In love, like nowhere, there are many underwater pits and traps. There are roads on which everything would be fine, but it often happens, as in Russian fairy tales: if you go to the left - you lose the horse, you go to the right - you yourself will disappear ...
“Do you know how I love him?” She writes. “To show this, I need to put the whole universe in front of you, - it is immense, and my love, my happiness are also immense! And all the dogmas and rules of decency are nothing before my feeling Why? Alas, he is married, I was late, and someone managed to get him away from me. And yet I am happy - he loves me ... Yes, I am for the girl who gave Mexico out of love for Cortes. Those who condemned her and now me, although the reasons are different, they’re wrong, no, they just don’t understand love ... You hear, I’m Beloved, you who forgot what waiting is and stand up speech, that meeting for which I will give the whole world and anything to give in. I am immensely happy, I am grateful to everyone that I love, I love! What can I say in response? Dogmas? I don’t hear them ... Be happy, happy in their own way, and wish me strength so that I do not spill my love. With love for you. "
This exultant letter was written several years ago, and I replied: thank you for writing so frankly about the most intimate, thank you for wishing us all happiness.
Many probably heard about drunk honey - honey from heather, which intoxicates, and even poisons. There is such “drunk honey” in love, and it can turn your head, cover your eyes and even knock you down.
Love through and through is dual, it is all an alloy of poles and contradictions, and this split into poles already begins with the double optics of love. The eyes of love see the virtues of a loved one enlarged - like with binoculars, and the disadvantages are reduced - like with inverted binoculars; love instills this double optics in our subconscious, and it is all being rebuilt according to its tuning forks.
So think about whether your feeling has such sympathy for your loved one. Your love is not one on one, you fell into a love triangle, and completely different laws reign in it. The sharp corners of this triangle have been crippled for centuries - and will be crippled for centuries - people's hearts. It is probably impossible to eliminate the tragedy of such a triangle, we can only try to behave in it as humane as possible.
Is your love enough for such humanity? Do you understand that your beloved is rushing between the rises of happiness and the failures of grief? Is it easy for him to chop alive, kill pieces of a living soul in himself and, most importantly, in his wife? If he has children, it is doubly difficult for him. And since it’s hard for him, maybe you shouldn’t just rejoice with happiness? Perhaps it would be more humane to empathize, sympathize with him? When happiness grows on someone else's misfortune, it is perhaps inhuman to turn a blind eye to it.
Of course, this is not about loving you or stepping on the throat of your song. This is your personal affair, this is a personal affair of those who are drawn into your triangle, and outsiders have no right to interfere in your destinies. It's not about loving or not loving, but about how to love. Unfortunately, in a triangle - at any exit - always someone is unhappy. Unfortunately, happiness in the misfortune of others is inevitable, as long as one love is supplanted by another. But perhaps the more humane it is necessary to be the one who receives everything and does not lose anything?
By the way, about the one who loses everything, you respond only as an obstacle: "I was late, and someone managed to get him away from me." Probably the opposite: you take him away from her. And most importantly - the letter does not show any pity for her, no desire to understand how unbearable "toothache in the heart" (Heine), does not show the desire to see a living person in her.
Love is not only a holiday, but also the hard work of the soul; not only a sweet flame, but also a heavy burden. Having fallen in love, you take responsibility for the fate of others, you share with your beloved everything important in his fate. It is in this division of the joys and hardships of a loved one - the main essence of the love "unity of souls". If there is no other unity with life, love is doomed to die quickly. And this is not moralism, not lean moralizing: here lies the very psychological essence of love feelings.
This is precisely what love differs from its poorer relatives, but many, unfortunately, do not see this. Dozens of centuries have said: love is stronger, love is weaker. In my opinion, this is not so. That is, it happens this way, but it happens the other way around: the difference here is not in the intensity of feeling, not in its "quantity", but in its "quality".
Love gravitates to the balance of two "I", it is as if bicentric, and the craving for such a balance is the very essence of her emotions, the very psychological matter from which her feelings are woven. It is like transferring one's “egoism” to another person, drawing another into the orbit of his “I-centrism”.
An unusual psychological state arises: it is as if your nerves are fused with the nerves of another person, and his joys sing in you, like yours, his sorrows poison you like your own. As if love fused two different biopsychic fields together, tuned them into deep unison, and they now live in almost twin resonance, repeating each other's invisible vibrations.
Love, as it were, instills in us the ability to transform into another person; it is a daily subconscious discovery in another soul of its underlying currents, a constant connection with the inner life of a loved one, empathy with his sorrows and joys. As soon as such a discovery ceases, as soon as the daily connection of the soul with the spiritual life of another person disappears, the core of love disappears.
