The Passion Of Brock & Frenesi (Unhappy Mutual Love)

[Terrance]

The Passion Of Brock & Frenesi

 "Passion means suffering, something undergone, the mastery of Fate over
a free and responsible person." 

So says, Denis De Rougemont in __Love In The Western World__, Book I
(The Tristan Myth), Chapter 11 (The Unhappy Mutual Love)

The first paragraph  

Passion means suffering, something undergone, the mastery of fate over a
free and responsible person. To love love more than the object of love,
to love passion for its own sake, has been to love to suffer and to
court suffering all the way from Augustine's **amabam amare** down to
modern romanticism. Passionate love, the longing for what sears us and
annihilates us in its triumph-there is the secret which Europe has never
been allowed to be given away; a secret it has always repressed-and
preserved!  Hardly anything could be more tragic; and the way passion
has persisted through the centuries should cause us to look to the
future with deep despondency. 

The Fifth Paragraph 

	This seems to me to explain much of our psychological nature. Unless
the course of love is being hindered there is no 'romance'; and it
romance that we revel in-that is to say, the self consciousness,
intensity, variations, and delays of passion, together with its climax
rising to disaster-not its sudden flaring. Consider our literature.  The
happiness of lovers stirs our feeling only on account of the unhappiness
that lies in wait for it.  We must feel that life is imperilled, and
feel the hostile realities that drive happiness away into some beyond. 
What moves us is not its presence, but its nostalgia and recollection.
Presence is inexpressible and has no perceptible duration; it can only
be a **moment** of grace-as in the duet of Don Giovanni and Zerlina.
Otherwise we lapse into a Hallmark Card.  Happy love has no history-in
**European literature.**  And a love that is not mutual can not pass for
a true love. The outstanding find made by European poets, what
distinguishes them first and foremost among the writers of the world,
what most profoundly expresses the European obsession by suffering as a
way to understanding, is the secret of the Tristam myth; passionate love
at once shared and fought against, anxious for a happiness it rejects,
and magnified in its own disaster-**unhappy mutual love.**