To people who do not comprehend life, the emotion of love does not appear as the essence of human life but as a transitory mood—as independent of his will, just like all those other moods that a person is prone to. One often reads and hears the opinion that love is some false, tormenting mood, something that disrupts the correct course of life—much as sunrise must seem to an owl.
There is no love in the future; love is something happening only in the present. Someone who does not express love in the present has no love.
The possibility of loving activity, something that will always satisfy him and others, arises only when someone rejects the possibility of happiness in individual life and therefore does not concern himself with this false happiness and has liberated from within himself the goodwill toward all, a desire that is natural to man. The happiness of this person’s life is in love, as the happiness of the plant’s life is in light. A plant that is not shaded by anything cannot and does not ask what direction it should grow and whether the light is good enough, nor whether it should wait for another, better light. It rather accepts the single light that is in the world and reaches out toward it. In just such a way, a man who has renounced his individual happiness does not theorize about what he should receive from others, nor what his loved ones should receive, nor whether there might be some other, even better love than the one now making its demands. He devotes himself, his whole existence, to whatever love is available to him and stands before him. Only this love gives full satisfaction to the reasonable nature of man.
English