Jeanette Winterson: The PowerBook

The great and ruinous lovers.

Lancelot and Guinevere.
Tristan and Isolde.
Siegfried and Brünnhilde
Romeo and Juliet.
Cathy and Heathcliffe.
Vita and Violet.
Oscar and Bosie.
Burton and Taylor.
Abelard and Heloïse.
Paolo and Francesca.

There are many more. This is a list you can write yourself. Some are greater than others. Some more ruinous. Some tales have been told many times, others privately and by letter. Love's script has no end of beginnings. The characters and the scenery change. There are three possible endings: Revenge. Tragedy. Forgiveness.

The stories we sit up late to hear are love stories. It seems that we cannot know enough about this riddle of our lives. We go back and back to the same scenes, the same words, trying to scrape out the meaning. Nothing could be more familiar than love. Nothing else eludes us so completely.

I do not know whether or not science will formulate its grand theory of the universe. I know it will not make it any easier to read the plain text of our lives. It is plain but it seems like a secret alphabet. We train as our own Egyptologists, hoping the fragments will tell a tale. We work at night as alchemists, struggling to decipher the letters mirrored and reversed. We are people who trace with our finger a marvellous book, but when we turn to read it again the letters have vanished. Always the book must be rewritten. Sometimes a letter at a time is all we can do.

My search for you, your search for me, is a search after something that cannot be found. Only the impossible is worth the effort. What we seek is love itself, revealed now and again in human form, but pushing us beyond our humanity into animal instinct and god-like success. The love we seek overrules human nature. It has a wildness in it and a glory that we want more than life itself. Love never counts the cost, to itself or others, and nothing is as cruel as love. There is no love that does not pierce the hands and feet.

Merely human love does not satisfy us, though we settle for it. It is an encampment on the edge of the wilderness, and we light the fire and turn up the lamp, and tell stories until late at night of those great loves lost and won.

The wilderness is not tamed. It waits -- beautiful and terrible -- beyond the reach of the campfire. Now and again someone gets up to leave, forced to read the map of themselves, hoping that the treasure is really there. A record of their journey comes back to us in note form, sometimes just a letter in a dead man's pocket.

Love is worth death. Love is worth life. My search for you, your search for me, goes beyond life and death into one long call in the wilderness. I do not know if what I hear is an answer or a echo. Perhaps I will hear nothing. It doesn't matter. The journey must be made.