55 lines
2.7 KiB
Plaintext
55 lines
2.7 KiB
Plaintext
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DO YOU LOVE ME, ADAM?
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By M.L. Verb
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In the month of Valentine's Day, it's hard to imagine anything that hasn't been
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said already about love, beginning with Adam and Eve.
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Adam and Eve were the lucky ones in love. They weren't burdened by countless
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ideas about what, if anything, love is. They didn't have to listen to
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June-moon-spoon-buffoon love songs unless they made them up themselves. They
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didn't have to agonize over whether to buy tender, humorous or insulting
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Valentine's Day cards for each other.
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What Mark Twain once observed about Adam and Eve is true enough--that among
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their principal advantages is they escaped teething. But an even bigger
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advantage, if you ask me is that they got to discover love without help from
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Miss Manners, Dr. Ruth or Leo Buscaglia.
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I've always imagined the world's first couple playing with love the way a puppy
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plays with the first cat he's ever seen. He sniffs it, yips at it, jumps
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around it and tries to nuzzle it. He wants to be close to it. And for awhile
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that works. But when he tries to keep it, to make it his own, to limit its
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freedom in some fundamental way, it scratches his nose and leaves him howling.
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Over the centuries humans have discovered a great deal about love. In nearly
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every book of famous quotations the biggest section is on love. They include
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Philip Barry's description of two people in love as "two minds without a single
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thought" and Napoleon Bonaparte's observation that "the only victory over love
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is flight."
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But it turns out that all the books, songs, advice and posters are of almost no
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help in teaching us about love. In love each of us eventually is our own Adam
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or our own Eve. For nothing anyone says to you about love BEFORE you have
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loved makes any sense and nothing anyone says to you about love while you are
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IN love makes any difference.
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Yes, we can read, say, St. Paul's unmatched words about love in the 13th
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chapter of his first epistle to the fledgling church at Corinth, and we can
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sense that this man knows what he's talking about.
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Or we can hear beautiful love songs and read Shakespeare's love sonnets, and
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conclude that even though we can't see it or touch it, love really exists and
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it would be to have it.
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But until we give ourselves away in love, we really don't know anything about
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it. Merely reading about love is no more an approximation of it than reading a
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civics book is an approximation of politics.
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Although Adam and Eve lacked historical perspective about love they could use
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certain responses not available to us today. For instance, to Eve's inevitable
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question--"Do you love me, Adam?"--we can imagine him looking around the
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garden, grinning and replying, "At least you know if I don't it's not because
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of another woman."
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