Love Cries Out to be Expressed

Four Plays
Author: Wallace Shawn
Format: Hardcover · Published: January 1998
ISBN: 0374525358 · Published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Incorporated

Because love always cries out to be expressed. But the expression of love leads somehow - nowhere. You express love and suddenly you've...you've dropped off the map you were on, in a way, and onto another one - unrelated - like a bug being brushed from the edge of a table and falling off onto the rug below. The beauty of a face makes you touch a hand, and suddenly you're in a world of actions, of experiences, unrelated to the beauty of that face, unrelated to that face at all, unrelated to beauty. You're doing things and saying things you never wanted to say or do. You're suddenly spending every moment of your life in conversations, in encounters, that have no connection with anything you ever wanted for yourself. What you felt was love. What you felt was that the face was beautiful. And it was not enough for you just to feel love, just to sit in the presence of beauty and enjoy it. Something about your feeling itself made that impossible. And so you just didn't ask, Well, what will happen when I touch that hand? What will happen between that person and me? What will even happen to the thing I'm feeling at the very moment? Instead, you just walked right off that table, and there was that person, with all their qualities, and there was you, with all your qualities, and there you were together. And it's always, of course, extremely fascinating for as long as you can stand it, but it has nothing to do with the love you originally felt. Every time in every way, you think it will have something to do with the love you felt. But it never does. It never has anything to do with love.
Wallace Shawn, Aunt Dan & Lemon