e it finds it not, it despairs.

Whenever we speak of love there is always present in our memory the idea
of sexual love, the love between man and woman, whose end is the
perpetuation of the human race upon the earth. Hence it is that we never
succeed in reducing love either to a purely intellectual or to a purely
volitional element, putting aside that part in it which belongs to the
feeling, or, if you like, to the senses. For, in its essence, love is
neither idea nor volition; rather it is desire, feeling; it is something
carnal in spirit itself. Thanks to love, we feel all that spirit has of
flesh in it.

Sexual love is the generative type of every other love. In love and by
love we seek to perpetuate ourselves, and we perpetuate ourselves on the
earth only on condition that we die, that we yield up our life to
others. The humblest forms of animal life, the lowest of living beings,
multiply by dividing themselves, by splitting into two, by ceasing to be
the unit which they previously formed.

But when at last the vitality of the being that multiplies itself by
division is exhausted, the species must renew the source of life from
time to time by means of the union of two wasting individuals, by means
of what is called, among protozoaria, conjugation. They unite in order
to begin dividing again with more vigour. And every act of generation
consists in a being's ceasing to be what it was, either wholly or in
part, in a splitting up, in a partial death. To live is to give oneself,
to perpetuate oneself, and to perpetuate oneself and to give oneself is
to die. The supreme delight of begetting is perhaps nothing but a
foretaste of death, the eradication of our own vital essence. We unite
with another, but it is to divide ourselves; this most intimate embrace
is only a most intimate sundering. In its essence, the delight of sexual
love, the genetic spasm, is a sensation of resurrection, of renewing our
life in another, for only in others can we renew our life and so
perpetuate ourselves.

Without doubt there is something tragically destructive in the essence
of love, as it presents itself to us in its primitive animal form, in
the unconquerable instinct which impels the male and the female to mix
their being in a fury of conjunction. The same impulse that joins their
bodies, separates, in a certain sense, their souls; they hate one
another, while they embrace, no less than they love, and above all they
contend with one