Towards Love

George Mason on love as shared identity.

- George Mason

“where I does not exist, nor you, so close that your hand on my chest is my hand, so close that your eyes close as I fall asleep.”

Pablo Neruda, Sonnet XVII

In his dialogue The Symposium, Plato has Aristophanes recount his myth of the lovers. Human beings were once physically paired, Aristophanes says: creatures with two faces, four arms, four legs. In this form we were powerful enough to challenge the gods, and so Zeus split us forever in two. Condemned to this solitude, humans would wander the Earth searching for their lost halves, and on meeting them, “would throw their arms about each other, weaving themselves together, wanting to grow together.”

Aristophanes’ account speaks to a need still keenly felt today for an intimacy denied to us by the human condition: “Love is born into every human being; it calls back the halves of our original nature together; it tries to make one out of two and heal the wound of human nature.”

True, our psychological isolation is a necessary tragedy of our material individuation. We exist as physical beings, but we experience our selves as ephemeral coalitions of thought and feeling, forever bounded by flesh and bone. Words, endlessly ambiguous, are grievously imperfect vehicles for communication to another mind. Through them we give others not a window to our being and meaning, but a foundation on which to build their own; as Roland Barthes says, communication ultimately allows us representation in another’s mind, but never