Nathaniel Hawthorne: Hester & Arthur, The Scarlet Letter

Charles Dickens: Agnes & David, David Copperfield

Lucy Montgomery: Anne & Gilbert, Anne of Green Gables

Thornton Wilder: Emily & George, Our Town

Stephen Sondheim: Fosca & Giorgio, Passion

Reunited after 76 years: "All precious things discovered late"

Love-Song Lyrics: "I believe in music, I believe in love"

Editor's Essay: The Great Idea of Love

Editor's Essay: Do Opposites Attract?

Editor's Essay: The Perfect Mate

Editor's Essay: Illusion & Reality: A Parable of Two Beautiful Girls

VJ Day, Times Square, 1945

Personal Statement #3: An Introduction to The Scientific Evidence for The AfterLife: "I'm not allowed to tell you too much about what it's like over here, because some of you might try to end your mortal lives just to get here a little faster"

Personal Statement #7: Love In The AfterLife: The Love Story of Elmere and Franklin: Summerland, Where Dreams Come True 

Personal Statement #9: Love In The AfterLife: The Story of Della: The Bride Who Did Not See Her Husband Off To War

Personal Statement #13: Love In The AfterLife: Part 1: The Troubadour and the Wedding Song: What Is The Reason For Falling In Love?

Personal Statement #25: Love In The AfterLife: The Soulmate Story of Norma and Richard: Why Destined Lovers Fail To Recognize Each Other

Personal Statement #26: Love In The AfterLife: Soulmate, Myself: The Story of The French Girl Denise, The Perfect Resume: Everything a Man Could Want, But She's Not You

Personal Statement #28: Love In The AfterLife: The Perfect Storm of Ultimate Human Suffering: Exploring Cosmic Meaning in Separation from a Soulmate Lover: Making Your Music Pure

Personal Statement #30: Anger: the Soul's Blinding, the Ego's Cry of Resistance: How We Fail to Recognize the Loves of Our Lives: My Friendship with Carolyn Kuhn Sperle

Personal Statement #32: Love In The AfterLife: The Mysterious World of Twin Soul Lovers: The Glowing Deep Purple: Why True Romance Will Last Forever

Personal Statement #33: Love In The AfterLife: The Story of The Fish and The Crab: Twin-Soul Love and The Purging Fire: Freedom, Only In This Case, I Covet Not: Loving According To Each Other's Liking

Personal Statement #37: Love In The AfterLife: Part II: The Troubadour and the Wedding Song: All That You Have Is Your Soul: Woman As Transforming Fire: Do You Believe In Something You've Never Seen Before?

Personal Statement #38: Love In The AfterLife: The Soulmate Story of Ed and Kerri: Still A Whisper On My Lips: If I Should Meet Thee After Long Years, How Should I Greet Thee? With Silence and Tears

Personal Statement #46: Love In The AfterLife: Romance at the Pinnacle of Existence! The Ultimate Dualistic-Halves of Eternal Twin-Soul Love! Why Your Deepest Yearning is the Voice of the Universe Proclaiming Its Truest Cosmic Message! I will love no other! no other!

Personal Statement #49: Can Morality Be Reduced to a Set of Written Rules? An Interview With Francesca of Madison County: The Good Little Girl Strikes Back!

Personal Statement #51: Love In The AfterLife: The Deceptiveness of Eros and The Tests: How to Distinguish True Romance from Animalistic Fever! Love has a nasty habit of disappearing overnight

Personal Statement #61: Love In The AfterLife: The Perfect Mate: To say I-love-you, right out loud! 

