ie broad and smiling in meaningless endlessness.

So it is a strange thing that men who are schooled by evolution to
relate themselves to all that exists, and to seek for new kinships,
should lament that there is no new thing under the sun. And whose eye
would be satisfied with seeing and whose ear with hearing? Who would
rather have the truth than the power to seek it? There is a way of
reading Ecclesiastes and Schopenhauer with a triumphant lilt in the
voice. After all, it is the modulation that carries the message of the
text. When you write the history of love, I find it fair reading. When
you tell me love is primal and engrossing, I hold it the more a sin to
crouch away from its fires.

"Love is the assertion of the will to live as a definitely determined
individual." This is Schopenhauer's thesis and (unnecessarily enough) he
apologises for it, as if it belittled love to say that it affects man in
his _essentia aeterna_. The genius of the race takes the lover conscript
and makes him a soldier in life's battalions.

"The genius of the race," a metaphysical term, but meaning what you do
when you speak of the function of love. Schopenhauer is a pessimist
consciously, you, unconsciously; and you have both missed the living
value of your facts. "Love is ruled by race welfare," says Schopenhauer.
"It (the race welfare) alone corresponds to the profoundness with which
it is felt, to the seriousness with which it appears, to the importance
which it attributes even to the trifling details of its sphere and
occasion." Love concerns itself with "The composition of the next
generation," therefore you find it common as the commonplace, therefore
Schopenhauer regards it as a force treacherous to happiness, since to
live is to be miserable. "These lovers are the traitors who seek to
perpetuate the whole want and drudgery which would otherwise speedily
reach an end; this they wish to frustrate as others like them have
frustrated it before."

Because love frustrates the death of the race, it is the joy of my
senses and the goal of my striving.

Says Schopenhauer: "Through love man shows that the species lies closer
to him than the individual, and he lives more immediately in the former
than in the latter. Why does the lover hang with complete abandon on the
eyes of his chosen one, and is ready to make every sacrifice for her?
_Because it is his immortal part that longs after her, while it is
merely his mortal part that desire