“Love is the answer,” the wall insists, like a palimpsest of exhausted certainties — a phrase so over-circulated it has become almost apotropaic in its repetition.
And yet, standing here, I think of the writers who arrived at the same conclusion only after circling the perimeter of despair — after anatomising cruelty, entropy, and the quiet attrition of human relationships.
There is a difference between the sentimental and the salvific.
Between the facile injunction to “be kind” and the unadorned recognition that tenderness is the last remaining instrument against annihilation.
Sometimes a cliché endures because it is all that survives after the rest of the language has collapsed.
Even William Burroughs saw it, eventually.
In one of his final journal entries, he writes:
“Love? What is it? Most natural painkiller what there is. LOVE.”
(Photo: d.)