Personal Statement #63: Love In The AfterLife: Summerland: Where Dreams Come True, Part II: How You Will Yet Find Healing from the Devastating Losses of this World! Long, long shall I rue thee, too deeply to tell

Couple Married 72 Years Dies Holding Hands, October 19, 2011: A Des Moines, Iowa couple married for 72 years died one hour apart last week in the hospital as they held hands. Family said the story of Gordon, 94, and Norma Yeager, 90, is a real-life love story. On the day she graduated from high school, Norma said yes to Gordon's marriage proposal. The couple married on May 26, 1939 in State Center. They left home last Wednesday to go into town, but they didn't make it. At the intersection of Highway 30 and Jessup Avenue just west of Marshalltown, state troopers said Gordon pulled in front of an oncoming car. The Iowa State Patrol crash report said the other driver attempted to avoid the crash but was unable to stop in time. In the intensive care unit, nurses knew not to separate Gordon and Norma. "They brought them in the same room in intensive care and put them together, and they were holding hands in ICU. They were not really responsive," said Dennis Yeager (son). Gordon died at 3:38 pm, holding hands with his wife. "It was really strange, they were holding hands, and Dad stopped breathing, but I couldn't figure out what was going on because the heart monitor was still going. But we were saying, he isn't breathing! How does he still have a heart beat? The nurse checked and said that's because they were holding hands and it's going through them. Her heart was beating through him and picking it up." At 4:48 pm, one hour after Gordon died, Norma passed too. "They just loved being together," said Dennis Yeager. At their funeral on Tuesday, Norma and Gordon held hands in their casket. Family said they will be cremated and their ashes mixed together.

Charles Williams: "Love you? I am you."

Augustine, The Confessions: The philosopher-theologian recounts leaving his lover of many years, a soul-mate "torn from my side...my heart which clave unto her was torn and wounded and bleeding. And she returned to Africa, vowing unto Thee never to know any other man... Nor was that my wound cured, which had been made by the cutting away of [his lover] but after inflammation and most acute pain, it mortified, and my pains became less acute, but more desperate."

Anonymous: "If you love someone, set them free. If they come back to you, they're yours forever."

Aristotle: "Love is composed of a single soul inhabiting two bodies."

Francois de La Rochefoucald: "Lovers never get tired of each other, because they are always talking about themselves."

Simone De Beauvoir : "Why one man rather than another? It was odd.You find yourself involved with a fellow for life just because he was the one that you met when you were nineteen."

Erica Jong: "You see an awful lot of smart guys with dumb women, but you hardly ever see a smart woman with a dumb guy."

Katharine Hepburn: “Plain women know more about men than beautiful women.”

Quincy Howe, Jr., Reincarnation for the Christian: "...  a touching and uncharacteristically tender story by Mark Twain entitled 'My Platonic Sweetheart.' In this story he tells of a recurring dream of great vividness in which he found himself again and again loving the same girl in many different guises. This dream-personage first intrudes upon Twain when he is in his late teens, and she revisits him on an average of every two years until he is in his sixties. In these dreams he is always seventeen and his beloved is always fifteen. All else changes, however: her appearance, her name, his name, and the setting are always different. In one such dream she expires in his arms in Hawaii. In another he is courting her amidst the grandeur of the Old South. In yet another he loves her in ancient Athens. What he finds extraordinary about all these encounters is that whenever they meet, there is no sense of separation. In each new dream they meet and talk with the most simple and unabashed affection. Recognition is immediate, despite the changes of name and appearance. Although there has been the apparent separation of time and space, they love and understand each other as though they had never been apart... In all his dream encounters Twain finds it utterly touching that this experience of love is based upon a familiarity that cuts across time and space... the realization that the pull of affection can sometimes be so immediate and overpowering as to point almost irresistibly toward a source more profound and ancient than the events of a single lifetime."

Neil Gaiman, Sandman:The Kindly Ones: "Have you ever been in love? Horrible, isn't it? It makes you so vulnerable. It opens your chest and it opens your heart and it means someone can get inside you and mess you up. You build up all these defenses. You build up this whole armor, for years, so nothing can hurt you, then one stupid person, no different from any other stupid person, wanders into your stupid life...You give them a piece of you. They don't ask for it. They do something dumb one day like kiss you, or smile at you, and then your life isn't your own anymore. Love takes hostages. It gets inside you. It eats you out and leaves you crying in the darkness, so a simple phrase like 'maybe we should just be friends' or 'how very perceptive' turns into a glass splinter working its way into your heart. It hurts. Not just in the imagination. Not just in the mind. It's a soul-hurt, a body-hurt, a real gets-inside-you-and-rips-you-apart pain. I hate love."

