28 April 2011 M: I reveal no secrets in referencing your suggestion that it is perhaps for the best that a selfannihilating love

(for such was the term I used to describe it) should be a rare thing, and one likely to burn itself out in time, and that all this is for the best. When we were yet in regular communication, it was my habit never to disagree with you, except in those cases - far too frequent, but, thankfully, grown (it would seem) far less so with the passage of time - in which your own lack of self-knowledge led you to underestimate yourself, insult yourself, or otherwise speak ill of one I considered very nearly perfect. I revert now to my old ways. Self-annihilating love does not destroy itself; rather, it is the self of the one who loves that seeks annihilation (and thereby, perfection). Which is to say, it is a love that seeks, not happiness for one who suffers from it (for loss of self is a most painful shattering of a most persistent delusion, but one wholly necessary and even essential), but rather, one that aspires to honor and reverence that spark of divinity and perfection it has found in another. In loving thus, one loves a person as an individual instance and instantiation of the God in Whose image and likeness she was made, for each soul surely bears some unique mark of Him who wrote it. Nor is this a rare phenomenon; I would make so bold as to suggest that this is the normal mode of romantic love. For, as it seems to me, anything less would be mere mammalian perpetuation of the species, for which such powerful passions are most certainly not required. As there are no vain or superfluous desires or drives found in nature (I will take Aristotle's word for it, and it matches my own experience as well), this is with us for a reason. This intensity of passion is also what drives the scholar and philosopher and poet. As odd as it may seem, the love of a scholar for his text is an image of the love of one soul for another - his commentaries and meditations and searches for alternate interpretations, these are his love letters. The classical and medieval philosophers - what did they seek but Wisdom, personified as the Lady Sophia? Re-read their works and find in them the heart of a lover on each page. And the poets, with their ceaseless invocations of the Muses, in what way did they differ from Dante invoking his Beatrice in Paradise, or - though I do not claim to belong in such august company - my looking for you in the texts of the poets of courtly love? All of which is to say, this is more common than perhaps one would suspect. In our case, the very facts of its simplicity and brevity saved our closeness from the

spiritual metastasis that marked my love for Lady A. I am not ashamed to admit that I loved you naively; yes, that is the best and only word for it - naive. I loved you, I saw perfection in you, and that was enough for me. No explanations were required, as it was the simplest, most natural thing in the world. With Lady A, however, things became more complicated by both duration of time and the difficulty of the case. She became to me, as it were, an extremely dense and difficult-tounderstand text; like all scholars, I required an elaborate interpretive apparatus to begin even the most basic approach. Over time, this body of thought, writing, meditation, memory, and all the rest of it, gradually took on a life of its own, and itself became in need of interpretation, which, because of the density of the underlying text, in turn generated its own apparatus. The very difficulty of it all only proved, tested, and strengthened my love for her; the greater the challenge, the more indecipherable the signs and indications, the more did I seek a meaning to it all. I don't know if you're at all familiar with the Talmud; frankly, I'd be surprised if you were. Regardless, it is nothing more than the accretion of commentary, memory, tradition, and argumentation from many centuries' study of Hebrew Scripture. It is dense, impenetrable, self-referential - a world unto itself, in fact. And thus it was with my love for Lady A - it existed in large part as commentary and interpretation. The very fact that the previouslypublished draft of a letter to her should have so much in the way of commentary (much of it recalled, true, but quite a bit of it actually written as marginalia and side-notes to myself) attached to what is, after all, a fairly banal body of text, shows how out-of-hand the thing had become. And the fact that, even now, I should recall so much of it all, so many of its details and incidents - this shows the extent to which I had dwelt on and pondered the whole affair, to the point that I could write, over ten years ago, "Mit dir, Lili Marleen," as a side-note and yet even now recall the incident to which that otherwise cryptic note refers, and, as I am not ashamed to confess, smile through silent tears at the beauty and folly and madness of it all. Of the few who knew me at the time, my Housemate was perhaps the only one who had any inkling of what was going on, and this only because she intruded by reading one of my drafts. Had she not done so, I doubt very much that anyone at all would know about it without my revealing it. She said herself that she had no idea so much could be going on in anyone's head, when she had me to explain to her the meaning of my side-notes, marginalia, and other such writings on the draft she found. No one could suspect, she said, any of it, as I presented to the world then the image of an affably indifferent and impoverished (though I had a good income at the time) scholar. "People," she said to me "wouldn't believe you capable of romance, and certainly nothing like this. It's like an entire culture and civilization fell in love with one woman, and she has no idea at all."

You may be surprised to learn that I married a woman altogether unlike you or Lady A. She was so young when we met, and all she asked was for friendship. She fell in love, as I learned from one of her friends, and I, for reasons largely cryptic but in part also from inertia and exhaustion after Lady A, I decided "as well her as another, and I am unlikely to find another." She knows me as an over-read, over-educated, largely superficial man who, for all that, is a good father. We have children, who are all that have kept us together, and, when they leave, I imagine one of us will leave with them. For all that, though, it is not a bad life. Please be well, and may every happiness be yours. C.