The new world offers "alternatives," as it were, to love, through a complexity of personal, both material and social developments, that seem to been able to replace or fill the spiritual needs.
Although men and women still interact what happens between them seems to be different from what was called love before, and it is often said that more and more isolation and solitude result from these interactions. The pressure of the material complex world and of the various social facts do not allow for the openness required by love. It can be said that the complexity of the modern society influence the emotional sates of the individual and make it impossible for him or her to return to the purity and simplicity of love.
What happens in our society today seems to be similar to what happened to the first legendary pair of lovers on Earth, Adam and Eve. Like them, people take interest in knowledge and material development, in building and creating and making use of all their powers and abilities, which gives them very little time to discover themselves firstly, their own spiritual disponibilities and then those of the people that surround them.
However, it seems important to point out that perhaps it is not love as such that which is lacking from our world today, but that in fact love itself has changed as part of the structure of the new-formed society, where new values have developed. In the modern...
The form of expression has been mostly modified, and not necessarily the feeling as such. As DH Lawrence points out, in the modernist vein, nothing can be said to remain the same or endure, including love, therefore the basic features attributed to love in the past are changed, as its permanence for example:
We are a liars, because the truth of yesterday becomes a lie tomorrow, whereas letters are fixed, and we live by the letter of truth.
The love I feel for my friend, this year, is different from the love I felt last year.
If it were not so, it would be a lie.
Yet we reiterate love! love! love!
A as if it were a coin with a fixed value instead of a flower that dies, and opens a different bud."[3]
Nothing stays the same and everything is relative, therefore the skepticism and paranoia specific to modernity and postmodernism have also remodeled the pattern of love, the feeling still exists as a state of consciousness, but it is now subject to the conditions of the modern world that acts on the spirits through all the channels available. Love being essential to the human spirit as such can be altered by the conditions that influence the our lives and the general rules of social interractionism, to the extent that it can be transformed. At the same time though, the feeling still retains its force and traditional meaning.
Works Cited
Alighieri, Dante Divine Commedy translated by Longfellow, Project Gutenberg at http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext97/0ddcl10.txt
Dickinson, Emily Poems Poetry x http://poetry.poetryx.com/
Fromm, Erich The Art of Loving, 2000.New York: Perrennial Classics
D.H. Lawrence Poems, Poetry X http://poetry.poetryx.com/
Ortega y Gasset, Jose On Love 1957. On Love. New York: Meridian
1]Dante Alighieri, The Divine Commedy, translated by Longfellow, Project Gutenberg at http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext97/0ddcl10.txt
2] Emily Dickinson, 3] DH Lawrence Poems, Poetry X http://poetry.poetryx.com
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