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Years of yearning had made her sensitive, the way a starving dog twitches its nostrils at the faintest scent of food. She could not mistake it. She recognised it at once: love, one-way deep adoration that bounced off and did not bounce back; careful, quiet love that didn’t care and went on anyway.

So much of desire, at that age, was a willful act. Trying so hard to slur the rough, disappointing edges of boys into the shape of someone we could love. We spoke of our desperate need for them with rote and familiar words, like we were reading lines from a play. Later I would see this: how impersonal and grasping our love was, pinging around the universe, hoping for a host to give form to our wishes.

“There is an eroticism to waiting: Sexual fulfillment requires that one urgently desire what is necessarily, torturously delayed. Romantic waiting is, like certain shades of pain, delicate enough to hint teasingly at future gratification but never disagreeable enough to preclude it. But at a certain point, gratification has been so thoroughly warded off that waiting becomes unendurable, and it wasn’t long after our second meeting that I began to wait in earnest. What had at first been surprised delight that he existed was transformed, without my noticing it, into fear that his privacy would close back over him. His silences began to stretch longer and longer, often for days. I wondered, relentlessly and futilely, what this portended. When I confronted him about what I could only describe as a “tonal shift”—what seemed to me to be a cruel infliction of waiting—he purported to have no idea what I was talking about. This shift (tonal or otherwise) in patterns of waiting represented a shift in power: Expectation is a form of subjugation. What is the opposite of waiting: the imposition of waiting on someone else? I wished it on him, ineffectually, like a curse. As his communications petered out, I felt increasingly powerless, besieged. I recalled the medieval conception of God as sustaining us, actively willing us into existence second by second, and I felt that his silence was at every moment draining me of myself.”

“239. But now you are talking as if love were a consolation. Simone Weil warned otherwise. “Love is not consolation,” she wrote. “It is light.””

“Romance as means of redemption is the worst kind of Western medicine, but an obsession with personal transformation is an even more American tendency, or at least it is mine. In the last couple years it became a more interesting challenge to be ‘good’ than bad. I started living alone, vacuuming my apartment weekly, saving parmesan rinds for soup, calling to negotiate better rates for utilities. I became a better cook and friend, especially to myself. These specific tasks are not meant to demonstrate adulthood, the inane fantasy of the unrigorous that there is a finite level—based often on what you can afford to own and what that implies—at which no further acquisition of skills or growth is necessary. Rather, it’s to illustrate that I now live my life in a way that suggests I care to be in it. Naturally that desire transfers to other tasks, practices, and ways of relating––what I mean is that it transfers to love.”

“I’m sure there are aspects of my personality buried within me that will surface as soon as I know I am completely loved.”

“To fall in love is to individualize someone by the signs he bears or emits. It is to become sensitive to these signs, to undergo an apprenticeship to them (thus the slow individualization of Albertine in the group of young girls). It may be that friendship is nourished on observation and conversation, but love is born from and nourished on silent interpretation. The beloved appears as a sign, a ‘soul’; the beloved expresses a possible world unknown to us, implying, enveloping, imprisoning a world that must be deciphered, that is, interpreted. What is involved, here, is a plurality of worlds; the pluralism of love does not concern only the multiplicity of loved beings, but the multiplicity of souls or worlds in each of them. To love is to try to explicate, to develop these unknown worlds that remain enveloped within the beloved.”

Everything was so random. As a girl, I had fallen in love with Mario, but I could have fallen in love with anyone: a body to which we end up attributing who knows what meanings. A long passage of life together, and you think he’s the only man you can be happy with, you credit him with countless critical virtues, and instead he’s just a reed that emits sounds of falsehood, you don’t know who he really is, he doesn’t know himself. We are occasions. We consummate life and lose it because in some long-ago time someone, in the desire to unload his cock inside us, was nice, chose us among women. We take for some sort of kindness addressed to us alone the banal desire for sex. We love his desire to fuck, we are so dazzled by it we think it’s the desire to fuck only us, us alone. Oh yes, he who is so special and who has recognized us as special. We give it a name, that desire of the cock, we personalize it, we call it my love. To hell with all that, that dazzlement, that unfounded titillation. Once he fucked me, now he fucks someone else, what claim do I have? Time passes, one goes, another arrives.

Most of us are raised to believe we will either find love in our first family (our family of origin), or, if not there, in the second family we are expected to form through committed romantic couplings, particularly those that lead to marriage and/or lifetime bondings. Many of us learn as children that friendship should never be seen as just as important as family ties. However, friendship is the place in which a great majority of us have our first glimpse of redemptive love and caring community. Learning to love in friendships empowers us in ways that enable us to bring this love to other interactions with family or with romantic bonds.

We see movies in which people are represented as being in love who never talk with one another, who fall into bed without ever discussing their bodies, their sexual needs, their likes and dislikes. Indeed, the message received from the mass media is that knowledge makes love less compelling; that it is ignorance that gives love its erotic and transgressive edge. These messages are often brought to us by profiteering producers who have no clue about the art of loving, who substitute their mystified visions because they do not really know how to genuinely portray loving interaction.

“By choosing men who were not interested in being loving, I was able to practice giving love, but always within an unfulfilling context. Naturally, my need to receive love was not met. I got what I was accustomed to getting–care and affection, usually mingled with a degree of unkindness, neglect, and on some occasions, outright cruelty. At times I was unkind. It took me a long time to recognize that while I wanted to know love, I was afraid to be truly intimate. Many of us choose relationships of affection and care that will never become loving because they feel safer. The demands are not as intense as loving requires. The risk is not as great.”

Love is profoundly political. Our deepest revolution will come when we understand this truth. Only love can give us the strength to go forward in the midst of heartbreak and misery. Only love can give us the power to reconcile, to redeem, the power to renew weary spirits and save lost souls. The transformative power of love is the foundation of all meaningful social change. Without love our lives are without meaning. Love is the heart of the matter. When all else has fallen away, love sustains.

I take pleasure in my transformations. I look quiet and consistent, but few know how many women there are in me.

“Memory is like sand in my hand,” [Varda] says. “I keep some and some is going. The beaches are the thread, and it’s true that I’ve been on beaches all my life. I know that if I need the ideal place, it’s the perfect one for me. This has nothing to do with swimming or surfing or sailing. It’s the pleasure of watching the beach, which means watching the sky and the sea, and if you go at a different time, it can be different light and weather, it can be white or it can be flat. I love it when it’s almost flat. It’s so pure that it’s like the beginning of the world. And it allows me, as a metaphor, to believe that I was always on the beach in my mind. And the other metaphor is that there is a poem of Jacques Prévert, you know – ‘Et la mer efface sur le sable / Les pas des amants désunis’ – the sea erases from the sand the steps of the parted lovers. I always thought of that.”