"First of all, love is a joint experience between two persons -- but the fact that it is a joint experience does not mean that it is a similar experience to the two people involved. There are the lover and the beloved, but these two come from different countries. Often the beloved is only a stimulus for all the stored-up love which has lain quiet within the lover for a long time hitherto. And somehow every lover knows this. He feels in his soul that his love is a solitary thing. He comes to know a new, strange loneliness and it is this knowledge which makes him suffer. So there is only one thing for the lover to do. He must house his love within himself as best he can; he must create for himself a whole new inward world -- a world intense and strange, complete in himself."


Carson McCullers, The Ballad of the Sad Café


*


"World was in the face of the beloved—
but was poured out all of a sudden:
world is outside, can't be comprehended.

Why did I not drink, then, when I raised it,
drink from the full face of the beloved,
world—so near, I tasted its bouquet?

Oh, I did! I drank insatiably.
Only, I was so brim-full already
with world, that when I drank I overflowed."


Rainer Maria Rilke, World was in the face of the beloved, translated by Joan M. Burnham