Ambrose Bierce: "Love: a temporary insanity, curable by marriage."

Margaret Anderson: "In real love you want the other person's good. In romantic love you want the other person."

Samuel Clemens, upon Olivia's acceptance of his marriage proposal: "I am so happy I want to scalp somebody."

Unknown: "Do you believe in love-at-first-sight? or do I have to walk by you again?"

Tiffany Anton: "You don't really know if it's love, until it's over."

Mae West: "A woman has got to love a bad man once or twice in her life to be thankful for a good one."

Cyndi Thompson: "It took me by surprise when I saw you standing there. Close enough to touch, breathing the same air. You asked me how I've been, I guess that's when I smiled and said 'just fine.' But I was lying. What I really meant to say is I'm dying here inside. I miss you more each day. There's not a night I haven't cried. Baby, here's the truth, I'm still in love with you. And that's what I really meant to say."

Unknown: "A dream is a wish your heart makes when you are asleep."

C.S. Lewis,The Four Loves : "When the two people who ... are on the same road [i.e., very much alike] are of different sexes, the friendship which passes between them will very easily pass - may pass in the first half hour - into erotic love."

Erich Fromm, psychiatrist, The Art of Loving : "Since erotic love is the most deceptive form of love there is ... it becomes important to distinguish sexual desireper se from love. If erotic love is not also brotherly love , the union is likely to be orgiastic, transitory."

Dr. Mortimer Adler: "When a man and woman fall in love they desire each other, but not in the same way that they desire food or water. Human sexuality takes two directions: there is sex in the service of love, and there is sex divorced from love (i.e., lust). To desire a person as one desires food or drink is lust - a completely selfish desire.But sexual love implies a fusion of soul and body. It seeks to realize itself in a union which involves knowing, understanding, compassion and self-sacrifice."

Theodore Reik, psychiatrist: "Love and sex often coincide, but coincidence is not evidence of identity ... There is no doubt among psychoanalysts that there is sex without love, sex 'straight.' [But] they vehemently deny that there can be love without sex," emphasizing the relentless need for true Love to bond, body and soul, with the focus of its affection.

Dr. Mortimer Adler: "According to an ancient Greek myth, man was originally a composite being, half male and half female. A capricious god split him in two, with the result that the separated male and female have sought ever since to become re-united with the 'other half.' Modern psychologists make the same point in a somewhat different way when they say that the deepest need of man is the need to overcome his separateness, to leave the prison of his aloneness."

John Donne, speaking of sexual love as a union of body and soul: "Love's mysteries in souls do grow, But yet the body is his book."

Lord Byron: " But who, alas! can love, and then be wise? Not that remorse did not oppose temptation; A little still she strove, and much repented, and whispering, 'I will ne'er consent' - consented."

Lord Byron: " Long, long shall I rue thee, Too deeply to tell... In silence I grieve, That thy heart could forget, Thy spirit deceive. If I should meet thee After long years, How should I greet thee? - With silence and tears."

Lord Byron: " She walks in beauty, like the night Of cloudless climes and starry skies; And all that's best of dark and bright Meet in her aspect and her eyes."

Elizabeth Barrett Browning: "How do I love thee? Let me count the ways. I love thee to the depth and breadth and height My soul can reach... I love thee with the breath, Smiles, tears,of all my life! - and, if God choose, I shall but love thee better after death."

Goethe:

Tell me what fate has planned for us.
How did it join us in such close accord?
In ages now gone by You were my sister or my wife. 
 

You knew the hidden recess of my being,
And of my soul you grasped the subtle resonance.
With just a glance you saw me to the core,
To depths unseen by any other eye. 
 

You quelled the raging torrent in my veins,
My wild and erring course you set aright
Until my heart, shattered and distraught,
Finally found its rest within your angel arms.

