Love is the final frontier.
What else is so improbable, so inexplicable, so stubbornly intangible as love? What else flies in the face of those who would keep tabs on it behind cold iron bars, if only they knew how? What else flits between the fingers of those who would cage it with classification, ferret out the secrets of its grandeur with a scalpel and bone saw, lay open its innards with a dichotomous key to study its diet? What else, if the atoms of love could be split, would send the human race scurrying into bunkers as a great, terrible fleet of joy and beauty bombs rained down?
The defining characteristic of the human being is to be unable to accept things as they are. With this and time, humans have risen to dominate a world that once chained them to their fire pits with luminescent eyes in the darkness that spun the harvest moonlight into beacons of salivating death.
Love is driven by our insatiable inacceptance of ourselves _ particularly the loneliness that is to be one's self, and to be one's self alone.
It is by means of love that humans conquer the solitary confinement that we are sentenced to without earthly hearing or trial, without cause outlined in any mortal Miranda rights. With love, we seek to make right some wrong so ancient that we remember only that we fight it, and not why: a notorious wrong that changed each of us into exiles in our own bodies.
For we are firmly convinced that despite the 6.8 billion people crowding the overburdened Earth, despite the looming possibility of astronauts looking down from space and seeing continents crowded with massive swarms of writhing human beings the way North America once held herds of buffalo tens of miles long _ despite this, in the most fundamental ways, we are all alone.
Love makes possible the preposterous notion of empathy. Without it, we rail fruitlessly against our inability to know what goes on in the minds of others; we despair of ever glimpsing the inner universes that, if we rested a hand on the head of another person, would be inches from the fingers yet light years from the touch. We live our lives in the individual prisons that we ourselves brick up with differences and disinterest, cement with conflicts and mistrust, and we never step out from them because we can never find a door. It is only with love that we learn we can walk through the walls.
What makes love so impressive is its terrific impracticality. Logically, it is ridiculous to want to be with someone else nearly all of the time. There is no biological need to feel someone else's fingers within your own, no cellular process that requires the affection sealed in the clasp of another's warm lips. One could argue that parental love is vital to making sure that the parent's offspring grow up safely, but romantic love has no excuse whatsoever. It certainly isn't necessary for the continuation of the species, as is demonstrated by most other animals and every rap song ever written.
Love is terribly un-Darwinian. The persistent desire to develop an unreasonable attachment to another unrelated being and to devote all of your resources to its continued well-being hardly meshes well with survival of the fittest. An evolutionary biologist would go into psychological trauma shock if all of the Earth's creatures suddenly began falling in love at first sight without so much as an elaborate mating dance or clash of horns to prove their genetic fortitude.
Love is universal. In every culture there are love stories, tales of often forbidden trysts driven not by sexual need, but by the more intangible desire to come as close as possible to a union of two existences as one. Marriage is not common to all cultures, but what is common is the idea that souls may be united with the objects of their devotion. Whether that object of devotion is a god, another human or otherwise, all societies acknowledge the concept of a human overcoming the loneliness that is his or her birthright by devoting his or her existence to something else. Cross-culturally, union of the soul to the object of devotion is the ultimate reward.
What is love? Where does it come from, and why it is necessary? What is the source of tenderness and devotion? What is the purpose of wanting to be whatever someone has need of, and never asking if they love you in return?
I believe that love is what lends credibility to the idea of a higher power. Love does not behoove the practicality and the randomness of the natural world. Love demands the acceptance of the soul as a thing inherently broken, a shattered half of something beyond explanation that must be mended with another remnant to regain its former glory. Love assumes that all of a human's biological needs and desires are secondary to the human's spiritual handicap, and may be sacrificed in the pursuit of its mending. Love would burn the physical on a pyre just to get a glimpse of the metaphysical's shadow among the embers.
The theory of intelligent design looks to the wonderful genius within the universe to advocate the presence of a higher being. Perhaps in the search for the elusive greater presence, we should look not to the masterpieces found in the natural world, but to the flops. Maybe such marvelous biological fallacies as love are the cracks left in the otherwise seamless cover that separates us from whatever lies beyond us. Maybe to fall in love is to throw back the Wizard's curtain.
I leave you with a quote on the matter from "Les Miserables," a novel by Victor Hugo. "To love another person is to see the face of God."
Jessie Matus is a 2009 graduate of Oneonta High School.
