love and death

While I was looking for a good book to read, I came across a title “Love and Death.” I got struck by it enough for me to try to figure how the phrase hit a chord on me.

Love is the beginning of life, while death is simply the end. The striking contrast of these two words seemed to suggest that each is the opposite of the other. The absence of one necessitates the occurrence of the other. Therefore one can simply say that to love means to be alive and to die means to simply stop loving.
Yet for some reason, such thought just doesn’t hold true for those who are in love or even for those who had loved at some point in their lives. In the real world, when a person loves, he dies; he just has to. The two words are simply entwined.

To love is to die. There are different levels of death when one starts to love, first is the death of self. For when one loves, the self interest ceases to be. The “I” starts to get beyond what would make himself comfortable and begins to consider the well being of the other. Second is the death of pride. When the “I” falls in love, he makes himself vulnerable to the other; he begins to put his guard down and learns to have faith on the other. Pride ceases when the degree of helplessness and reliance increases. Third is the death of self-preservation. For some reason, self-preservation even as an instinct loses power over a person in love. This I just can’t figure why, but such phenomenon is avowed by all the stupid things one does in the name of love. Martyrdom for one are all willingly done in the name of love.

To love, therefore, is to die. In fact, love is perfected by death, and death only finds meaning in love. Christ’s love would not have been as divine if it had not culminated on the cross.

Now, do you want to die? haha