Sympathy, or respect, or habit may remain, bodily gravitations may remain, but all this will be fragmented and isolated - scattered lights that are not merged into one fire by the clairvoyance of love, by the subconscious movement of others as oneself.
The uplifting power that allows a person to find unison with every step of his beloved with almost no effort and weightlessness of happiness disappears. And just as after physical weightlessness people feel their weight heavily, so here they with a strain begin to bear the burden of their heavy emotions.
Perhaps your feeling is not love yet, but love, a self-centered feeling, not a bicentric one. It has a lot from the geyser feeling, which throws out streams of joys, and a little from the x-ray feeling, which shines through the beloved to the depths and knows where to help him. Whether such love falls into love - that is, whether treasure is born in it to others as to itself - depends on the person himself. "
Falling in love is like an inner shadow of a person: it repeats the outlines of his character, and what it is depends on what kind of person it is. For a good person, it is more humane, richer, for an egoist - it is already, although, perhaps, hotter, more heated. Of course, falling in love can improve a person, raise him above himself, if he himself wants it, if he will help her.
When the attitude towards others, like oneself, begins to grow in such a person, then he himself will begin to change little by little, and, as an echo of these changes, his love will also change - it will develop into love. But climbing the peaks of such love is the hardest of climbing, because these peaks have to be worked out in oneself, and that means constantly growing the ability to tune in the waves of someone else’s soul, the ability to feel someone else’s pain as one’s own. And this again is not edification, but the only, unfortunately, opportunity to maintain love and good relations.
And now about what you can give for love. For the sake of love, "I will give the whole world and anything to boot." The power of such love can be understood. Love gives rise to a new and incomprehensible attitude to the world in a person, strange internal scales on which one person equally weighs, and all of humanity, a beloved being, and the entire globe.
And here we come to the very tip of the snag. Recall what the Aztec girl did, who out of love for Cortes "gave Mexico." This girl, Malinal (or Malinche), was a Mayan slave, and when Cortes defeated Maya, she became his wife, the mother of his children. She was smart, she had a striking flair, and she helped Cortes fight with the Indians, including her people.
Her story is tragic: she darted between love for a stranger who freed her from slavery and became her husband, and love for her land, which this stranger conquered with fire and sword. She did not “give” Mexico to Cortez - her role in the events was much less; and she had “extenuating circumstances”: then many Indian tribes were at enmity with each other, and the Aztecs were subjugators, despots of other tribes. But she helped a stranger who became her own for her, against her own, who became strangers to her. There is apostasy in her actions - for the love of one she paid with the blood of many. Of course, manners were cruel then, and the Aztecs were cruel; but they died, protecting their land, and not capturing someone else's.
It is clear that you are not for this, Alice, the whole spirit of your writing speaks about this. But what price can you pay for love? Does this board have a limit?
Of course, love is of great value. But is this the main value of life? Perhaps such a main value is humanism, the desire to improve one's life and other people? If so, then, probably, like everyone else in the world, it was humanity that should rule in love. On internal scales, love, perhaps, should always be commensurate with humanism - this is the simplest and most humane culture of feelings.
If this is a triangle, then it would be necessary to throw on the scales of conscience the interests of all who are drawn into it. Only in this way, apparently, you can find a way out that will bring the least pain. The principle of greatest good and least pain is probably the main (and most humane) guiding thread in the labyrinths of the love triangle. Of course, using this thread is incredibly difficult, because it is incredibly difficult to measure something for which there is no measure: pain and grief of the soul, joy and exultation of feelings. But do not do it inhumane.
Does all this mean that you need to abandon your loved one by sacrificing yourself? I repeat once again: this is not about that; we don’t know anything about him, about his wife, family, therefore we cannot judge which way will yield less evil and more good. An absentee court is a Shemyakin court, especially when you do not know those whom you judge. And this is not our business - it’s not requested to get into someone else’s personal life and prescribe behavior. Outsiders can only advise: suffer the decision yourself, but just suffer; imbued with each other's pain and measure which way will give less grief and more joy.
Think about it, Alice, and God grant that your strong love becomes sighted. Of course, failures of grief, reflection, sympathy with a loved one will intrude into the ups of your joys. But only the fusion of joy and grief makes the soul wise. Only he can teach to create a lasting advantage of joy over grief, which is happiness. Not the short, fluent happiness that many have, but the lasting, lasting happiness. Because love gives us only happiness, and happiness gives us only love.
