Fool's Quest

At 13, a reading assignment brought me my first encounter with love. A Shakespearean masterpiece, containing a dialogue that has been etched in my mind ever since. We should hold day with the Antipodes, if you would walk in absence of the sun. Quoting another classic, a sitcom brought me the next noteworthy meeting soon after. When I was sixteen, I made the discovery - love. All at once and much, much too completely. It was like you suddenly turned on a blinding light on something that had always been half in shadow, that’s how it struck the world for me. With Wuthering Heights, I couldn't have gotten halfway through when I had to start a new collection of my favorite quotes for want of space.

I'm beginning to believe that I might have started writing because I wanted to evoke the same paroxysm of earnest emotion in somebody, anybody, as I felt, upon reading such sublime literature. An indescribable, uncontainable, omnipotent euphoria - a warmth of a thousand fires and a hope of a million prayers. An all-consuming delirium to immerse oneself in profound, unadulterated affection. Before, I had been oscillating between two paradoxical ideologies all my life. It was too easy to give into cogent explanations of biochemistry, and too difficult to let go of the enigma that is the irrationality of love. But words like these, and life, have me convinced, and today, there's one cynic lesser, and one hopeless romantic more in the world.

And yet, there is something terrifyingly amiss about our priorities when it comes to broken hearts and bruised egos. It has become too unchallenging to give up on love. Maybe it's because nobody came across a discourse potent enough to foster the next wave of lovers. Maybe science is to blame, for it's the Flynn effect that enables us to reason our way out of any painfully real sentiment. Maybe the freedom, the awareness, the inexhaustible options - it's all too hard to resist. We could argue the cause indefinitely, but the conclusion would remain achingly unambiguous.

I haven't ever been much of a rebel. But some ideals are worth the fight. I'll persist in my pursuit of the right words, the ones that will someday hopefully be enough to keep one's passions aglow. And if someday it becomes too arduous to keep my faith, I, for one, have some excellent compositions to borrow from.

Until then, may the Universe give us plenty more chances to find our bliss.

May we only need one.