Love and Connection

The thirteenth-century Sufi poet Rumi wrote thousands of verses on this single subject. For him, romantic love was not the destination but a door, the place where the heart finally learns to be undone. Beyond it, he insisted, was something larger: divine love, the love that was always already loving us. The reed flute cries because it has been cut from the reed. We long because we are made of longing.

She had a less mystical but no less precise eye. Jane Austen's novels are sociology with a heart. She studied how love is filtered, distorted, and sometimes purified by money, class, manners, and self-deception. Pride, she showed, blocks love. Prejudice blinds it. The slow work of becoming someone who can be loved well. That is the real plot.

He described love in still-stranger terms. Not affection, not even devotion, but a kind of mutual unselfing. The eye through which I see God, he wrote, is the same eye through which God sees me. Love, for him, was the dissolution of the boundary between two.

Writing music in a twelfth-century convent, Hildegard von Bingen heard love as cosmic music, the green vitality (viriditas) running through every living thing, binding stones to angels.