Emotionally eviscerated and wanting toshare some passages from a book I finished reading today.

First passage:

Then, in a sudden intuition... I knew it wasn't the movies I wanted, but the audiences. I wanted to be with the people around me in the darkness.

Not just being close--because I don't feel it in a crowded elevator or on the subway during the rush--but on a hot night when everyone is out walking, or sitting in the theater, there is a rustling ,and for a moment I brush against someone and sense the connection between the branch and trunk and the deep root. At such moments my flesh is thin and tight, and the unbearable hunger to be part of it drives me out to search in the dark corners and blind alleys of the night.

Second passage:

I don't pretend to understand the mystery of love, but this time it was more than sex, more than using a woman's body. It was being lifted off the earth, outside fear and torment, being part of something greater than myself. I was lifted out of the dark cell of my own mind, to become part of someone else--just as I had experienced it that day on the couch in therapy. It was the first step outward to the universe--beyond the universe--because in it and with it we merged to re-create the perpetuate the human spirit. Expanding and bursting outward, and contracting and forming inward, it was the rhythm of being--of breathing, of heartbeat, of day and night--and the rhythm of our bodies set off an echo in my mind. It was the way it had been back there in that strange vision. The gray murk lifted from my mind, and through it the light pierced into my brain (how strange that light should blind!), and my body was absorbed back into a great sea of space, washed under in a strange baptism. My body shuddered with giving, and her body shuddered its acceptance.

This was the way we loved, until the night became a silent day. And as I lay there with her I could see how important physical love was, how necessary it was for us to be in each other's arms, giving and taking. The universe was exploding, each particle away from the next, hurtling us into dark and lonely space, eternally tearing us away from each other--child out of the womb, friend away from friend, moving from each other, each through his own pathway toward the goal-box of solitary death.

But this was the counterweight, the act of binding and holding. As when men to keep from being swept overboard in the storm clutch at each other's hands to resist being torn apart, so our bodies fused a link in the human chain that kept us from being swept into nothing.