Pascal: "The heart has its reasons, which the reason does not know. We feel it in a thousand things... it hardens itself against one or the other at its will. You have rejected the one, and kept the other."

Shakespeare: "The greater castle of the world is lost," says Antony to Cleopatra; "we have kissed away kingdoms and provinces."

Shakespeare: Romeo's words to Juliet: "My bounty is as boundless as the sea, my love as deep; the more I give to thee, the more I have, for both are infinite."

Dr. Mortimer Adler: "Love is all opposites - the only reality, the great illusion; the giver of life and its consumer; the benign goddess whose benefactions men beseech, and ... who wreaks havoc and devastation. She is a divinity to be feared when not propitiated, her potions are poison, her darts are shafts of destruction. Love is itself an object of love and hate. Men fall in love with love and fight against it. Omnia vincit amor, Virgil writes -love conquers all."

Plato: To the question Socrates asks, whether life is harder towards the end, the old man Cephalus replies in the words of Sophocles, when he was asked how love suits with age, "I feel as if I had escaped from a mad and furious master."

Lucretius: In the most passionate diatribe against love's passion, Lucretius condemns the sensual pleasures which are so embittered with pain. Venus should be entirely shunned, for once her darts have wounded men,"the sore gains strength and festers by feeding, and day by day the madness grows, and the misery becomes heavier ... This is the one thing, whereof the more and more we have, the more does our heart burn with the cursed desire ... When the gathering desire is sated, the old frenzy is back upon them . . .nor can they discover what device may conquer their disease; in such deep doubt they waste beneath their secret wound ...These ills are found in love that is true and fully prosperous; but when love is crossed and hopeless, there are ills which you might detect with closed eyes, ills without number; so that it is better to be on the watch beforehand, even as I have taught you, and to beware that you are not entrapped. For to avoid being drawn into the meshes of love, is not so hard a task as when caught amid the toils to issue out and break through the strong bonds of Venus."

Dr. Mortimer Adler: "The love between man and woman makes all the great poems contemporaneous with each other and with ourselves. There is a sense in which each great love affair is unique -- a world in itself, incomparable, unconditioned by space and time... There seems to be no happiness more perfect than that which love confirms. But there is also no misery more profound, no depth of despair greater, than that into which lovers are plunged when they are bereft, disappointed, unrequited."

Dr. Mortimer Adler: "When greed violates the precepts of justice, or gluttony those of temperance, the vice or sin appears to have no redeeming features. These are weaknesses of character incompatible with heroic stature. But many of the great heroes of literature are otherwise noble men or women who have, for love's sake, deserted their duty or transgressed the rules of God and man, acknowledging their claims and yet choosing to risk the condemnation of society even to the point of banishment, or to put their immortal souls in peril. The fact seems to be that only love retains some honor when it defies morality; not that moralists excuse the illicit act, but that in the opinion of mankind, as evidenced by its poetry at least, love has some privileged status. Its waywardness and even its madness are extenuated. The poets suggest the reason for this. Unlike the other passions which man shares with the animals, characteristically human love is a thing of the spirit as well as the body. A man is piggish when he is a glutton, a jackal when he is craven, but when his emotional excess in the sphere of love lifts him to acts of devotion and sacrifice, he is incomparably human. That is why the great lovers, as the poets depict them, seem admirable in spite of their transgressions. They almost seem to be justified poetically, at least, if not morally -- in acting as if love exempted them from ordinary laws; as if their love could be a law unto itself. 'Who shall give a lover any law?' Arcite asks in Chaucer's Knight's Tale. 'Love is a greater law,' he says, 'than man has ever given to earthly man.'"

Jim Croce, Operator : "... something in my eyes ... you know, it happens everytime I think about the love that I thought would save me"

Mel Gibson, The Patriot: "There were times when I had trouble breathing around your mother."

Sara Teasdale: "No one worth possessing can be quite possessed."

Anne Morrow Lindbergh: "Him that I love, I wish to be free - even from me."

