When one falls in love, one has been seduced; one falls in love with the other person with such force, losing oneself and one’s place in the customary scheme of things to such an extent, that a doubt inevitably arises whether it is a matter of seduction. The object of love seduces the lover, even if the “object” knows nothing about what he or she has provoked. Just as a lover does not choose his object of love, but that person is chosen through the “machinations of the forces of hell” (Kleist, Werke und Briefe, 2:206), so the object of love is seductive in a deeper sense. Of course, this has nothing to do with mindless courting, breach of trust, or coquetry. Seduction is a manifestation of the attraction of the personality; the lover, who has been seduced, enjoys the plunge into love, by which he hastens from himself into the other. “I thank you from the bottom of my heart for all the desperation you have caused me and detest the tranquillity in which I lived prior to knowing you,” wrote Mariana Alcoforado, a Portuguese nun, in a letter to her seducer (quoted in José Ortega y Gasset, On Love: Aspects of a Single Theme). Love appears as a never-ending pleasure, and the secret of the pleasure is that it is under these circumstances that our own uniqueness, inexhaustibility, and inscrutability present themselves most sensually. Doors open for a lover, chains fall away, and only then does he feel that he has finally found himself. Found himself, because he has experienced his world extending past where he thought it ended, beyond its borders, to a region that in his naïveté he had never noticed; a boundless space marks its start, inviting him to the hopeless task of conquering it. What else would this be but the accession of melancholia to the throne? The lover finds himself by glimpsing his own infinitude — but in doing so, he also loses himself (Liebestod). “Plato calls love bitter,” Ficino wrote, “and not without justification, because death is inseparable from love” (Ficino, De amore, bk. 2, 4; quoted in Wind, Pagan Mysteries in the Renaissance, 161). The suffering and anguish, as well as superiority and bliss, derive from the same experience as the melancholic’s simultaneous fear of death and death wish, from the intertwining acts of self-surrender and self-discovery. By contrast, in our everyday life we experience these emotions either as mere sacrifice or as our own invulnerability. The lover breaks out of the bonds of the customary world, and the beloved becomes a seducer, tempting him out of the world of trust into a world of which the essence is incessant delusion, elusiveness, and unappeasable craving.
Power is on the side of the beloved; the lover is helpless here. Thus, if one regards love as the highest form of an individual’s self-enjoyment, then that pleasure is passive and paralyzing on the part of the lover. The object of love, on the other hand — insofar as she is aware at all of anyone being in love with her — is “active.” Active because, as against the lover, she enjoys strength rather than defenselessness, which is latent in her personality. Only in love does she awaken to what her personality is capable of, what an effect it can provoke — and from the moment that she experiences her own strength, she is up to the game. According to her personality, the beloved will start to test her strength, test how far her power extends. It is a game, though one that is a matter of life and death for the lover. It starts with not looking back at her lover, and its most extreme boundary is to go along with a relationship only in order to be able to give it up. In the giving up, the demonic strength of personality equals the demonic power of love. Goethe’s breakup with Friederike, Kierkegaard’s with Regine Olsen, and Hamlet’s with Ophelia: these were experiments, games, tests of strength for the personality. In those cases, the actions of the beloved formed the decisive factor; for the men (and there is little doubt that only men are capable of totally “unwarranted” breaking off, which is not the same as infidelity or losing interest and is likewise a bridge to melancholia), it was no longer a matter of love.
Loneliness separates the lover from other people, and love from all other relationships. The lover is left to himself by the object of his love (the latter does not allow herself to be reached), but instead of seeking a cure, the lover derives pleasure from suffering and avoids every situation in which his solitude might be relieved in some way. He avoids people and does not speak about his love to others, for he thinks this would be a form of betrayal; words and fixed expressions would tie down, as it were, his love and its object, and he thinks this fixity would soil him, “lead him back” to the place out of which love had led him. For this is love’s greatest gift: it makes it possible for the lover to rise above quotidian existence and, by constructing the object of his love, create a new world for himself. This is a world of lack. It is accompanied by suffering: the lover finds no place of abode or rest, other connections having lost value in his eyes. He disdains the world and neglects everything that had once been of value to him. He is neglectful of his life, and regards this carelessness as the most natural thing. There is no greater or more natural force than ruining one’s own fate, which is typical of the lover. He fritters away his energies — though from his point of view, this dissipation is actually a way to gather strength for enduring a higher-order life that affords a glimpse into the destructive power of nothingness. Faith in the other sustains him, and he feels that in that other person, a new world is realized, for which he must leave this earthly world.
Faith is the substance of the things we hope for
and is the evidence of things not seen.
(Dante, Paradise, canto 24, ll. 63–64)
Yet that new world, needless to say, seems to be unstable and unattainable. A lover thinks that the new world will resolve all the contradictions
and painful restrictions that torment him in the old world. Of course, we know full well that this is not what is going to happen. But one can sense just as well that once one has got over the suffering of the lover, love’s greatest gift is not just wanting but faith as well. The lover is like a work of art in the process of being realized; love condemns him to solitude and crushes him but, by way of compensation, raises him out of this world so that he can pass beyond time and geographic boundaries for a while, and gain insight into a world that is at least as real and existent as our usual home, and look back on our home from that remoteness, rearranging the order of his world from afar. The new world in which the lover ends up is a world of melancholia, which slowly consumes everything — and by rearranging the order of this world, he helps smuggle nothingness, along with his love, into it. This makes the lover awe inspiring and uninhibited, but also extremely lamentable, since he has overstepped the boundaries that people who are not in love and nonmelancholics regard, in their own defense, so to speak, as the ultimate barriers of existence.