What may conquer the spirit of a man? Not war. Not famine. Not disease. Not death. No, only starvation of love may conquer the spirit of a man. It is not good for a man to be alone. Would it then be safe to say that it is an evil for a man to be alone. Countless stanzas of love starved sonnets line the folios in the shelves of the human soul. Thousands upon thousands of beating hearts can be heard, even in the distant past, as the army of romantics march on into the greatest battle the human soul. Some march into hopeful victory and some march into merciless defeat. Myriads of love songs litter the soul literature of every great and small, past and present, barbaric and cultured civilization.
A man deprived of love is as a starved and abandoned infant. Left on the doorstep of some unbeknownst stranger. Helpless to feed itself, a neglected infant lies in wait for some conscience-bound soul to pity its unfortunate circumstances. Yet, where a child cries in the pain of hunger and cold, a loveless man aches of a different pain; pain of sadness and loss of feeling. Both abandoned child and loveless man are deprived, both are lacking, both experience similar desperate conditions. Only, where the child may loose its life, the man may only loose his will to live. Life is unbearable to both. Yet, where the child is only aware of its condition because of the pains experienced in the body, the man is not only aware of the experience but he must stand under the consciousness of the constant struggle at all times. One will wither and die if it is not given food and shelter; the other will shrink into himself in loneliness and soon his soul will die of a broken heart if the rays of love’s sunlight do not rest on the shadows of his cold morning sorrow. Any right-minded bargaining man would prefer the state of the abandoned child over the state of the loveless man. The child is to be envied, the man eternally pitied. So why is that the infant is pitied more than the man?
He is dying inside. He has barely enough energy to live, but not enough to go on caring. You can look a man right in the eye and tell whether or not there is a love-starved soul. You taste anger, you feel aggression, You smell a fearful soul. He feels the weight of struggle even if there is nothing that immediately presents itself as something to struggle with. He’s battling himself, for it is within his own heart that the unfilled desire arises. There is no light in his eye. Look into the eye of a man in love and you will see the reflection of the sun, but look into the eye of a man without love and you will see only blackness; deep and sorrowful blackness.
A man can drive himself into destitution created by his own sense of abandonment. The world is a lonely place even when you’re with the one you love, but its even more oppressive of a place when you bear the weight of it all alone. As the young child fears the separation from a parent in a foreign place, so also does a young man fear the lostness of loneliness and the anxiety of desperateness. Soon he hardens. Soon he calluses. It is likely he responds this way because there is none to care for him and thus, for him to care at all seems ridiculous and fleeting. His basic needs remain unmet. What child can survive the lack of basic human need? The same is true for a grown man. What man cans survive the emptiness; the distress that accompanies the lack of mutual affection? When he feels the weight of the millstone dragging him to the bottom of the sea, there is little that any can do to save him.
There are different degrees of destitution. A lover is destitute of the loved. Their love weakens each other to the point of unnatural dependence so that if the one is gone the other is in disrepair. A mother is destitute over the loss of her child. It’s often said to be more than she can bear.
A world-sadness of ill-proportioned senses overwhelms a man when he learns he has nothing to offer, when he comes to regard himself without personal worth, without real purpose, without definite direction. The love of a woman gives a man those senses and when he finds them, life paints a different picture. Sometimes it takes the strength to give up. Not that I am giving in, it’s just a sort of letting go. The road we walk has its smooth surfaces, but then more often than not we’re walking blindly. The way has been made by those long gone passer-by’s who trod along making headway without knowing where the path was leading them. For life is only paid in sorrow and the days thereof with grief. We stumble at every obstacle; we go astray at every thought of release from our trials. Our strength deteriorates with each cycle of the moon.
Love urges us on. Is it the idea or is it the experience? It’s like an itch on the roof of your mouth that your tongue cant scratch hard enough.