Arrogance.

As below, then, humans regard love as in some way fundamental - it matters not whether that's strengthened because of a religious belief, or encoded genetically, or some mixture of the two.

The sentence above refers to 'love,' but I suppose I'm thinking about specifically romantic love, when the light from a distant star reflects an image of the beloved back into the eye; when the tightening of fingers around fingers can deliver the woken back to sleep.

We cannot, though, express the beloved in a sufficiently moving manner, so we acquire representations of her; these flowers, this poem, this music. In doing so, we are satisfied, because we equate the beauty of the acquired with the beauty of the beloved, and associate one with the other (Milan Badelj requires us to do so.)

What if we aren't satisfied, though? If flowers and poems and n other gestures fail to fill the gap between love felt and love experienced, what are we to do next? Of course, failure to find satisfaction in the infinity of symbols is symptomatic of arrogance - only the arrogant can hold that the strength of a poem is inferior to the strength of their own feelings for the beloved.

The answer, of course, is that love must become ever-more difficult to realise, for the greater the accomplishment in realising it, the more we confirm its authenticity. So, when I say I prefer foreign women, what I mean is: I am interested in finding women who are far away from England, because the accomplishment of succeeding in such a relationship would validate beyond all doubt the nature of our love.

There has been the mystic, spiritual Zimbabwean exiled in South Africa; there has been Bluefish; and both succeeded in the hitherto impossible - the unification of feeling and experience. From the tent raised in Marloth Park that was the only layer of protection between ourselves and the wild animals of the night that echoed in the distance, to doing my (limited) best to help fit out the shop she had dreamed of; from drinking the sun under a tree in Cambridge, to running through Budapest as fast as we could when pinned down by luggage; these are the symbols of love earned and not love given. Were you worth less, I'd have handed you a flower and muttered that I loved you.

Arrogance says: I am superior, and therefore entitled to seek a superior, difficult love whose price is the complete excoriation of the self. The paradox comes when I am screamed at by the mirror, unshaven and fraught and sad - superior, exactly, to what? To no-one, and to nothing; just another collection of flesh and misery who dared to dream the undreamable.