By: Syed Imran Raza
While looking for defining the word Love, the best expression I found was the line from Matthew Arnold’ s poem ‘The buried life’ which reads; “The nameless feelings that course through our breast.” Whatever is the context of Arnold’s poem; this seems to me to begin with this appropriate expression.
People interpret love in varieties of ways. The unresolved mysteries of love are in the books of histories and literature. They all together attempt to provide an insight about the nature of love.
The love for philosophers is the love of wisdom. Philosophers’ love is an urge to know what is unknown for centuries. Whether it is metaphysics or aesthetics, the love of wisdom takes philosophers where the end is the beginning. This is philosopher’s passion to know that made Socrates, teacher of Plato, confess; “the only thing I know is that I know nothing.’ The passionate love to know what he does not know make Socrates indifferent among all the philosophers of the world. Thanks to the mysterious and magical power of love that made him produce such a powerful thought.
The psychological treatment of love is scientific in nature and psychologists usually compare it with friendship. For psychologists, love usually involves the idealization of another person. According to Sternberg, love constitutes intimacy (a sense of emotional closeness), commitment (the extent to which a relationship is permanent), and passion (arousal, some of its sexual, some intellectual and some inspirational), whereas, reciprocity, closeness and commitment between people who see themselves as equal are essential of friendship. However, on commonsense ground, people interchangeably use both love and friendship and, fail to draw a clear line between the two.
Then what is this thing called love which is everywhere in the universe? Perhaps, the feeling of love is imperceptible in its true sense because once it is perceived; the loveliness of love will lose its principle elements of truth, goodness, and beauty, therefore it is true as Keats says ‘ a thing of a beauty is joy forever, its loveliness never pass into nothingness.’
So strange and so enigmatic is the feeling of love that it intermingles with the emotion and passion just as the waves of oceans intermingle with one another and become one. However, people reports the feelings of the mysterious effect of love immensely as long they live a conscious life. Even after bodily death, the love transforms in the memory of the beloved.
Love has no history but all history is incomplete without love. Love has no beginning but all beginning is worthless without love. Love has no ending, but all ending is incomprehensible without love. The feeling of love is like dwelling on the landscape of thought illuminating the darkness of human inner world. So let’s not diminish or dim the fire of love which nature has set in human heart so that every glowing heart with the passionate fire of love will keep the world illuminating like unbroken chain of stars in the galaxy of illuminating the sky.
