Here is a line on love by Joesph Conrad in his short story Amy Foster: "...you need imagination to form a notion of beauty at all, and still more to discover your ideal in an unfamiliar shape." This may the very truth about the emergence of love. Somewhere along the wavy line called life, we meet someone and fall in love. I don't believe in love at first sight. It is an emotion which comes of being with a person for some time, seeing our notion of ideality in that person and imagining him/her to be beautiful beyond description. One can be utterly happy and in love with the ugliest person -- I say this because I see many happy couples who do not have an iota of physical beauty in them, yet are in so much of love with each other that it often makes me wonder at how love and mental closeness disguise the physical ugliness. Once you become closer to someone, their colour, features are invisible to you. Though, at first you need imagination to see beauty in a person as Conrad says.
'Caught in a strange land in a net with other butterflies, I'm a caterpillar yet undecided to remain a caterpillar and perish or turn into a beautiful butterfly and live a life full of joy.' Readers don't laugh. But I came up with this one night recently when I was travelling in a train. I tossed and turned, not being able to sleep, upset over unexplainable things and frustrated over events not in my control. Then it occurred to me that our life and its usefulness depends on our decisions -- whether to remain a crawling caterpillar whose existence otherwise is either ignored by all and sundry or who is cursed for just being there and thrown out with a stick, or to develop wings of life and metamorphose into a beautiful butterfly whom everybody adores for its beauty and colour, for its flitting liveliness, for its service to the flower's pollination... I thought that I should be a butterfly, of service to others, but then again I thought, anyway, who really cares?
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