Love That Desires Nothing Save the Other's Good

There exists, rarest among the manifold expressions of human affection, a love that constitutes in its essence an act of radical self-abnegation — which fixes its contemplative gaze so exclusively upon the beloved's felicity that the votary's own solicitudes become matters of thorough indifference. It does not ratiocinate. It maintains no ledger of reciprocities. It entertains no interrogation regarding what recompense shall be tendered in return, for such mercantile cogitation would be to misconstrue the fundamental nature of the oblation entirely. Such devotion is at once the most exigent and the most emancipatory of all attachments — exigent, because it demands the implacable mortification of every egocentric instinct; emancipatory, because in its unconditional bestowal, the votary discovers, with astonishment, that in surrendering everything, they have, by some ineffable calculus, been vouchsafed more than they relinquished.