"We love but once, for once only are we perfectly equipped for loving"
About this Quote
Connolly voices a melancholy law of the heart: only once do desire, innocence, courage, and imagination align so completely that love feels unguarded and absolute. Perfectly equipped does not mean armed with skills; it means unarmored, unspoiled by comparison, expectation, and memory. The first time the self opens fully to another, it does so without the hedging habits that later experience brings. Afterward, knowledge changes the instrument. We remember, we measure, we fear, and we try to avoid the pain we now know is possible. We may love again, even more wisely or tenderly, but never with that same unpremeditated totality.
The claim is qualitative, not numerical. It marks the unique texture of first love, when the self has not yet become a curator of its own defenses. Later attachments are made by a self that has learned to bargain with risk. Comparison intrudes; nostalgia edits the past; the beloved is weighed against an ideal. What was once a leap becomes a calculation. Connolly suggests that time is love’s great solvent, turning passion into recollection and recollection into pattern.
The line belongs to The Unquiet Grave (1944), the wartime notebook he published under the name Palinurus, Aeneas’s helmsman who slips overboard. That emblem of failed navigation fits a book steeped in self-scrutiny, influenced by Pascal and La Rochefoucauld, and shadowed by European ruin. Connolly, a brilliant critic preoccupied with his own artistic shortcomings and uneasy marriages, repeatedly tests the tension between love and vocation, pleasure and endurance, youth and the deadening gravity of habit. His aphorism compresses that broader mood of disillusionment: the cost of lucidity is the loss of those reckless illusions that once made love feel boundless.
There is both lament and warning here. If experience equips us with prudence, it also disqualifies us from the purity of abandon. The heart’s first instrument plays only once in its original tuning; afterward, the music may be deeper, but the tone is irrevocably changed.
The claim is qualitative, not numerical. It marks the unique texture of first love, when the self has not yet become a curator of its own defenses. Later attachments are made by a self that has learned to bargain with risk. Comparison intrudes; nostalgia edits the past; the beloved is weighed against an ideal. What was once a leap becomes a calculation. Connolly suggests that time is love’s great solvent, turning passion into recollection and recollection into pattern.
The line belongs to The Unquiet Grave (1944), the wartime notebook he published under the name Palinurus, Aeneas’s helmsman who slips overboard. That emblem of failed navigation fits a book steeped in self-scrutiny, influenced by Pascal and La Rochefoucauld, and shadowed by European ruin. Connolly, a brilliant critic preoccupied with his own artistic shortcomings and uneasy marriages, repeatedly tests the tension between love and vocation, pleasure and endurance, youth and the deadening gravity of habit. His aphorism compresses that broader mood of disillusionment: the cost of lucidity is the loss of those reckless illusions that once made love feel boundless.
There is both lament and warning here. If experience equips us with prudence, it also disqualifies us from the purity of abandon. The heart’s first instrument plays only once in its original tuning; afterward, the music may be deeper, but the tone is irrevocably changed.
Quote Details
| Topic | Soulmate |
|---|
More Quotes by Cyril
Add to List
