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PARTISAN REVIEW
the courting, attacking, often violently grasping role: this fact makes
one easily overlook the element of fate, the dependence on some–
thing which cannot be predetermined or compelled contained in
every erotic experience. This refers not only to dependence on the
partner's concession but to something deeper still. To
be
sure, every
"love returned" is a gift which cannot be "earned," not even by any
measure of love-because demand and compensation are irrelevant
to love; it belongs in principle in a category altogether different from
a squaring of accounts-a point which suggests one of its analogies
to the more profound religious relation. But over and above that
which we receive from another as a free gift, there still lies in every
happiness of love-like a profound, impersonal bearer of those per–
sonal elements-a favor of fate. We receive happiness not only from
the other: the fact that we do receive it from him is a blessing of
destiny, which is incalculable. In the proudest, most self-assured event
in this sphere lies something which we must accept with humility.
When the force owing its success to itself and giving the conquest of
love the note of victory and triumph is combined with the note of
favor by fate, then the constellation of the adventure is pre-formed,
as it were.
The relation connecting the erotic content with the more general
form of life as adventure is rooted in deeper ground. The adventure
is the exclave of life, the "torn-off" whose beginning and end have
no connection with the somehow unified stream of existence. And
yet, as
if
hurdling this stream, it connects with the most recondite
instincts and some ultimate intention of life as a whole- and this
distinguishes it from the merely accidental episode, from that which
only externally "happens" to us. Now when a love affair is of short
duration, it lives in precisely such a mixture of the merely tangential
and yet central. It may give our life only a momentary splendor, like
the ray shed in an inside room by a light flitting by outside. Still, it
satisfies a need, or is, in fact, only possible by
vi~tue
of a need which
-whether considered as physical, psychic, or metaphysical-exists
timelessly, as it were, in the foundation or center of our being.
The fact that love harbors the possibility of this double relation
is reflected by the twofold temporal aspect of the erotic. It displays
two standards of time: the momentarily climactic, abruptly subsid–
ing passion; and the idea of something which cannot pass, an idea
