As I rode home on the bus, confined to the rather small, blackish seat, I gaze in astonishment to the street just before me. A passing transit bus emits a gray cloud of fumes from the rear of its cabin and quickly swims down the street. The street is littered with people going every which direction in what seems to be an infinite quest for solidarity. I noticed a man standing at the corner awaiting his chance to hustle across the street. He was rather large—in the norm of things—wearing a bright green suite, talking ever furiously on his cell phone. His opportunity quickly fades as a parade of cars streams past him. From within the bus I heard a pleasant tune playing over the speakers as the soft catcher of people persists. The tune playing is a rather jazzy one, which I recognize quickly. And every so often a chunk of a fading conversation passes over my dull seat.

The mind is not forced to believe in the existence of anything. The philosophies of subjectivism, absolute idealism, solipsism, and skepticism are quite idiotic philosophies to begin with, but nonetheless can’t be proven wrong. That is why the only organ of contact with existence is acceptance, love. That is why beauty and reality are identical. That is why joy and the sense of reality are identical.

This need to be the creator of what we love is a need to imitate God. If we do not accept reality but only believe in absolute idealism then we are trying to be God. This is the downfall of all philosophy and love. Thus the two opposites which rend human love are united: to love someone just as they are, and the want to recreate them.

Love is only an imaginary love of creatures; A cord that attaches us to all the objects of desire, and a cord can always be cut. Things remain outside and our knowledge of them is confined to the tensions of varying degree and direction that affect the cord when there is a change of position on their part or on ours.

Love needs reality. What is more terrible than discovering we’ve loved through bodily appearance, something of imaginary being? It’s much more terrible than death, for death does not prevent the beloved from having lived. This is the punishment for having fed love on imagination.

The imagination is always united with a desire. Only desire without an object is empty of imagination. The beautiful takes our desire captive and thus forbidding it to fly off towards the future. Such is the price of chaste love. Every desire for enjoyment belongs to the future and the world of illusion, whereas if we desire only that a being should exist, he exists: what more is there to desire?

Do not allow yourself to be imprisoned by any affection. Keep your solitude. The day, if it ever comes, when you are given true affection there will be no opposition between interior solitude and friendship, quite the reverse. It’s even by this infallible sign that you will recognize it. Other affections have to be severely disciplined.

To love purely is to consent to distance; it’s to adore the distance between ourselves and that which we love. But love is only a sign of our wretchedness. And love tends to go further and further, but there is a limit. When the limit is passed love turns to hate. To avoid this change, love has to become different.