Before the majesty of the love-death life breaks
down, to be laid hold of and transcended in a new (divined) sphere.
The thought of the love-death, the will that the world should be
governed by love, is the most unconditional postulate of feeling ever
laid down. For the love-death is the definite and irrevocable victory of
emotion; it is ecstasy as a solution of the world-problem and the
world-process. It is human to regard love and death as antitheses; to
consider them far removed from each other; marriage and funeral are the
poles of social life. The ecstasy of the love-death, however, owing to
its all-transcending claim, unites the two poles. The climax of life
shall also be its end.
It is here, in the voluntary surrender of life in order to attain a
divined unity, and not in the union of begetting and destroying, that
the frequently assumed connection between love and death is to be found.
Voluptuousness and death are not interlinked, as is so frequently
asserted since Novalis (not on the higher plane of eroticism), but
voluptuousness has immolated itself, has been annihilated in the
love-death.
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