Love requires something beyond knowledge. It has always already been a mystery hardly unpacked. As a matter of fact, there is more to it, for the good hearts that continue to beat to it, than just agony, open wounds and tears experienced by many but felt by few and hence expressed, articulated and depicted and sometimes prevaricated, exagerated and twisted by poets, writers and whoever feels himself at it. It all depends on the nature and nurture of the few blessed and cured hearts and minds welcoming and fostering it or the many sullied, corrupt and dirty minds and hearts mistrusting, using and then dismissing it.
In
love lies perfect wisdom, healing and eternal happiness for the good hearts that either welcome or shy away but still repsect and in love lies limitations, suffering and homesickness too. In short, to be able to love means to be able to remember clearly and decently. Now, by invoking memory, thus coupled with shared, because it is negotiated, knowledge of the past that must be delivered to the present, we keep at once reading and re-reading, writing and re-writing and building and re-building upon it for posterity. Nobody can start from void because love has always preceded.
Of course, for curious minds, this is easily proven by the existence of numerous collections of
poems and huge volumes of prose furthered by critical work to help them endure through time. But it is worth reminding that love cannot be found in books of literature. Literature itself, as Nicholas Watson* rightly said, refers not to books but to the knowledge gained from them.
We can see that in the same way as we see how actions and reactions are being taken and made through time on the ground by those who seek to read, learn and reach out with help (this is love!) and by those who ambition to move many a step further and begin to fly with words and deeds everywhere and offer help on the ground (this is love and knowledge!).
Success will then come to both categories as learning becomes incremental and life-long and this shows us the multitude of possibilties in
life and shows us the multiplicity and complexity of ways that either point to the Paradiso where love is nourished and elemented by divine beauty and truth or, alas, to the Inferno where hatred hates everything including itself and thus is ready to suffer, pay the bills of lies and crimes inflicted by its agents and therefore continue to feel the bitterness it has already caused everywhere.
Love, in a nutshell, however mysterious and dangerous, remembers and reminds but hatred, however comfortable, complex and horrendous, forgets, hinders and manipulates.
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*Nicholas Watson's statement is gleaned from his introduction to a chapter entitled "Theories of Translation" p.73 in a volume entitled "The Oxford History of Literary Translation in English" edited by Roger Ellis and first published by Oxford university press (New York, 2008).