Love

The culture of the Mediterranean is an erotic one. Rome is the supreme shrine of the Christian love-cult.

Whatever our pretensions to culture, we are, deep down, just naked animals, and naked in our needs, one of which is love. Needy, we drift into fantasies and illusions in our desperate search for love. Haunted by our failures, we may end up with broken hearts.

And yet, love certainly has its lighter side. We eavesdrop on the conversations of men's and women's misunderstandings of each other, we consider some odd matches, and argue which sex is superior. The author relates his own Roman romances, interjects some aphorisms, and then gets straightened out by a sybil.

Still naked in our needs, we want, not the examined life, but the shared life. Eros, our Mediterranean angel, guides us past sex to love and marriage, with home and family. Our needs are met, we find fulfillment.

LOVE is volume three of ROMAN RUMINATIONS, "the psychology of the human as enculturated animal".