Love's Greatest Gift

László F. Földényi, Melancholy (Melankólia), tr. Tim Wilkinson (Yale University Press, 2016), ch. 7, Love and Melancholia, pp. 245-246:

Loneliness separates the lover from other people, and love from all other relationships. The lover is left to himself by the object of his love (the latter does not allow herself to be reached), but instead of seeking a cure, the lover derives pleasure from suffering and avoids every situation in which his solitude might be relieved in some way. For this is love’s greatest gift: it makes it possible for the lover to rise above quotidian existence and, by constructing the object of his love, create a new world for himself. This is a world of lack. It is accompanied by suffering: the lover finds no place of abode or rest, other connections having lost value in his eyes. He disdains the world and neglects everything that had once been of value to him. He is neglectful of his life, and regards this carelessness as the most natural thing. There is no greater or more natural force than ruining one’s own fate, which is typical of the lover. He fritters away his energies—though from his point of view, this dissipation is actually a way to gather strength for enduring a higher-order life that affords a glimpse into the destructive power of nothingness. Faith in the other sustains him, and he feels that in that other person, a new world is realized, for which he must leave this earthly world.

                Faith is the substance of the things we hope for
                and is the evidence of things not seen.
                                                                (Dante, Paradise, canto 24, ll. 63–64)

Yet that new world, needless to say, seems to be unstable and unattainable. A lover thinks that the new world will resolve all the contradictions and painful restrictions that torment him in the old world. Of course, we know full well that this is not what is going to happen. But one can sense just as well that once one has got over the suffering of the lover, love’s greatest gift is not just wanting but faith as well. The lover is like a work of art in the process of being realized; love condemns him to solitude and crushes him but, by way of compensation, raises him out of this world so that he can pass beyond time and geographic boundaries for a while, and gain insight into a world that is at least as real and existent as our usual home, and look back on our home from that remoteness, rearranging the order of his world from afar. The new world in which the lover ends up is a world of melancholia, which slowly consumes everything—and by rearranging the order of this world, he helps smuggle nothingness, along with his love, into it. This makes the lover awe-inspiring and uninhibited, but also extremely lamentable, since he has overstepped the boundaries that people who are not in love and nonmelancholics regard, in their own defense, so to speak, as the ultimate barriers of existence.