Monday, June 1, 2015

Greeting our Angels

Here is one of the more elegant reflections on the mysterious and exhilarating institution of marriage. 
Authored by Leon Wieseltier and included in David Brooks' book The Road to Character:

Brides and grooms are people who have discovered, by means of love, the local nature of happiness.  Love is a revolution in scale, a revision of magnitudes; it is private and it is particular; its object is the specificity of this man and that woman, the distinctiveness of this spirit and that flesh.  Love prefers deep to wide, and here to there; the grasp to the reach ... Love is, or should be, indifferent to history, immune to it -- a soft and sturdy haven from it: when the day is done, and the lights are out, and there is only this other heart, this other mind, this other face, to assist in repelling one's demons or in greeting one's angels, it does not  matter who the president is.  When one consents to marry, one consents to be truly known, which is an ominous prospect; and so one bets on love to correct for the ordinariness of the impression, and to call forth the forgiveness that is invariably required by an accurate perception of oneself.  Marriages are exposures. We may be heroes to our spouses but we may not be idols.