New York, Auschwitz, Jerusalem - My Three Cities of Death : Fragments of Gillian Rose's Philosophy of Love

"My disastrous Judaism of fathers and family transmogrified into a personal, protestant inwardness and independence. Yet, as with the varieties of historical Protestantism, progenitor of modernity, the independence gained from the protest against illegitimate traditional authority comes at the cost of incessant anxiety of autonomy. Chronically beset with inner turmoil, the individual may nevertheless become roughly adept at directing and managing the world to her own ends. Little did I realize then how often I would make the return journey from protestantism to judaism."

"There's no democracy in any love relation: only mercy. To be at someone's mercy is dialectical damage: they might be merciful and they might be merciless."

The Dialectics of Love in Poetry

I
[Yeats]
No thorns go as deep as a rose's
And love is more cruel than lust

II
[Swinburne]
From too much love of living,
From hope and fear set free,
We thank with brief thanksgiving
Whatever gods may be
That no man lives for ever,
That dead men rise up never;
That even the weariest river
Winds somewhere safe to sea.