Perhaps that is why Jane Austen has been such a rich source of literary and visual images in recent years. Along with Shakespeare. The current surfeit of sex has created a great demand for love, if we can just remember what it was. It's just waiting to strike. Yevtushenko could write like that when he was still a young rebel, before prudence supplanted love, when he was still a poet rather than a visiting academic.
Love is such that even the memory of it can ache.
Yet when his diaries were released 50 years after his death, they showed an utter devotion to his wife, Sarah Hardt. Mencken's diaries stop for two years after his wife's death, as if he could not bear to go on. That hard-boiled iconoclast couldn't bring himself to mention her until years later, as always with tenderness and yearning. So much for curmudgeonhood. It is not only music but love that soothes the savage breast.