Worthy Romance "How grievous not to know the address of one's soul! "

On my way to Arizona this past weekend I was pulling into the gas station when I overhead a song being blasted by the car next to me. "So many hot girls tonight that I want to be my baby mamma" I was so irritated to hear the offensive perversion of romance.  What is this world coming to that a man is talking about checking out women in a club that he won't commit himself to but for one night and a kid.  Later on my 5 hour dirve I was listening to an abridged audio version of Les Miserables and was struck by the words of Marius first love letter to Cossett.  These are some of  my favorite lines.  Yeah I'd take this any day over the Baby-Mamma-woman-degrading junk out there today...just saying :)

"...God is behind all things, but all things conceal God. Objects are black and human creatures are opaque. To love a person is to render them transparent.  There are thoughts which are prayers. There are moments when, whatever the posture of the body, the soul is on its knees...The future belongs far more to the heart than to the mind. Love is the one thing that can fill and fulfil eternity. The infinite calls for the inexhaustible. Love partakes of the soul, being of the same nature. Like the soul, it is the divine spark, incorruptible, indivisible, imperishable. It is the fiery particle that dwells in us, immortal and infinite, which nothing can confine and nothing extinguish. We feel its glow in the marrow of our bones and see its brightness reaching to the depths of heaven. Oh, love, adoration, the rapture of two spirits which know each other, two hearts which are exchanged, two looks which interpenetrate!...We look up at a star for two reasons, because it shines and because it is impenetrable. But we have at our side a gentler radiance and a greater mystery, that of women...When love has melted and merged two persons in a sublime and sacred unity, the secret of life has been revealed to them: they are no longer anything but the two aspects of a single destiny, the wings of a single spirit. To love is to soar!..That which love begins can be completed only by God...'Does she still visit the Luxembourg?'...'No, Monsieur'... 'It is in this church, is it not, that she attends Mass?' ...'She does not come here any more'...'Does she still live in this house?'...'She has moved elsewhere'...'Where has she gone to live?'...'She did not say.'How grievous not to know the address of one's soul! ...You who suffer because you love, love still more. To die of love is to live by it...Love is a heavenly breath of the air of Paradise...Woe, alas, to those who have loved only bodies, forms, apperances! Death will rob them of everything. Try to love souls, you will find them again...How wonderful it is to be loved, but how much greater to love! The heart becomes heroic through passion; it rejects everthing that is not pure and arms itself with nothing that is not noble and great. An unworthy thought can no more take root in it that a nettle on a glacier. The lofty and serene spirit, immune from all base passion and emotion, prevailing over the clouds and shadows of this world, the follies, lies, hatreds, vanities and miseries, dwells in the azure of the sky and feels the deep and subterranean shifts of destiny no more than the mountain-peak feels the earthquake..."