And then, rather abruptly, she asks: “Do you think our love for each other is the same?”
“How do you mean?”
“Well, your images and your memories surely are not so much of yourself as they are of me, while I see only you and feel only you and speak only of you. And do you not, because you are a man, with a man’s sensibilities and a man’s body, have different sensations than I and therefore different recollections?”
“All lovers seek the illusion of oneness,” he answers. “But you are right. Most of a love affair is in the mind.”
“Is it?” she asks.
“Of course, there are the times when we are together,” he says. “When we express our love for each other. But do not these episodes but feed the true and ravenous lovers, which are the minds, creatures unto themselves? So that love is not simply the sum of sweet greetings and wrenching partings and kisses and embraces, but is made up more of the memory of what has happened and the imagining of what is to come.”
-Anita Shreve, Fortune’s Rock
