No, I’m smiling, the husband says. It’s my way of smiling. I want this grimace to be uniquely my own.Love is not just. Love does not deal in equality, nor does it acknowledge rights. Like the unreasoned whims of fate that make one man tall and smart while another is left deformed and brainless without even material comforts as compensation, love gives to the undeserving and takes from the worthy.
Thank you, thank you, Johannes, dear; it’s so sweet of you not to be furious with me, she said, wiping away her tears. But you mustn’t think I don’t love you too. By God, I’ll come and see you much more often than before and do everything you desire. It’s just that I love him more. I didn’t want it that way. It’s not your fault.
Love is God’s first word, the first thought that sailed through his brain. When he said, “Let there be light!” there was love. And everything that he made was very good, and no part thereof did he wish undone. And love became the world’s beginning and the world’s ruler; but all its ways are full of flowers and blood, flowers and blood.
Love is the truth in "To those who have much, more will be given, and to those who have little, even what they have will be taken from them." Love gives and takes in scandalous disproportion. Like Joseph Merrick, love is a misshapen Elephant Man. Like Proteus, it shapeshifts while we try to pin it down (which never we can) but we will try anyway.
You disagree? Love isn't out of its mind? True love anyway. But what of all things is true love if it isn't a madman on a dream? Who would say that scaling Cliffs of Insanity, enduring the Pit of Despair, and fighting Rodents of Unusual Size is anything but a wildly inappropriate response to life?
Love is inappropriate.
If you seek balance, do not venture near love or any of those who move in that circus crowd: mercy, selflessness, humility, kindness, compassion, sacrifice, forgiveness, and grace--these are not well-balanced individuals. They are a set of lunatics prancing about in their underpants; they are flower bedecked babies fully grown, who have scraped their knees and elbows. Their giddiness makes us feel embarrassed for them, but that feeling's tricky since in its loftiness it has pity which might be disdain and if we look at it our embarrassment on their behalf looks very much like jealousy on their account. After all, they do seem to be enjoying themselves, for all their scrapes and bruises. And love is their tyrant leader, the great extortionist.
Do you see, love just isn't just. You'll pardon that literary atrocity because love works in atrocities and outrages and in disturbing and in discomfort.
It is Victoria who is writing this, and God is reading over my shoulder.
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