Chapter 9 Summary and Analysis

All human beings experience solitude throughout their lives when dealing with separation, loss, and abandonment. Solitude involves escapism and insight into the condition that everyone tries to avoid. Just as love involves longing, solitude is regarded as suffering. There is punishment as well as promise of its end inherent in such condition. Both solitude and love are to provide more life. Escaping the solitude of birth and death is challenging as circumstances continually compel us towards it at the same time. In the same way, we are pulled away from love through our social existence, time, reason, and habits.

Society opposes love through morals, classes, laws, and races. As women are treated as instruments or in the way prescribed to them, love tends to be not natural. The Christian concept of sin and social disapproval made love impossible because of the...