Love is an extraordinary concept - it implies a connection that has at once a physiological, psychological and spiritual quality. It also implicitly bestows upon its bestower, the lover, both respect and responsibility. Therefore Love is  indeed all-consuming, in that it consumes at once all the person, the person's identity and all that person's Time. It potentially totally consumes the whole person, as it involves the whole person. Love is indeed blind, for being so all-consumed, it can have no sense outside itself, for self -  let alone extra-self, awareness, let alone have room spare within, for such awareness. Love cannot be reasoned with, nor be empathised with. Its mental identity gallops reinless and its psychological identity is unique.Certainly that begrudging respect automatically given all those who love, clothes them with an identity that makes of their own, an inferior stranger. And Love is indeed, the consumer of all Time , as it demands eternity as the pinnacle of its endeavour and a lifetime of solicitude and responsibility that inform the blood-signed contract.

Love has also very abnormal, inhuman, suicidal tendencies - it eschews heeding such survival instincts as the drive to eat, self-protect, be part of the herd etc. It swims, lemming-like but solitarily, to the perimeter of the herd, shuns sustenance, takes off all its armour and assumes maximum vulnerability, willing to risk life,  liberty,  identity - nay, even sanity - in a game at which it can surely never win. For if it win, it has lost all that the rest of Mankind covets. If it lose, it has reclaimed that Universe but lost the only thing worth living for. No, this is not logical, but it makes sense to the feelings.

The love for a partner, a child, a friend, an animal, Nature, Music - it is all the same. The wave engulfs and the sea-change at once destroys and recreates.

One cannot be both a Philosopher and a Lover. Nor can one choose. We are born as philosophers, some with more potential for complexity than others. We seek love with a desperation only marginally more beautiful than it is pathetic. And we seek the Meaning of Life only when such search is temporarily postponed.

Like Poetry, Dreams and all things remembered only fleetingly and imperfectly on re-assuming everyday consciousness, Love remains, unlike the Meaning of Life, never more than something touched and lost, something guessed at, whispered of, mused over, reached for........

Bertrand Russell - "Love is something far more than desire for sexual intercourse; it is the principal means of escape from the loneliness which afflicts most men and women throughout the greater part of their lives."
La Rochefoucauld - 'If we judge of love by its usual effects, it resembles hatred more than friendship'.
Bruyere - 'At the beginning and at the end of love the two lovers are embarrassed to find themselves alone'
de Unamuno - 'Love is the child of illusion and the parent of disillusion'.

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