Love is Illusion, Madness
Literature abounds with references to the foolish side of
love. He who has love in himself is a fool, proclaimed
Sophocles in his Antigone. This same line is repeated
in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night's, or in William
Congreve’s The old bachelor: «If this be not love, it
is madness, and then it is pardonable».
Folly, unthinkable declarations, sentimental intoxication,
coloured visions of reality. Illusion. Marcel Proust wrote:
When love is too big, the real woman’s role is unimaginably
small.
Love is a flagrant example of how reality is but a trifle to
us.
On the other hand, passionate love is a salutary
foolishness. Passionate love is mostly poetry, enchantment,
a capacity for seeing life and the beloved being in a
magnifying light. «Common life is an insignificant
reflection of what happens in love», said Proust. «Love is
the supreme poetry of nature», considered Novalis. «To be in
love is to meet the desire of seeing the world with other
eyes», wrote Alberoni.
The true madness is in other types of love: it is in the
love of money, for instance. Or in the love of some
religious ideals, a source of mad acts such as the September
11 attacks.
In fact, strangely, behind the hate to those who are
targeted by such acts, there is also love in terrorist acts:
a fundamentalist’s love to a supreme God, and love of a
divine cause. And it is this extreme love that causes hate
against all that may oppose the cause and the God.
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Quotations
Love is Madness
For stony limits cannot hold love out,
And what love can do that dares love attempt.
William Shakespeare, 1564-1616, English poet, Romeo and
Juliet
Common life is an insignificant reflection of what happens in
love
Marcel Proust, 1871-1922, French writer, The Prisoner
We knew passions could make us mad, but one should also state
that they can illuminate.
E. Morin, French philosopher and sociologist, Method V
Lovers and madmen have such seething brains,
Such shaping fantasies, that apprehend
More than cool reason ever comprehends.
William Shakespeare, 1564-1616, English poet, Midsummer’s
Night Dream
The lunatic, the lover, and the poet
Are of imagination all compact
One sees more devils than vast hell can hold,
That is the madman: the lover, all as frantic,
Sees Helen's beauty in a brow of Egypt:
The poet's eye, in a fine frenzy rolling,
Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven;
And, as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen
Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name.
Such tricks hath strong imagination,
That, if it would but apprehend some joy,
It comprehends some bringer of that joy;
Or in the night, imagining some fear,
How easy is a bush supposed a bear!
William Shakespeare, 1564-1616, English poet, Midsummer’s
Night Dream
The desire of love bewitches and turns fool the heart of the
victim. It bewitches the mountain lions, the fishes of the sea,
men, and all the creatures fed by Earth.
Euripides, 480-406 b. C., Greek author, Hypolitus
Books, Films,
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other related issues? See
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Romantic Love? See also:
Beauty and love
Love is a game
Big and small loves
Love and fidelity
Abelard
and Heloise
Love in
Literature
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