VOLUME VII, CHAPTER 13, SECTION 1

VOLUME VII, CHAPTER 13, SECTION 1

How a Great Love Remains in the Human World

The last chapter carried the book to its final layer: to leave that one great love, the love that has run through every word from the first volume to this one, in the human world, in trust, for good. This section asks the plain question first. This great love, how does it remain in the human world? Not by one person living forever. Not by one book that never crumbles. It remains because in one generation of real humans after another the five stay alive and that great love keeps flowing, each lamp lighting the next, on and on, never breaking. The way a great love remains is never by being frozen and stored. It is by being passed, alive: it lives in one real human heart, and flows from that heart to the next.

First, break a hope that will only fail. A great love does not remain in the human world by any one person living, or any one book lasting. People age, people go. No person who carries a great love can live forever and guard that love, by his own hand, to the end of time. Books crumble, books scatter. No book that bears a great love can stay unbroken and hold that love, unchanged, for ten thousand years. Pin the whole hope of the love's remaining on one person, one book, and the hope must fail: the person goes, the book crumbles, and is the love not then cut off, gone? So a great love cannot remain by the lasting of one person or one book. If it is truly to stay, to be handed on, it needs a vessel longer-lived than any person's years, more enduring than any book's frame. That vessel is nothing else than the one generation of real humans after another, endlessly born, and the five in their hearts, and that one great love. People age, but the real humans of the human world do not run out. Books crumble, but the five in the human heart do not die. The great love, borne on these endlessly renewing real humans, outlasts the brief span of any one person or book, and remains.

Said plainly, this layer sets the heart at ease. People worry: a good thing, how can it last? A good person goes, does his goodness go with him? A good book crumbles, do its truths scatter with it? That worry ties the good to a person or a thing that can crumble, and so cannot help but worry. But the way a great love remains slips exactly past that worry: it was never tied to any one person who can go, any one book that can rot. It is tied to the endlessly renewing human heart. The person passes, humankind runs on. One book rots, and the five in the human heart are born again in each generation. To entrust a great love to this unbroken human heart is to entrust it to a vessel far longer-lived than any person, any book. So do not grieve for the lasting of a great love. So long as the human world still holds people, and the human heart can still grow those five, this great love has a dwelling that is never cut off. While the human world does not perish, the great love does not die. What a steady, settled hope that is.

Then by what does the great love remain? By one real human heart after another, alive, in flow. It is no dead thing to be locked in a box and sealed away. It is alive, and it lives in one real human heart after another. A real human with the five grown, that great love alive in him, becomes one dwelling of the great love. He meets others with kindness, help, respect, and the love flows out from him to those around him. And those warmed by his love have the five in them wakened, the great love in them brought to life, and they become new dwellings of the love, and flow on to others. So the great love goes from one heart to the next, from this generation to the next. It is not stored in one place. It is in flow, alive, among countless hearts. This flowing is how the great love lives on in the human world: not by being frozen and kept, but by being passed without end, each heart it lights both a dwelling of it and a ford it crosses to reach the next.

Here too is the great difference between a great love and an ordinary treasure. Ordinary treasures, gold and jade and fine things, are yours-the-less-for-mine, had-by-one-lost-by-another: give a share to another and your own hand holds less. A great love is wholly otherwise: the more it is passed, the richer, the more it is given, the more there is. A person gives his love to another and his own love is not one thread less, but more alive, more warm, more full for the giving. And the one who received grows new love in turn. So love, in the passing, is not thinned but multiplied: one becomes two, two become four, the more it travels the more of it, the further it flows the wider it spreads. This is the great love's own near-miraculous law: it does not follow the common rule of this-up-that-down, but only love's own rule of ever-more-in-the-giving. And because of this, as the great love passes from heart to heart, the love in the human world is no fixed sum, had-here-and-gone-there, but a living stream, ever more in the passing, endlessly renewing. The love of the human world can grow greater and greater. That is a warm confidence this book is glad to leave the human world.

This heart lighting that heart, this flowing, is the each lamp lighting the next spoken of before, and in that lamp-to-lamp the great love goes on, unbroken. One lamp lights another, its own light no thread the less, and the human world has one more lamp of brightness. So with the great love: one heart passes it to another, its own love no less, and the human world has one more loving heart. Lamp lights lamp, heart lights heart, and the light spreads ever wider, the love grows ever more. The great love in the hearts of those before is passed to the next generation, and they to the next again, on and on, generation handing to generation. Though the one who first lit the lamp is long gone, though the first lamp itself long ago went dark, the light it kindled, through one lamp lighting the next, burns to this day, and will burn on. The great love remains in the human world for just this reason, that it is passed lamp to lamp, unbroken: it leans on no single lamp burning forever, only on the passing that never stops. While the passing goes on, though a thousand thousand lamps go dark in their turn, that light, that love, is never put out.

This gives a deep comfort, and lays on a heavy charge, and the two are one thing seen from two sides. The comfort: a great love is not cut off by the dying of one lamp. A good person goes, and the hearts he lit remain, and the love is passing still. A generation passes, and the light it handed on remains, to be handed on again. So do not despair at any one lamp going dark, for the light was long ago passed on, and does not rest on that one lamp. The charge: whether the passing goes on unbroken rests on each lamp now burning, on whether it will light the next. You, and I, and all in whom the five still burn this moment, are the lamps alight this moment. Whether this long stream of lamp lighting lamp runs on rests on whether you and I are willing to pass our own small light to the unlit hearts beside us. To take the light of those before, and pass it to those after, this is the one duty of every real human standing in this stream of lamp lighting lamp. Comfort and charge are the two faces of one body. Because the passing is unbroken, there is comfort. Because the passing rests on you and me, there is the charge.

And this is the whole hope of this book. This book, it has been said, is one shape of that great love, a small oil lamp. It does not hope to last unbroken. It hopes only that its own faint light may kindle one reader's heart, and that heart go on to kindle others. It gives itself away for just this lamp-to-lamp: this one lamp may rot, may go dark, but if it once lit a heart, and that heart passed the light on, then the great love it bore, through that passing, has stayed in the human world. So this book's hope was never to be remembered forever. It was that the great love, kindled through its one small flame, might join the unbroken stream of lamp lighting lamp. It is willing to be forgotten, surpassed, left to crumble, so long as that great love still lives and passes in one human heart after another. That willingness is the ground-tone of originally not a single thing, a great love remains in the human world, shown here one last time, and deepest. A book willing to be forgotten is a rare thing in this world. So many books are written for immortality, for a name, to be remembered by those who come after. This book turns it around: it does not ask to be remembered, but hopes that once the thing that matters more is safely handed on, it may quietly be forgotten. This is no self-scorn. It is having seen clearly what weighs more and what less, what comes first and what after: the book is form, the great love is heart. The book is a boat, the great love the one it ferries. The boat brings the one to shore, and its work is done, and whether the boat is then kept or left, remembered or forgotten, does not matter at all. What matters is that the one has reached the shore. This book is glad to be such a boat, ferrying and asking nothing for itself. It carries that great love into one reader's heart after another, and once across, it is content, and though forgotten, though crumbled, has no regret. This asking only to ferry, and nothing for itself, is the book's most thorough living-out of how a great love remains, and, as a small oil lamp, its last and brightest burning. The next section carries this on: this great love, passed lamp to lamp, comes down at last to one line. What is it?

Credit to the ancestors; the mistakes are mine: Tiger Lyon.