The Union: The Eschatology of Love
“It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye. You become responsible, forever, for what you have tamed.”
In Western cinema, love is often reduced to a sentamentalised fantasy, a spectacle of grand gestures and stoic suffering, where, under the shadow of love’s acme, lies the symbolic suicide for the sake of an idealised unity. Hollywood romances hinge on the ultimate moment of surrender–the protagonist giving up their ambition, individuality, or even their life, all in the name of love. This reduction of desire is sanitised into a seamless, consumable narrative. Love, however, asks of us a sacrifice that is far greater than this romanticised ideal.
Love is, at its core, the radical, transformative acceptance of both beginning and end, a birth and a death. When–rather appropriately baptised as “falling”–in love, the subject is central to the collapse of present, past, and future, meshed into a singularity. When choosing to love, or when the love chooses us, something very important happens. In that moment, we embrace the birth of the union—its limitless possibilities, its victories and defeats, its joys and struggles. But we also embrace its inevitable conclusion. To love is to stand at once at the threshold of creation and its undoing. To love is to accept not only its beginning, but its end. The moment we surrender to love, we surrender to its inevitable conclusion.
Love cannot exist in the abstract realm of eternity. Its power, however, resides in the tension between beginning and end. It is the fleetingness of love that makes it meaningful. To embrace love fully is to embrace its paradoxical temporality, knowing that in every glimpse of union, there is already the shadow of dissolution. The sacrifice love demands is deeper and far more intricate than we are ever capable to admit.
