The truth – that love is the ultimate and the highest goal to which man can aspire. Then I grasped the meaning of the greatest secret that human poetry and human thought and belief have to impart: The salvation of man is through love and in love. I understood how a man who has nothing left in this world still may know bliss, be it only for a brief moment, in the contemplation of his beloved. In a position of utter desolation, when man cannot express himself in positive action, then his only achievement may consist in enduring his sufferings in the right way – an honourable way – in such a position man can through loving contemplation of the image he carries of his beloved, achieve fulfillment.
“The angels are lost in perpetual contemplation of an infinite glory.”
– Viktor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning, on Love (pg 57)
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Contemplation, then, must be different from engagement. How, then, is it to be in love while engaged in it? There must be a significance in the difference the two experiences to the human soul, in archetypal terms?
