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[an extract of an early piece of writing [circa 1898?]by Sri Aurobindo [1872-1950] in the form of a light-hearted discussion among students on the depiction of 'love'. Sri Aurobindo's early education was in Cambridge where he excelled at a very young age in the Greek and Latin classics as well as other literary subjects]
"I am told to describe Love" began Powell "yet in order to describe I must first define. And how is that possible with a being intangible as the air and inconstant as the moon? For Love is as slippery and mutable as Proteus, chameleon-hued, multiform, amorphous, infinite; the transmigrations of a Hindu soul are not more various and elastic; the harmony of his outlines are not blurred by chaos or the weird; rather like poetry and summer he wraps himself in a cool soft robe of velvet air and his feet are kissed by the laughing sea. But the translucent air which promises to reveal is a cloak far thicker than the gathering dusk.
Thus the Eros of Praxiteles is not Love himself but the soul of the sculptor in one of her phases.
Yet though Love has no one form, the idea, the soul of Love, that strange essence which walks forever in the peopled Shadow-land, he is shackled in a single and uniform shape. How then shall I paint the idea of Love?
The Greeks have described a child with a warlike bow of horn and bitter arrows tipped with steel, and modern poets inspired by this rude conception have fabled of the smart which is the herald of Love's shaft. But these ideas however happy in themselves are by no means suitable to Love; for they are without two of his most essential elements, the subtle and the impalpable.
The Hindus are more felicitous when they sing of Kama—for poetry alone can express him—the divine and radiant youth mounted on an emerald parrot, and bearing in his right hand a bow of flowers; the arrows too must be of the same soft and voluptuous material—for a preference I would name the shefali, the only blossom which has a soul.
For Love's arrow never pains while in the wound—it is too subtle and flower-like—if a lover is in pain, it is because he loves himself more than Love—and that is the fault of Nature, not of Eros. Again Love has been painted as blind; and in this too the poets of Europe have conceived a lyrical fiction; for they say that Love looses his shafts and knows not whom they strike, whereas indeed he knows too well.
It is his delight to unite those who should never have so much as met and to blind them to their own misery until the shefali arrow has withered in their hearts; and this he does with eyes open and of deliberate purpose. So far poets have sinned; but it is a vulgar error to suppose Love garrulous, a bastard child of Momus and Aphrodite; whereas in truth he is the lawful son of Hephaistos; but he has swallowed his father down, and for that reason those lovely lips, the scarlet portals of Passion's treasury, do not yield up their store of pearls and rubies—nay dare not so much as open lest Hephaistos escape and in his anger blast the world. "Thus then I paint Love."
Sri Aurobindo - The Harmony of Virtue
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