FATAL LOVE 141
Loves which change are passing whims; and those at which one must blush are misadventures whose influence ought to be shaken off.
Homer, in showing us Odysseus, after he had triumphed over the wiles of Calypso and Circe, ordering himself to be bound to the mast of his ship so that he could hear, without yielding to it, the seductive song of the sirens, gave us the true model of the wise man escaping the deceptions of fatal love; Odysseus owed everything to Penelope, who kept herself for him, and the nuptial bed of the king of Ithaca, with posts which were the eternal trees rooted deep in the earth, was, in the sometimes licentious days of antiquity, the symbolic monument to venerable and chaste love.
True love is an invincible passion motivated by right sentiment; it can never be in contrachction with duty, because it becomes in its own right the most absolute of duties; but unjustified passion constitutes fatal love and it is this which must be resisted even if one suffers and dies in doing so.
One could call fatal love the prince of demons, because it is evil magnetism armed with all its power; nothing can confine or disarm him when he goes on the rampage. It is a fever, a mania, a transport of delirium. The victim feels himself burn slowly and there is none to pity. Memories torture him, unfulfilled desires make him desperate; he entertains thoughts of death but more often prefers to love and suffer than to die. What is the cure for this disease? How can the wounds of this poisoned arrow be healed?
Who will rescue us from the aberrations of this folly?
To cure fatal love, one must break the magnetic chain by applying another current and neutralizing one kind of electricity with its opposite.
Put a distance between you and the one you love; keep nothing which reminds you of her; even get rid of the clothes she has seen you wearing. Take up tiring work of all sorts, never be idle, and never daydream; wear yourself out with toil during the day so that you will sleep soundly at night; find some ambition to fulfil, some interest to satisfy, and go higher than your love to find them. In this way you will achieve tranquillity, if not forgetfulness. What must be avoided at all costs is solitude, that nurse of the affections and dreams, unless one is drawn towards
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