also be its end.

It is here, in the voluntary surrender of life in order to attain a
divined unity, and not in the union of begetting and destroying, that
the frequently assumed connection between love and death is to be found.
Voluptuousness and death are not interlinked, as is so frequently
asserted since Novalis (not on the higher plane of eroticism), but
voluptuousness has immolated itself, has been annihilated in the
love-death. The view that begetting and destroying are related
functions, is based on the supposition that love is bound up with
propagation. This is the fateful error of the modern theory of love, a
rationalistic, metaphysical abstraction, which touches no corresponding
chord in the human soul. To base the relationship of love and death on
an association of becoming and declining is a beautiful idea, but
nothing more. Modern synthetic love produces this relationship in its
metaphysical perfection out of itself; it is foreign alike to pure
sexuality and to spiritual love. (Wherever the desire to destroy is
found hand in hand with sensuality, morbid instincts are at play.)

It frequently occurs that lovers commit suicide together because
external circumstances prevent their union. This is a step corresponding
to suicide from offended vanity or incurable disease; life has become
unbearable to the individual haunted by a fixed idea, and he throws it
away. But this has nothing whatever to do with the love-death; it is a
purely negative act of despair, whereas the love-death is an altogether
positive act, namely, the will to win to a higher (and to the intellect
inconceivable and paradoxical) metaphysical unity. The love-death
aspires to perform a miracle. It has, possibly, never been realised in
its full greatness; the evidence of the common death of Heinrich von
Kleist and Henrietta Vogel must be rejected. During the last days of his
life Kleist was wrapped up in the idea of their common death, and in a
letter to his cousin, Marie von Kleist, he says: "If you could only
realise how death and love strive to beautify these last moments of my
life with heavenly and earthly roses, you would be content to let me
die. I swear to you I am supremely happy." In the same letter he speaks
of "the most voluptuous of deaths." And yet it was no real love-death,
that is to say, death following as a necessary corollary in order that
love may be consummated. Kleist as well as Henrietta had separately
resolved to commit