Two years have lapsed since college and people still look at me as some loveless dolt. True, I have never had a girlfriend; true, I have had some bizarre attractions; true, I had chosen not only to be single, but to be alone. In a world where love is quickly becoming more of an economic factor rather than something innate in every human being, I find myself being left behind, a man with absolutely nothing, not even love.
The tendency is to give in to the pressure of creating for oneself a normal life where family and work are the only concerns of your life, loosened up by the occasional visits of friends. This pressure is furthered by the encouragement of your gang of friends, who are waiting to see you surrender to the normalcy and are themselves preparing for such, looking up to you as the one who has been there, done that. But all these seem to be a fain definition of a life, a simple and rather uneventful choice that most citizens of the world would choose over altruistic sacrifice. Hell, I cannot even prove to others that choosing otherwise is at least as satisfying as the choice of living the good life!
Love becomes the means to enforce the ordinary choice. Thus I would be ridiculed as a faggot or perfectionist or moron or shyster, dismissed as someone whose love is either too simple or too complex—and even utilitarian—paired with ladies who seem to suffer the same lovelorn condition that is my predicament, and God knows what else I must have experienced for my different vision of love, given the forgetfulness of my tired mind. These actions by other people should have normally broken anyone’s resistance.
Even I, as a matter of philosophical discipline, have subjected myself to asking in a doubtful fashion why I continue to reject love as an ingredient in my life. I have unwittingly debunked the idea that I have wisdom and intelligence; my financial security is drawing to a close as my parents are prepping up themselves for retirement; I have very few friends (friends are different from friendlies) and even fewer confidantes. (You know that you’re in my inner circle once I speak to you in what I call the “English of the heart” – which you can determine as highfalutin.) Is it a matter of being afraid to step out into the abyss, hoping that Indiana Jones’ invisible bridge will catch your (mis-)step? Is it my rejection of life as a desirable thing?
I see love not as a means, but as an end. I do not see it as a comfortable pillow where I can shed my tears until I’m lulled into dreaminess. I do not sense it as a perfume that makes my head turn to see the beautiful lady whose face I missed because I was busy concocting formulae and proofs. I do not think of it as the solution to the problems. Rather, it is the problem, it is the concern, and in the words of Paul Tillich, it is my ultimate concern.
But while it does render me catatonic and helpless, love fails to arouse me into action – which is precisely what love should be doing to the one experiencing it. A wrong definition of love? Perhaps. And yet, if you are going to contest it, my definition is not so different as yours, as his and hers, and theirs.
So why should not I look for love? Maybe it’s the realization that I am a program. I need not be the genius who redefines himself as a being other than the human being. I need not be the invisible software that exists only as the mechanism of computers. I simply have to refuse the classification that I can love and be loved. I cannot create; I can only enforce the creativity of that undeniable being whom others call God. That my ultimate concern is love does not negate my assertion; in fact it makes sense that love is the object of my feeble powers, for the logic by which I have been transformed makes me the cosmopolitan that I have become. My views are irrelevant or at most only a part of this universalist weltanschauung. My life is driven by the search for an answer – an answer to the challenge of love.
You may say that love can only be responded to by love. But love challenges me in a different manner: how can love be governed? Ah, that is a subject for another time. I shall be content for with my discontentment of this drivel that unfortunately you have just read.
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