A pinch of unromanticism

Yehuda Halevi once wrote that it is a fearful thing to love what death can touch. Mortality is generally viewed as a weakness, and love makes it more so. Yet like overly romantic poets all over the world lured us into believing, there is no true love without death. We remember tragic love stories. Not comedies. Taming of the Shrew is rarely a subject of any conversation, but Romeo and Juliet is a benchmark in the world of literature.

Research says that the average life cycle of love (passionate love and not affection) is three to five years, and is a chemical induced phenomenon. In other words, what appears to be infinite is finite. It is transient and evanescent. Yet interestingly, something as finite as love has dominated not just literature or art, but also philosophy, psychology and social life.

We hope that love would be the panacea of all questions on existence. However, the simple yet dark truth called death casts a shadow on it. Which is unacceptable. So through our all round efforts we create a bubble where love beats death and glorify it. That should roughly account for all the art in the world.

While that may be the case, one question still perplexes me. That reality where death is unheard of and where love beats itself…is it worth living at all?