There is one thing... Love

I finished reading Peony in Love by Lisa See today. The last sentence of the author's note at the end of the book got to me...

All women on earth-and men too, for that matter-hope for the kind of love that transforms us, raises us up out of the everyday, and gives us the courage to survive our little deaths: the heartache of unfulfilled dreams, of career
and personal disappointments, of broken love affairs.

I've been reading a lot lately. I started off reading about love and loss or rather losing someone you love and feeling lost. There were ghosts and dreams, strange disappearances and travel to distant places. I would say things took a turn with Murakami's, The Wind Up Bird Chronicle, where love is like the brightest sunlight illuminating you wholly as if you were everyday sitting in the bottom of a dark dry well... the sunlight only lasts for a few seconds each day and then maybe it burns so brightly that it takes everything inside of you and replaces it with itself, love. You can't be sure of anything but that. Now I have Yukio Mishima's novel, Spring Snow to read and I am trying to decide between starting it or finishing Anna Karenina, thus continuing on with my education on love. I want to know everything there is to know.

Oh yes, and the photo is Marie-Antoinette's Temple de L'Amour.