# Loving Purely By [VICTOR ALEXANDER](https://paragraph.com/@victoralexander-2) · 2025-07-16 --- _a reading of Simone Weil & Ralph Waldo Emerson_ > _Daughters of Jerusalem, I charge you: Do not arouse or awaken love until it so desires._ **_\-Song of Solomon 8:4_** \*\*\* Beyond words lies the beauty we _become_ in the practice of pure love. To Love what is Beautiful is an initiation into the eternal form of Beauty itself. > _receiving the effluence of beauty through his eyes, he is warmed, and this warmth waters the growth of his \[soul’s\] wings_… _when he sees the beauty here below, he is reminded of the true Beauty, and his wings begin to grow, and he is eager to fly upward, but he cannot, and like a bird he looks upward, careless of the things below, and is accused of being possessed by madness._ **_\-Plato, Phaedrus_** But how we resist purity. How we stain the order of divine providence. How we disrespect the order of grace, how we run ahead of it with our fantasies and our personal desires , unable to sit chastely and purely- unrestrained children. In resisting purity in loving, we grow to pervert the gift of love by forcing it. By seizing love in brute force, or seeking to possess what is beautiful, we pervert it- we prostitute ourselves. > _The beautiful is that which we cannot wish to change. To assume power over is to soil. To possess is to soil. To love purely is to consent to distance, it is to adore the distance between ourselves and that which we love._ **_\-Simone Weil_** To mature is to see truly. To mature is to let go of the blind compulsion, and see the relations of things. It is to sit at home like the mountains, chaste as the inert matter of the world which awaits the order of grace and yields perfection. > _At times the whole world seems to be in conspiracy to importune you with emphatic trifles. Friend, client, child, sickness, fear, want, charity, all knock at once at thy closet door, and say,--'Come out unto us.' But keep thy state; come not into their confusion. The power men possess to annoy me, I give them by a weak curiosity. No man can come near me but through my act._ **_\-Ralph Waldo Emerson_** To love purely is the art of dying- the beautiful sacrifice of our own fantasies of desire, our own compulsions to possess, to become pure is to discipline all affection except that which visits us in our solitude by pure grace. > _Do not allow yourself to be imprisoned by any affection. Keep your solitude. The day, if it ever comes, when you are given true affection there will be no opposition between interior solitude and friendship, quite the reverse. It is even by this infallible sign that you will recognize it. Other affections have to be severely disciplined._ **_\-Simone Weil_** To love purely is to enter reality - to sit at home in our own hearts and embrace _what is._ To be authentically affected by what exists through the organ of our heart not our mind (that great divider)- which fabricates to all hopes and fantasies of the future or selfish desires of another. > _Every desire for enjoyment belongs to the future and the world of illusion, whereas if we desire only that a being should exist, he exists: what more is there to desire ? The beloved being is then naked and real, not veiled by an imaginary future. The miser never looks at his treasure without imagining it ‘x’ times larger. It is necessary to be dead in order to see things in their nakedness._ **_\-Simone Weil_** It is to forgo every external compulsion towards love as a carnal pleasure for its own sake, to resist every lying affection the world brings to us, eager to imprison us in it. To love purely is to be obedient to the miracle of reality. The miracle of love and friendship is free, and cannot be worked, bought or paid for. It must be received as the fields receive rain. > _It is an act of cowardice to seek from (or to wish to give) the people we love any other consolation than that which works of art give us. These help us through the mere fact that they_ **_exist_**_. To love and to be loved only serves mutually to render this existence more concrete, more constantly present to the mind. But it should be present as the source of our thoughts, not as their object\[ive\]._ **_\-Simone Weil_** \*\*\* So then, the practice of pure love is the practice of sublime death to all falsehood, and the authentic embrace, the authentic loving of reality in us, the world and in others. Only in this can we not destroy each other through fantasy, by oppresssing the other by images of our personal desires and fantasies. Instead, through pure love, to awaken the wings of each other’ soul upwards. Love as ascension towards eternal beauty and truth. This begins with an essential stern quality. A vigorous disciplining of our own weak tendencies to satisfy our lower natures and to satisfy others out of inferior motivations. Only then do we become truly beautiful in our love. > _We must go alone. I like the silent church before the service begins, better than any preaching. How far off, how cool, how chaste the persons look, begirt each one with a precinct or sanctuary! So let us always sit. Why should we assume the faults of our friend, or wife, or father, or child, because they sit around our hearth, or are said to have the same blood? All men have my blood, and I have all men's. Not for that will I adopt their petulance or folly, even to the extent of being ashamed of it._ **_\-Ralph Waldo Emerson_** Once our essence is pure, once the law of our soul abides eminently in us- we command all attention , because we need none of it. To love purely is to develop a purity of self-reliance, it is the beginning approach to the eminent sanctities of obedience and faith. > \*Thus all concentrates: let us not rove; let us sit at home with the cause. Let us stun and astonish the intruding rabble of men and books and institutions, by a simple declaration of the divine fact. Bid the invaders take the shoes from off their feet, for God is here within. Let our simplicity judge them, and our docility to our own law demonstrate the poverty of nature and fortune beside our native riches. > > Who has more obedience than I masters me, though he should not raise his finger. Round him I must revolve by the gravitation of spirits. We fancy it rhetoric, when we speak of eminent virtue. We do not yet see that virtue is Height, and that a man or a company of men, plastic and permeable to principles, by the law of nature must overpower and ride all cities, nations, kings, rich men, poets, who are not. \* > > **_\-Ralph Waldo Emerson_** --- *Originally published on [VICTOR ALEXANDER](https://paragraph.com/@victoralexander-2/loving-purely)*