in love with love

Every time you fall in love, you also have to fall in love with love itself again, to remember what it is and why it's worth so much, that fleeting knowledge —

Today I saw the McQueen exhibit at the Met, and although I didn't fall in love, I guess you could say I fell in love with love again — with the idea that by pulling together your deepest intellectual resources, confessing your wildest fantasies, abandoning your practical impulses, you stand a chance of making your life into something more, elevating things once mundane to elegance, sublimity —

I think that's what art really is: not what we fall in love with, exactly, but what reminds us of love, of its existence and its power and why we need it so terribly badly.