On Love and Death

Patrick Suskind

The price paid for love is always the loss of reason, abandonment of the self, and thus the surrender of adult responsibility.

Orpheus, we must remember, is an artist, and like all artists not without vanity, or let us say not without pride in his art. And like many artists, particularly the performing arts, he relies on an audience to watch him, listen to him, applaud him or at least react to him in some way, an audience from whose behaviour he can assess the effect of his singing.

Suskind's examination of the Orpheus and Eurydice myth is the most attractive part of this little essay. There's a lot that is twisted in here, but there is also a lot that isn't. Love and death go hand in hand in the human tradition. It's good, sometimes, to think about them together, as Suskind does. Just be careful.