Both in the lower and the middle classes the wiseacres urge young men 'to think it over' before taking the decisive step. Thus they foster the delusion that the choice of a wife or husband may be governed by a certain number of accurately weighable pros and cons. This is a crude delusion on the part of common sense.

Passion and marriage are essentially irreconcilable. Their origins and their ends make them mutually exclusive. Their co-existence in our midst constantly raises insoluble problems, and the strife thereby engendered constitutes a persistent danger for every one of our social safeguards.

To love in the sense of passion-love is the contrary of to live. It is an impoverishment of one's being, an askesis without sequel, an inability to enjoy the present without imagining it as absent, a never-ending flight from possession.

Having fallen from the eternal, the Evil One's desires are endless, insatiable. Having fallen from pure Being, he is driven by the desire to possess, to fill his emptiness. But the problem is insoluble, always. He is compelled to have and to hold, to possess and consume, and nothing else. All he takes, he destroys.

Romance only comes into existence where love is fatal, frowned upon and doomed by life itself.

One possessed a thousand and three women (in Spain alone), the other only one. But it is multiplicity that is impoverished, whilethe entire world is concentrated in a single being infinitely possessed. Tristan no longer needs the world--because he loves! While Don Juan, always loved, cannot love in return. Hence his anguish and his frenzied course.

Social confusion has now reached a point at which the pursuit of immorality turns out to be more exhausting than compliance with the old moral codes.