LUCIFER:  Thou didst before I came upon thee.

    CAIN:  How?

    LUCIFER:  By suffering.

BYRON:  Cain, Act II., Scene I.

The most tragic thing in the world and in life, readers and brothers of mine, is love.  Love is the child of illusion and the parent of disillusion; love is consolation in desolation; it is the sole medicine against death, for it is death’s brother.

    Fratelli, a un tempo stesso, Amore e Morte
    Ingenero la sorte,

as Leopardi sang.

Love seeks with fury, through the medium of the beloved, something beyond, and since it finds it not, it despairs.

Whenever we speak of love there is always present in our memory the idea of sexual love, the love between man and woman, whose end is the perpetuation of the human race upon the earth.  Hence it is that we never succeed in reducing love either to a purely intellectual or to a purely volitional element, putting aside that part in it which belongs to the feeling, or, if you like, to the senses.  For, in its essence, love is neither idea nor volition; rather it is desire, feeling; it is something carnal in spirit itself.  Thanks to love, we feel all that spirit has of flesh in it.

Sexual love is the generative type of every other love.  In love and by love we seek to perpetuate ourselves, and we perpetuate ourselves on the earth only on condition that we die, that we yield up our life to others.  The humblest forms of animal life, the lowest of living beings, multiply by dividing themselves, by splitting into two, by ceasing to be the unit which they previously formed.

But when at last the vitality of the being that multiplies itself by division is exhausted, the species must renew the source of life from time to time by means of the union of two wasting individuals, by means of what is called, among protozoaria, conjugation.  They unite in order to begin dividing again with more vigour.  And every act of generation consists in a being’s ceasing to be what it was, either wholly or in part, in a splitting up, in a partial death.  To live is to give oneself, to perpetuate oneself, and to perpetuate oneself and to give oneself is to die.  The supreme delight of begetting is perhaps nothing but a foretaste of death, the eradication of our own vital essence.  We unite with another, but it is to divide ourselves; this most intimate embrace is only a most intimate sundering.  In its essence, the delight of sexual love, the genetic spasm, is a sensation of resurrection, of renewing our life in another, for only in others can we renew our life and so perpetuate ourselves.