Chaucer: "For there is one thing I can safely say: that those bound by love must obey each other if they are to keep company long. Love will not be constrained by mastery; when mastery comes, the God of love at once beats his wings, and farewell - he is gone. Love is a thing as free as any spirit; women naturally desire liberty, and not to be constrained like slaves; and so do men, if I shall tell the truth. See who is the most patient in love; he has the greatest advantage. Patience is surely a great virtue, for it vanquished, as these scholars say, things that rigor would never manage. One cannot scold or complain at every word. Learn to endure patiently, or else, as I live and breathe, you shall learn it whether you want or not. For certainly there is no one in the world who doesn’t do or say something amiss. Anger, sickness, or planetary influences, wine, sorrow, or changing of disposition often causes one to do or speak amiss. One cannot be avenged for every wrong; according to the occasion, everyone who knows how, must use temperance. And therefore a wise man, in order to live in comfort, promises his lady forbearance, and she wisely gives her promise to him."

Elizabeth Barrett Browning: "Whoso loves, believes the impossible."

Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray: "Each time that one loves is the only time one has ever loved. Difference of object does not alter singleness of passion. It merely intensifies it. We can have but one great experience at best, and the secret of life is to reproduce that experience as often as possible."

Silver Birch: "There is a great power in the universe... it is so real that it transcends all other forces ... that love is deathless because it is part of the Great Spirit, the creative spirit of all life, part of the power which has fashioned life; it is indeed the very breath and the very essence of life. And wherever love exists, sooner or later those who are united by its willing bonds will find one another again [implying, the two had been temporarily "lost"] despite all the handicaps and obstacles and impediments that may be in the way... there is the love, the undeniable love, between man and woman who are complementary to one another; that is, they are two in form, but one in purpose - they harmonise, they are, indeed, as your poet has expressed it, 'two hearts that beat as one.' Now, where that love has found itself, there is never any separation. Those whom the natural law has joined by love can never be sundered in your world or in mine . Where there is that love -- and here I am afraid I am going to be controversial -- it is always reciprocated... the real love, that only comes once to each man or woman, whether on earth or in the world of spirit , is always reciprocal... the two halves instinctively, because they are two halves,must recognise one another. That does not happen in your world always because your vision, regarding things of the spirit, is often blind ... Physical things could stop it [temporarily] ... but real love is so magnetic, is so overwhelming in its attraction , that it must find itself and claim itself, when once you have got rid of the imperfections of the earth which were the deterrents to recognition." [see full text]

Arthur Findlay, The Way of Life: The following words, given during seances, are from those on the "Other Side ": "No one is left alone on coming over here; not one passes the border-line without some ministering one receiving them... There is not a weary soul on our side of life. If there are weary ones when they first come over, there are always those who help them... The one you love best will draw you like a magnet when you come over here."

Rod Stewart, You're in My Heart (The Final Acclaim): "You're in my heart, you're in my soul, You'll be my breath should I grow old, You are my lover, you're my best friend,You're in my soul. My love for you is immeasurable, My respect for you immense; You're ageless, timeless, lace and fineness, You're beauty and elegance. You're a rhapsody, a comedy, You're a symphony and a play, You're every love song ever written, But honey what do you see in me..."

Sir Oliver Lodge, Raymond: Sir Oliver Lodge, one of the most famous British scientists of the early 20th century, lost his son Raymond during WWI. Lodge devoted much of his remaining years to the study of the afterlife. The following quote is seance-testimony from his son: "You can prepare yourself for the higher spheres while you are living in lower ones. He's on the third, but he's told that even now he could go on to the fourth if he chose; but he says he would rather be learning the laws appertaining to each sphere while he's still living on the third, because it brings him closer -- at least until you two have come over. He will stay and learn, where he is. He wouldn't like to go on there and then find it to be difficult to get back. He will wait till we can go happily and comfortably together!"  Editor's note: Raymond, here, in principle, speaks to the dream of so many lovers, that of not only meeting on the "Other Side ," but of waiting for one's Beloved there -- even to the extent of delaying whatever advancement there might be in the Celestial Realm until joined by one's True Love. Often lovers speak in terms of willingness to "trade the sun, moon, and stars" for their object of desire; and here Raymond (though, in context, speaking to his parents) confirms the reality of this pledge: apparently, true love does willingly trade the universe and all its mysteries until such time that lovers are able to experience these wonderful things - together, or not at all!

