Oh, Sunday afternoons tend to lead to discomforting reading, and, not being a chap for church, my dosage today came from a larkish flipping through Jaroslav Pelikan's horribly-edited
The World Treasury of Modern Religious Thought. Flipping, flipping, flipping, I stumbled on this excerpt from a piece by Kierkegaard:
The fact of love abiding, or, perhaps more correctly, the question of whether it really abides in this or that case, or whether it ceases: is something which occupies the thoughts of men in such manifold ways, is so frequently the subject of their conversation, and very frequently the prinicipal content of all their poets' works. It is regarded as praiseworthy that love abides, but as unworthy that it does not last, that it ceases, that it changes. Only the first is love; the other seems, because of the change, not to be love-- and consequently not to have been love. The facts are these, one cannot cease to be loving; if one is in truth loving, one remains so; if one ceases to be loving, then one was not loving. Ceasing to love has therefore, in relation to love, a retroactive power. Moreover, I can never weary of saying this and of demonstrating it: wherever there is love, there is something infinitely profound. For instance, a man may have had money, and when he no longer has it, it still remains entirely true that he had had money. But when one ceases to be loving, he has never been loving. What is still so gentle as love, and what so strict, so jealous for itself, so chastening as love!
--- Soren Kierkegaard, Works of Love
Excuse me a moment.
I can't even be bothered to parse through the antinomic problems of this sort of thing. Let's just say that I'm now feeling an uncontrollable desire to listen to Tina Turner-- and to have my stomach pumped.
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