"To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly be broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket — safe, dark, motionless, airless — it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable.
The alternative to tragedy, or at least to the risk of tragedy, is damnation. The only place outside of Heaven where you can be perfectly safe from all the dangers and perturbations of love is Hell."
C. S. Lewis
2 comments:
I really agree with this quotation. Ultimately one of the most difficult aspects of love is that you put your happiness under someone else's control. When you love someone, their choices can bring you overwhelming joy or excruciating pain. For some it is easy to love, for others it is difficult; but for all those who contemplate the madness that is falling in love, the associated vulnerability is perhaps the most frightening part.
C. S. Lewis certainly knew what it meant to love and to lose... his wife of only four years died of cancer when he was about 62.
Heh, I used the word perhaps... who does that anymore?
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