Anthony Borgia, More About Life In The World Unseen: "... it is sometimes the case that people dwell in certain realms ... when, by virtue of spiritual progression, they are entitled to live in a higher one... Some may elect to abide [on a lower level of the spirit-world ] for purely private reasons, reasons of affection between two individuals. It may transpire that two people, between whom there is a strong bond , might belong to different planes of progression, and therefore inhabit different realms ... it is not uncommon for the one entitled to live in the higher realm to remain with the one who has not yet advanced, until such time as the latter has progressed, and then, together, the two mount to their new realm, and so continue unseparated."

Mark Twain, Adam's Diary: "After all these years, I see that I was mistaken about Eve in the beginning; it is better to live outside the Garden with her than inside it without her."

The above photo is from the 1985 movie-adaptation of Anne of Green Gables . We see Gilbert here making a nuisance of himself and annoying Anne more than a little - he is desperate to gain her attention and blunders into this. Later in life we sometimes recognize that certain childhood antisocial behavior - braid-pulling, pinching, teasing, and other provocative antics - was really someone's juvenile attempt to love another.

Anne of Green Gables and Gilbert: “There is a book of Revelation in everyone's life, as there is in the Bible... She loved Gilbert - had always loved him! She knew that now. She knew that she could no more cast him out of her life without agony than she could have cut off her right hand... the knowledge had come too late … Oh, the black years of emptiness stretching before her!... he would never know that she loved him… She belonged to him and he to her … Oh, what a fool she had been not to realize [how a] bond ... held her to Gilbert … And now she must pay for her folly as for a crime… [but later] There was so much to talk over and recall - things said and done and heard and thought and felt and misunderstood... 'But, I'll have to ask you to wait a long time, Anne'... [she professes her love] 'I don't want sunbursts and marble halls. I just want YOU.' ” Editor's note: compare Anne's resolve to forego "sunbursts" to that of  lovers who delay experiencing the magnificence of higher celestial realms (see above quotes) in order to enjoy those wonders with a beloved - or not at all! Unless one can readily say with Anne, "I just want YOU," one hasn't yet truly loved; or, as Mark Twain wrote, Adam learned that it was better to live outside the paradise-garden with Eve, than inside it without her!

David Copperfield and Agnes: “Her tears fell fast; but they were not like those she had lately shed, and I saw my hope brighten in them… ‘Agnes! Ever my guide, and best support… when we grew up here together, I think my heedless fancy never would have wandered from you. But you were so much better than I, so necessary to me in every boyish hope and disappointment, that to have you to confide in, and rely upon in everything, became a second nature, supplanting for the time the first and greater one of loving you as I do’… I tried to show her how I had hoped I had come into the better knowledge of myself and of her … If she did so love me (I said) that she could take me for her husband, she could do so, on no deserving of mine, except upon the truth of my love for her, and the trouble in which it had ripened to be what it was; and hence it was that I revealed it. ‘And, oh, Agnes, even out of thy true eyes, in that same time, the spirit of my child-wife looked upon me, saying it was well; and winning me, through thee, to tenderest recollections of the Blossom that had withered in its bloom!’ ‘I am so blest, Trotwood, my heart is so overcharged, but there is one thing I must say’ - ‘I am afraid to speculate on what it is. Tell me, my dear’ - 'I have loved you all my life! '” [Editor's note: Notice how David sees Agnes as two entities, the present adult version and the young girl he knew when they "grew up ... together." He sees the "spirit of [his] child-wife" in the eyes of the adult Agnes; but it is this little girl of so long ago - the original one who loved him - who looks upon him now, and speaks to him now, "saying it was well," cooing, soothing him, reassuring him, "winning" him with memories of their lost love that had "withered in its bloom." He finally realizes that the present adult Agnes is fundamentally, still, that childhood little girl who loved him; who had unsuccessfully, then, reached out to him - his "child-wife," one who would have easily been his, had he only been able to see and receive her.]

