New-born

Love is like a new-born: always naked,

and naked forever.

We put clothes on love, we educate and scold love, we are exasperated, angry, disgusted, in awe and laughing at love,

And we never disrespect and especially, never abandon love, the new-born baby that has gracefully visited us!

John le Carré, who wrote "love is whatever you can still betray", and Emmanuel Lévinas, who even more poignantly described our lives as "the always renewed postponement of the hour of betrayal", were perfectly accurate, especially Lévinas who rises so high above sentimentalism that very few people -and certainly not me- can understand him till now. But Novalis, 150 years before them, as in anticipation, entirely reversed this dark, sentimental and somehow complacent vision, and prepared a ground for our work towards an answer: "We must never admit that we love ourselves. This is the secret of the only true and eternal love". What Novalis describes here is the opposite of the physical and spiritual self-destruction that our lazy times call "self-love". Because we don't really understand yet what we mean by "ourselves", and we are in complete illusion regarding where and what is the boundary between "you" and "me", as we try to assimilate this to an international frontier, complete with its border posts, armed guards, visa and periodic shootings.