As requested, here are my thoughts on love as presented in our group presentation on Friday. I chose to approach this topic for our modern symposium by viewing the idea of love through the lens of the arts...and also my own belief that love is not, as this society professes so openly, a system of codependence fueled by past scars and barely concealed bitterness, nor is it something paltry and inconsequential. Rather, love is....more than all this....yet contained in everything we ever see.... We cannot think of it divorced somehow from who we are or from this world. We cannot think of it as existing with no connection whatsoever to our souls and our lives, the purpose of our existence.
"In the arts, love is a constant, beating energy as real as the canvas before us, the brush held in our hands. It feeds our every inspiration. Love of life, love of passion, love of truth. Every painting you have ever seen has something to do with some form of love in this life, or the absence thereof.
In my case, I am in love with life. I am in love with the light in a street puddle. I am in love with the bare branches of a dormant tree lit up by one lonely street lamp. I see my life, my art, my love, in every wistful cloud, every full and perfect morning, every single breath of air. In these moments, I am in love, perhaps not even with the sight itself, but with my ability to see it and with my heart for its ability to withstand such joy. Love is no passing compulsion; it is not a pastime or luxury. Love is life.
In one writer’s words, “It is with a sense of life that one falls in love—with that essential sum, that fundamental stand or way of facing existence, which is the essence of a personality. One falls in love with the embodiment of the values that formed a person’s character, which are reflected in his widest goals or smallest gestures, which create the style of his soul—the individual style of a unique, unrepeatable, irreplaceable consciousness” (Ayn Rand’s Romantic Manifesto). True love, then, is the quickening in the heart of this recognition, the meeting of souls as from a great distance.
Far too many speak of love as some sort of bondage. From the moment one feels its touch, they say one is taken prisoner. Love is a sickness. Love is blind. We have all heard these expressions. Love is none of these things. Love is freedom.
When we feel love, we feel the falling away of all fleeting ambitions, all preconceived notions, and every self-imposed boundary or limitation. While in its grasp, we are the fullest versions of ourselves that we can possibly be. And that thought terrifies us. No other force on earth reveals so fully or so truthfully exactly who we are. In our choice of partner we betray the secrets of our soul.
So, you see, love is not something of chains and imprisonment, nor of battered hearts besieged. The height of love is the height of true, absolute freedom. One writer put it most succinctly, “Love is reverence, and worship, and glory, and the upward glance” (Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead).
We crave love in this life because we crave the fulfillment of our true selves. This does not come from another. It comes from ourselves in the presence of another, our equal.
As an artist, I have chosen to follow an ongoing tradition of those dedicated to their love. I hope thereby to find my freedom."
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