Emily and George, Our Town: “George: Listen, Emily, I'm going to tell you why I'm not going to Agriculture School. I think that once you've found a person that you're very fond of... I mean a person who's fond of you, too, and likes you enough to be interested in your character . . . Well, I think that's just as important as college is, and even more so. That's what I think. Emily: I think it's awfully important, too. George: Emily. Emily: Y-yes, George. George: Emily, if I do improve and make a big change . . . would you be . . . I mean: could you be . . . Emily: I . . . I am now; I always have been. George: Pause. So I guess this is an important talk we've been having. Emily: Yes . . . Yes.” Editor's note: Notice in these three passages the sense of having loved another all of one's life - even, despite, at times, the absence of any conscious knowledge of such bond. Anne's receipt of revelation is noteworthy as she begins to look at the past events of her own childhood as a kind of third-party observer and discerns what her young-girl spirit truly felt, despite overt and surface disclaimers to the contrary! David, too, looks upon Agnes and sees her as his "child-wife," so strong is his present sense of having even a marital bond with her spirit so long ago. These lovers speak of a progressive revelation, a removal of what Silver Birch called "deterrents to recognition" which temporarily cause a form of blindness. This stupor and lack of perception, for David, and for Anne, resulted in the "Blossom" of love withering "in its bloom"; meaning, two who should have easily fallen in love, even at an early age -- and, indeed, did, albeit on a subliminal level -- would now need to wait until later in life to be revealed to each other - sometimes, as in the case of David, even after marrying others. Failings of vision can temporarily derail the consummation of love, but, as Anne reminds us, there is, eventually, a book of Revelation in everyone's life, a time when we finally see things as they are. But even when clear vision comes, not every heart-bound couple finds fulfillment in this world of suffering - but we learn from AfterLife entities that such profound loss will ultimately find satisfaction on the Other Side: be sure to see the page-three notes on the "Spheres of Love."

Orleans, Still The One: " I looked at your face every day, But I never saw it 'til I went away..."

Tennyson: "All precious things discovered late To those that seek them issue forth, For Love in sequel works with Fate, And draws the veil from hidden worth ."

Jim Croce, New York's Not My Home: "... it's been so long since I have felt fine ... I'm so alone..."

Jim Croce, Tomorrow's Gonna Be A Brighter Day: "... no more cryin' in your lonely room, and no more empty nights..."

George McFly to Lorraine Baines, Back to the Future: George reads from a prepared script his 4-word message to a nodding-in-agreement, serious-faced Lorraine who finds deep meaning in: " I am your density, Lorraine ." Editor's note: This scene, I think, ranks among the funniest in movie history.

Rod Stewart, You're in My Heart (The Final Acclaim): "... her ad lib lines were well rehearsed, but my heart cried out for you..."

Bertrand Russell: "To fear love is to fear life, and those who fear life are already three parts dead."

William Butler Yeats: "But O that I were young again And held her in my arms! "

Benjamin Franklin, in a letter, advising a young man regarding marriage and sex: "My Dear Friend: I know of no Medicine fit to diminish the violent natural inclination you mention; and if I did, I think I should not communicate it to you. Marriage is the proper Remedy. It is the most natural State of Man, and therefore the State in which you will find solid Happiness. Your Reason against entering into it at present appears to be not well founded. The Circumstantial Advantages you have in View by Postponing it, are not only uncertain, but they are small in comparison with the Thing itself, the being married and settled. It is the Man and Woman united that makes the complete Being. Separate she wants his force of Body and Strength of Reason; he her Softness, Sensibility and acute Discernment. Together they are most likely to succeed in the World. A single Man has not nearly the Value he would have in that State of Union. He is an incomplete Animal. He resembles the odd Half of a Pair of Scissors..."