Despite the difficulties of my story, despite discomforts, doubts, despairs, despite impulses to be done with it, I unceasingly affirm love, within myself, as a value. Though I listen to all the arguments which the most divergent systems employ to demystify, to limit, to erase, in short to depreciate love, I persist: “I know, I know, but all the same . . .” I refer the devaluations of love to a kind of obscurantist ethic, to a let’s-pretend realism, against which I erect the realism of value: I counter whatever “doesn’t work” in love with the affirmation of what is worthwhile. This stubbornness is love’s protest: for all the wealth of “good reasons” for loving differently, loving better, loving without being in love, etc., a stubborn voice is raised which lasts a little longer: the voice of the Intractable lover. ”
“…I accept and I affirm, beyond truth and falsehood, beyond success and failure; I have withdrawn from all finality, I live according to chance (as is evidenced by the fact that the figures of my discourse occur to me like so many dice casts). Flouted in my enterprise (as it happens), I emerge from it neither victor nor vanquished: I am tragic. (Someone tells me: this kind of love is not viable. But how can you evaluate viability? Why is the viable a Good Thing? Why is it better to last than to burn?)
This morning, I must get off an “important” letter right away—one on which the success of a certain under-taking depends; but instead I write a love letter—which I do not send. I gladly abandon dreary tasks, rational scruples, reactive undertakings imposed by the world, for the sake of a useless task deriving from a dazzling Duty: the lover’s Duty. I perform, discreetly, lunatic chores; I am the sole witness of my lunacy. What love lays bare in me is energy. Everything I do has a meaning (hence I can live, without whining), but this meaning is an ineffable finality: it is merely the meaning of my strength. The pain-ful, guilty, melancholy inflections, the whole reactive side of my everyday life is reversed. Werther praises his own tension, which he affirms, in contrast to Albert’s platitudes. Born of literature, able to speak only with the help of its worn codes, yet I am alone with my strength, doomed to my own philosophy.”
Die-Heart Romantic 