Once condemned to desire, the lovers are subject to a kind of curse masquerading as grace. The victims' only choice is to worship one another in endless torture, for true love has no consummation. Each seeming conquest only fuels the desire for more to say nothing of jealousy, pathos, remorse. . . . If the flames of the inferno have any meaning, this surely must be it. Except for being magnificent.
Love is the final metaphor of sexuality.
But the price of freedom is, again, the imperative of morality. At the very essence of morality is the principle of treating others as ends in themselves. Yet love is sometimes, perhaps more often than not, curiously incompatible with morality which the lovers, in classical terms, transgress at their peril. The paradox is that love itself makes all danger, including death, entirely subservient to the inescapable, all-consuming passion that defines such love. Which is itself a kind of redemption.