Well, here he was. They could save each other, the way the poets promised lovers should. He was mystery, he was darkness, he was all she had dreamed of. And if she would only free him he would service her - oh yes - until her pleasure reached that threshold that, like all thresholds, was a place where the strong grew stronger, and the weak perished. Pleasure was pain there, and vice versa. And he knew it well enough to call it home.
Interpretation
The quote explores the intertwined nature of love, pleasure, and pain in a deeply passionate relationship.
In this quote, Clive Barker delves into the complexity of love, suggesting that true connection involves both ecstasy and suffering. The protagonist perceives their beloved as a source of profound mystery and darkness, emphasizing that their relationship is characterized by a powerful cycle of salvation and service, pleasure and pain, where an individual's strength and vulnerability are magnified in the depths of their bond.
In practice
In a discussion on the complexities of romantic relationships, this quote can illustrate how love often blurs the lines between joy and torment.
Of course it’s the apparently tranquil periods that deceive us. Though our instruments or our senses or our wits may not be able to see the processes that are leading toward these clusters of events, they’re happening. The star, the wheel, the butterfly—all are in a subtle state of unrest, waiting for the moment when some invisible mechanism signals that the time has come. Then the star explodes; the wheel makes poor men rich; the butterfly mates and dies.
We’re too much ourselves. Afraid of letting go of what we are, in case we are nothing, and holding on so tight, we lose everything else.
In this sense love is of a different order to any other phenomenon, for it may be both an event and a sign of that invisible mechanism I spoke of before; perhaps the finest sign, the most certain. In it’s throes we need neither luck nor science. We are the wheel, and the man who profits by it. We are the star, and the darkness it pierces. We are the butterfly, brief and beautiful.
Perhaps a wiser eye than hers would be able to read tomorrow in tonight's stars, but where was the fun in that? It was better not to know. Better to be alive in the Here and the Now--in this bright, laughing moment--and let the Hours to come take care of themselves.
With the inevitability of a tongue returning to probe a painful tooth, we come back and back and back again to our fears, sitting to talk them over with the eagerness of a hungry man before a full and steaming plate.
You cut up a thing that's alive and beautiful to find out how it's alive and why it's beautiful, and before you know it, it's neither of those things, and you're standing there with blood on your face and tears in your sight and only the terrible ache of guilt to show for it.
I don’t know a perfect person. I only know flawed people who are still worth loving.
Heaven be thanked, we live in such an age when no man dies for love except upon the stage.
Is it not a sad thing that after all Christ's love to us, we should repay it with lukewarm love to Him?
To all, I would say how mistaken they are when they think that they stop falling in love when they grow old, without knowing that they grow old when they stop falling in love...
My request is not for bliss of the Garden. I only desire to see You.
Whatever our religion, we know that if we really want to love, we must first learn to forgive before anything else.
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