If heat can’t heal it, nothing can
The amazement that can turn out to have been the beginning of love usually leads nowhere but still alerts one to the value at which full-blown love would stand in amazement. Lucky for me, my wife sometimes strikes me afresh with wonder, as if I hadn’t already known her for forty years: she strikes me, then, as if she were a wonderful stranger. If I weren’t vulnerable to strangers, I would be lacking in vulnerability to that occasional stranger who is my wife.
Feeling incipient love for a perfect stranger thus enlivens one’s capacity for appreciating personhood in other ways. It may be followed by reflective solitude or depressing loneliness or the thought of a real-life lover, all of which are further ways of valuing personhood.
{ J. David Velleman, Sociality and Solitude | Continue reading }
