is what you desire, I am ready to melt you into one and let you grow together, so that being two you shall become one, and while you live, live a common life as if you were a single person, and after your death in the world below still be one departed soul instead of two, I ask whether this is what you lovingly desire, and whether you are satisfied to attain this?’ There is not a one of them who when he heard the proposal would deny or would not acknowledge that this meeting and melting into one another, this becoming one instead of two, was the very expression of his ancient need. And the reason is that human nature was originally one and we were a whole, and the desire and pursuit of the whole is called love."
May you find this whole my friends, cheers to that.
- Pablo Cesar Espinoza Lafuente 03, November 2020
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