"Do you want to live? Or do you want to die?
"I've forgotten it, just to live. I may look all right to you, but that's just the outside of me. Inside ... if you knew what's inside ... it's terrible. It would scare you.
"Losing those you love: I suppose there is no greater grief than that, because the one who still lives is not only left with a great load of sorrow, but a load of love and nothing to do with it. Failure, rejection, poverty, illness ... these are all trivial causes for depression. The profound sorrow lies in the loss of those you loved and will go on loving after they are no longer there to be loved.
"Love and loss. Love and loss. It is the metronome of life. And it is not always death which occasions the loss. Jealousy, contempt, estrangement, even boredom can accomplish the same thing. But even then, the faint memory that love once lived and animated the world brings grief unutterable.
"To receive love is a wonderful thing. To give love is even better, but the fundamental, the most important thing of all, is to possess, and to know that one possesses, the capacity both to give and to receive. To be deprived of this capacity is the greatest misfortune that can befall anyone.
"No one knows precisely what love is, though poets and philosophers have tried for centuries to define it. I doubt that any one of us has been satisfied with any of the definitions. Yet we go on trying, desperate to know, desperate to feel, desperate to find, because we sense that without it we are lost."
Beyond Belief, first broadcast by CBS Radio Mystery Theater on December 17,1979.
