"Love is an energy which exists of itself. It is its own value"
About this Quote
Wilder’s line refuses the transactional model of feeling: love isn’t presented as a reward, a moral badge, or a social tool, but as a self-sustaining force. “Energy” is the key provocation. It’s a modern, almost scientific word that strips away the lace doilies of romance and replaces them with motion, heat, propulsion. Love, in this framing, doesn’t need to be proven useful to deserve existence. It doesn’t have to fix you, redeem someone else, or justify the mess it can cause. It simply is.
The second sentence tightens the screw. “It is its own value” argues against the cultural habit of auditing emotions for outcomes: Did the relationship last? Did it produce stability, marriage, children, status, content? Wilder implies that measuring love by its aftereffects is a category error, like judging music by whether it paid the rent. There’s a quiet rebuke here to the Protestant-flavored ethos of merit and utility that shadows American life: if it doesn’t produce, it doesn’t count.
Context matters. Wilder’s work (The Bridge of San Luis Rey, Our Town) circles mortality and the small, easily missed radiance of ordinary lives. In a century marked by mechanized war and ideological bookkeeping, insisting on love as self-justifying reads like a humanistic protest. The subtext is simple but sharp: if you wait for love to be “worth it” by external standards, you may miss the only standard that matters - the fact that it animates you at all.
The second sentence tightens the screw. “It is its own value” argues against the cultural habit of auditing emotions for outcomes: Did the relationship last? Did it produce stability, marriage, children, status, content? Wilder implies that measuring love by its aftereffects is a category error, like judging music by whether it paid the rent. There’s a quiet rebuke here to the Protestant-flavored ethos of merit and utility that shadows American life: if it doesn’t produce, it doesn’t count.
Context matters. Wilder’s work (The Bridge of San Luis Rey, Our Town) circles mortality and the small, easily missed radiance of ordinary lives. In a century marked by mechanized war and ideological bookkeeping, insisting on love as self-justifying reads like a humanistic protest. The subtext is simple but sharp: if you wait for love to be “worth it” by external standards, you may miss the only standard that matters - the fact that it animates you at all.
Quote Details
| Topic | Love |
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