love joined their bodies but disjoined their souls;
it kept their souls strangers to one another; but of this love is
begotten a fruit of their flesh--a child. And perchance this child,
begotten in death, falls sick and dies. Then it comes to pass that over
the fruit of their carnal fusion and spiritual separation and
estrangement, their bodies now separated and cold with sorrow but united
by sorrow their souls, the lovers, the parents, join in an embrace of
despair, and then is born, of the death of the child of their flesh, the
true spiritual love. Or rather, when the bond of flesh which united them
is broken, they breathe with a sigh of relief. For men love one another
with a spiritual love only when they have suffered the same sorrow
together, when through long days they have ploughed the stony ground
bowed beneath the common yoke of a common grief. It is then that they
know one another and feel one another, and feel with one another in
their common anguish, they pity one another and love one another. For to
love is to pity; and if bodies are united by pleasure, souls are united
by pain.

And this is felt with still more clearness and force in the seeding, the
taking root, and the blossoming of one of those tragic loves which are
doomed to contend with the diamond-hard laws of Destiny--one of those
loves which are born out of due time and season, before or after the
moment, or out of the normal mode in which the world, which is custom,
would have been willing to welcome them. The more barriers Destiny and
the world and its law interpose between the lovers, the stronger is the
impulse that urges them towards one another, and their happiness in
loving one another turns to bitterness, and their unhappiness in not
being able to love freely and openly grows heavier, and they pity one
another from the bottom of their hearts; and this common pity, which is
their common misery and their common happiness, gives fire and fuel to
their love. And they suffer their joy, enjoying their suffering. And
they establish their love beyond the confines of the world, and the
strength of this poor love suffering beneath the yoke of Destiny gives
them intuition of another world where there is no other law than the
liberty of love--another world where there are no barriers because there
is no flesh. For nothing inspires us more with hope and faith in another
world than the impossibility of our love truly fructifying in this world
of flesh