Love Itself

Love’s memories, love recalling itself in letters lost and found over an interval of forty years: Cixous’s writer-narrator advances here far into a labyrinth of passions long ago delivered and yet still arriving through the mail, through letters and literature, in other words, the poetry of the post. As for the lovers’ returning scenes, they have their addresses in Paris (rue Olivier de Serres, Avenue de Choisy, street names that endlessly feed love’s unconscious language) and in New York, but also in a lost oasis of the Egyptian desert during the Napoleonic wars, in Athens and along the shores of a great lake centuries ago in the country of myth. The lovers are poets or soldiers, philosophers or students madly in love with poetry and poets. They are as well mermaids or panthers. Panthers? Yes, for it is the passion of the animal that drives all these lovers to bare themselves, and sometimes their claws, before the beloved. Misunderstandings are often, even inevitably the result. Seconded and witnessed by her passionate, truth-telling cats, Cixous’s narrator-writer returns unerringly to moments of errancy inflicted on address and language, those errors and faults when love, perhaps, is listening only to itself, without subject or object, lover or beloved, just love itself, l’amour même, l’amour m’aime, love loving me, in the letter box of memory.

Hans Urs von Balthasar (1905–1988) sets out to reunite Truth and holiness by returning the saints to their proper place at the heart of philosophy, theology, and metaphysics. Love Itself is Understanding is one of the first systematic treatments of Balthasar’s theology of the saints. Matthew Rothaus Moser presents Balthasar as an alternative to Idealist philosophy, a thinker who develops a religious metaphysics in which the saints’ practices of prayer and contemplation are the chief mode of knowing that the Truth of Being is divine love. Love Itself is Understanding casts new light on dominant themes in Balthasar’s thought and invites a renewed vision of the theological and metaphysical significance of the spiritual practices of prayer, obedience, and charity.

In this powerful book of quotations, Byron Katie talks about the most essential issues that face us all—love, sex, and relationships; health, sickness, and death; parents and children; work and money; and self-realization. The profound, lighthearted wisdom embodied within is not theoretical; it is absolutely authentic. Not only will this book help you on many specific issues, but it will point you toward your own wisdom and will encourage you to question your own mind, using the four simple yet incredibly powerful questions of Katie’s process of self-inquiry, called The Work. Katie is a living example of the clear, all-embracing love that is our true identity. Because she has thoroughly questioned her own mind, her words shine with the joy of understanding. "People used to ask me if I was enlightened," she says, "and I would say, ‘I don’t know anything about that. I’m just someone who knows the difference between what hurts and what doesn’t.’ I’m someone who wants only what is. To meet as a friend each concept that arose turned out to be my freedom."

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