Great love destroys people because those who love personally and exclusively cannot contain love as it really is.
Only the stellar system is profound and total enough to illustrate the possibilities of the love of man and woman.
The universe, in fact, is life’s symbol of their potential.
Love’s destruction of a man or woman is the making of a star.
The making of a star is love incarnate; untouchable, unattainable except through the destruction it surely and lovingly works among those who love the earth — those who see the light but not the star.
The star is in the beholder.
Love that does not begin to glimpse its own beauty within the beholder is earthbound and deathbound. Love that does is also doomed, but in a different way; it has to go beyond the earth and its exclusive loving into the terrible aloneness of deep space. The journey is a self-consuming destruction of all the previous personal love that would endeavour to preserve the persons loved, with beautiful motive but untenable selfishness, denying them the inevitable destiny of becoming their own star.
So the love of my children becomes the love of any child; my mother, any mother; my people, any people; my love, all things; my life, all life. And each moment of love is dictated by where I am and what I do, for where I am is life.
Life’s infinite appeal is its refusal to compromise with death, destruction or man’s ideas of good and evil.
Because man cannot face the fact of life’s infinite destruction, he fears.
Fear is anxious caring. Life does not care; and yet it cares beyond all caring for it destroys and rampages only so that the infinite play of life may continue.
Can man live like life?
Can he stop fearing, or anxiously caring?
Can he destroy his fears and ideas every moment as life destroys itself, and begin fresh and new every moment?
Can he cease to compromise, not with people, but with his fears of what people will say or think? For apart from fear of tomorrow, that is perhaps his most virulent fear.
Can he never again look back with sorrow or regret on what he has done? And so cease compromising with his imagination and excuses?
When man ceases to compromise with himself he finds caring turns to love.
A woman’s perception is different to a man’s, more intuitive; so her way is different.
Women have less habit in them than men. The grooves of habit do not run so deep. Their clinging is more superficial.
They are more able to forego and forbear when their outer crust is penetrated.
They have more love in them than men; not the superficial love that in most women clings or even serves, but the unexpressed love that plays across the grooves of habit to diminish them. This is the terrible unpredictable love that draws, weakens and destroys man.
This love is the thing in woman that a man says he cannot understand. It is her forgetfulness, her flightiness, her unreliability, irresponsibility and caprice; all the elements that destroy her own habit and man’s expectation. All searing, universal; impersonal love. When woman is made perfect, and she is all this love, she is uncontainable.