Lovers know what social scientists sometimes fail to understand: everyone is an individual before and after he or she is a member of a race, a class, or a profession, and that these differences, so tiny that they can only be seen in the minute mutual scrutiny of a bedroom are the source of the identity that is primary for a person… In love we want to banish father and mother as fully as we can, if only to banish the Oedipal taboos that linger and bleach away desire.
… it becomes an essential activity of the intelligence to safeguard the meaning of the romantic tradition (the integrity of love poetry, for example) so that our children can still grow up hearing the dream speaking from its source, as in Shakespeare’s Sonnet 31, with its sublimely wise vision of love based not on flight from the shades of the past but on finding a home for the past in the loves of the present:
Thou art the grave where buried love doth live
Hung with the trophies of my lovers gone
Who all their parts of me to thee did give
That due of many now is thine alone.
Their images I loved I view in thee
And thou, all they, has all the all of me
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