Are We Capable of Love Any More?

 

The bronze mists of the haunted jazz club, 

Meilori's,

curled and creamed like

 a dreaded thought 

trying to form itself 

on the fevered edge of consciousness.

"I fold," sighed the ghost of Ray Bradbury, laying his cards gently upon the rune-etched table.

"You folded your cards a long time ago," drily smiled the ghost of William Faulkner, 

"as our friend, Roland, almost did last Halloween."

"What month is it, anyway?" asked Ray Bradbury.

"It's a month away from Valentine's Day, sir," I smiled sadly having lost my Kathleen decades that seemed only months ago.

Faulkner laid down his cigar. "Your living friends these days are incapable of love."

"Here, I find myself standing outside the window of the storefront of humanity, still observing as a writer but unable to reach out and touch with fingers of new prose"

He shook his head.

"Because of the darkness in this world , the young man or woman writing today has forgotten the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing

 

because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat of wresting something from nothing.

 

You must learn them again. You must teach yourself that the basest of all things is to be afraid.

 And teaching yourself that, 

forget it forever,

 leaving no room in your writing for anything but the old truths of the heart,

 the old universal truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed - 

love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice.

 Until you do so, you labor under a curse.

 You write not of love but of lust,

 of defeats in which no one loses anything of value,

 of victories without hope and,

 worst of all, without pity or compassion. Your griefs grieve on no universal bones, leaving no scars.

 You write not of the heart but of the sex glands."

He turned, "What do you think, Ray?"

The last breath of winter sighed down my spine, for Mr. Bradbury looked as young as a high school senior.

"What is Love? 

Perhaps we may find that love is the ability of someone to give us back to ourselves when we thought ourselves truly lost forever. 

Maybe love is someone seeing and remembering, handing us back to ourselves just a trifle better than we had dared to hope or dream we could ever be again.”

He turned to me. "What do you think, Roland."

"I think, sir, that it is, indeed, a dark world. 

But if we find love, we don't have to walk it alone. 

Because even if we lose the source of that warmth, its memory will light the way before us."

William Faulkner said, "You trouble me, Roland. You surely do."

"Me, too, sir. Me, too."

***

So, my friends, what do you think about love?