An Love, Reason, and the Antidote to the Melancholy of the Chance Not Taken

This essay is adapted from Traversal. We feel first and think second, then spend our lives contorting to invert the order, sublimating emotion to reason, only to find ourselves made smaller and less alive by the flight from feeling. The mind has peculiar way of protecting the heedless heart from breaking, a way of damming an impossible love from flooding in through a bramble of reasons and rationalizations, persuading the possessed person that the ebullient joy of the other’s company, the creative and intellectual invigoration, the ecstasy of understanding flowing between the two, must be a...