The Room of Love

The room of love is another world. You go there wearing no watch, watching no clock. It is the world without end, so small that two people can hold it in their arms, and yet it is bigger than worlds on worlds, for it contains the longing of all things to be together, and to be at rest together. You come together to the day's end, weary and sore, troubled and afraid. You take it all into your arms, it goes away, and there you are where giving and taking are the same, and you live a little while entirely in a gift. The words have all been said, all permissions given, and you are free in the place that is the two of you together. What could be more heavenly than to have desire and satisfaction in the same room?

~ from Hannah Coulter by Wendell Berry

I have been re-reading Hannah Coulter for a book club, and while I knew that I loved it when I read it for the first time (as I did all of Berry's novels), I did not remember how really beautiful it is. The passage above is one of the loveliest things that I've ever read about sex. I wish that I had read it when I was young. I wish that I had read it to my children when they were teenagers. When I hold this in contrast with the poor, tawdry notion that so many people have of sex today, and, I guess, that many people have always had, it's amazing that one act could be so incongruously construed.

This reminds me of something that Maclin Horton wrote in a post several years ago.

I mean I now see the separation [of sex, love, marriage and procreation] itself, apart from any worldly consequences, as a sort of shocking mutilation, like the severing of a limb from the body. People learn to live with the loss of a limb, of course, and once it’s healed and the person has adjusted as well as possible its absence may be less startling, but the action of severing remains appalling. And I’m now walking around in a world where this action is celebrated.

You can read the rest of the post here. Unfortunately, it has been severed from its comments.

AMDG