love.
romantic love. familial love. companionate love. sexual love.
passion. intimacy. commitment.
eros. philia. ludus. agape. pragma. philautia. storge. mania.
what kind of mathematical formula is this ? if we try to reduce love into one more simplistic frame of understanding for our feeble mind to comprehend, love is a feeling of affection that our conscious mind wants to make sense of. it’s instinctual, it’s habitual - our reflex to put meanings on something we don’t understand. does it actually have some inherent meaning and we are discovering it, or are we just arbitrarily interpreting something out of nothing ?
call it black-and-white thinking or whatever you understand it is. like a piece of art whose origin has already been lost to time, our conscious mind can only attempt to figure out the meaning behind the feelings we have, while the intention of the author - our unconscious mind - forever remains eluded. the moment the feeling springs up, seemingly out of nowhere, who knows whether the feeling has come from the current context or inspired by a scenery forever beyond our grasp, lost to the passage of time ?
love. like the meaning of a piece of art as malleable as the mind that attempts to understand it, it can be anything, or nothing at all. it can be both full of intention, or as whimsical as a castaway stroke of wind. it can be anything you want it to be, or everything beyond your control. it’s like schrodinger’s cat: the “truth”, if any, is lost to time, and one can only speculate. the truth is the lack of truth.
suddenly quantum theory is a lot more romantic than it seems. i want a book on this.