youtu.be/ Rz11zMvACmg
way of expressing the fact that their wish can be realized. It would not have been enough if he had encouraged them by saying, "It can be done, love can be preserved"; but when he says, "It shall be preserved," there is in that an authority which answers to the heartfelt desire of love. Love drives out fear; yet when love is for a moment fearful for itself., fearful of its own salvation, duty is the nutriment of all others love stands in need of; for it says, "Fear not, you shall conquer," speaking not futuristically, for that only suggests hope, but imperatively, and in this lies an assurance which nothing can shake. So then you regard duty as the enemy of love; I regard it as its friend. You will, perhaps, be content at hearing this declaration, and with your customary mockery will congratulate me on such an interesting and uncommon friend. I, on the other hand, will by no means be satisfied with this reply, but will take the liberty of carrying the war into your own territory. If duty, once it has appeared in consciousness, is an enemy of love, then love must do its best to conquer it; for you, after all, would not think of love as a being so impotent that it cannot vanquish every opposition. On the other hand, you think that when duty makes its appearance it is all over with love, and you think also that duty, early or late, must make its appearance, not merely in conjugal love but also in romantic love; and the truth is that you are afraid of conjugal love because it has in it duty to such a degree that when it makes its appearance you cannot run away from it. In romantic love, on the other hand, you think this is all right, for as soon as the instant arrives when duty is mentioned, love is over, and the arrival of duty is the signal for you, with a very courtly bow, to say farewell. Here you see again what your eulogies of love amount to. If duty is the enemy of love., and if love cannot vanquish this enemy, then love is not the true conqueror. The consequence is that you must leave love in the lurch. When once you have got the desperate idea that duty is the enemy of love, your defeat is certain, and you have done just as much to disparage love and deprive it of its majesty as you have done to show despite of duty, and yet it was only the latter you meant to do. You see, this again is despair, whether you feel the pain of it or seek in despair to forget it. If you cannot reach the point of seeing the aesthetical, the ethical, and the religious as three great allies, if you do not know how to conserve the unity of the diverse appearances which everything assumes in these diverse spheres, then life is devoid of meaning, then one must grant that you are justified in maintaining your pet theory that one can say of everything, "Do it or don't do it-you will regret both." . . .
If you hold fast what I have set forth in the foregoing treatise, just as I have expounded it, you will easily perceive that in holding fast to the inwardness of duty in love I have not done so with the wild alarm which sometimes is displayed by men in whom prosaic common sense has first annihilated the feelings of immediacy and who then, in their old age, have betaken themselves to duty, men who in their blindness cannot express strongly enough their scorn of the purely natural, nor stupidly enough sing the praise of duty-as though with this it was different from what you call it. Of such a breach between love and duty, thank God, know nothing; I have not fled with my love into wild regions and deserts where in my loneliness I return to savagery, neither have I asked all my neighbors what I should do. Such isolation and such participation are equally mad.... But I have not been afraid of duty; it has not appeared before me as an enemy which would disturb the bit of happiness and joy I had hoped to preserve through life; rather it has appeared before me as a friend, the first and only confidant of our love. But this power of having constantly a free outlook is the blessing bestowed by duty, whereas romantic love goes astray or comes to an impasse because of its unhistorical character.
