Love of Self, Love of Others...

I think Clive Lewis would be the first to note that the easiest way to love yourself clandestinely is to love another for your own sake. And Graham Greene would be there to show you how it is done. The End of the Affair is an exquisite chronicle (so far...I am only a third of the way through) of the unenviable state of a soul which has nothing but itself to care about. Perhaps this is why human love is necessary in our reconciliation with our lives, the world, and God--we learn how much better it is to love another than one's self alone. So our surrender in the finite readies us to surrender and embrace the infinite. Losing ourselves in another is a good lesson for permanently surrendering our deep and abiding concern for ourselves. And this is necessary for our salvation.

Hooray for rediscovering the Houghton College Library! Free books...it's almost better than Amazon!

"The sense of unhappiness is so much easier to convey than that of happiness. In misery we seem aware of our own existence, even though it may be in the form of a monstrous egotism--this pain of mine is individual, this nerve that winces belongs to me and to no other. But happiness annihilates us; we lose our identity."

"As long as one is happy one can endure any discipline; it was unhappiness that broke down the habit of work. When I began to realize how often we quarelled, how often I picked on her with nervous irritation, I became aware that our love was doomed; love had turned into a love affair with a beginning and an end. I could name the very moment when it had begun, and one day I knew I should be able to name the final hour. When she left the house I couldn't settle to work. I would reconstruct what we had said to each other; I would fan myself into anger or remorse. And all the time I knew I was forcing the pace. I was pushing, pushing the only thing I love out of my life. As long as I could make believe that love lasted I was happy; I think I was even good to live with, and so love did last. But if love had to die, I wanted it to die quickly."

--Graham Green, The End of the Affair.