Just read the last pages of Essays In Love. Quite an amazing feat for a book published when he was 23 years old. Chock-full of good insight and wisdom. Here are two final quotes I want to highlight (fyi: they aren’t really spoilers, but they come from the final chapter):

1. It is the confrontation between wisdom and wisdom’s opposite, which is not the ignorance of wisdom (that is easy to put right), but the inability to act on the knowledge of what one knows is right. […] knowing we might be fools had not turned us into sages.

2. I realized that a more complex lesson needed to be drawn, one that could play with the incompatibilities of love, juggling the need for wisdom with its likely impotence, juggling the idiocy of infatuation with its inevitability. Love had to be appreciated without flight into dogmatic optimism or pessimism, without constructing a philosophy of one’s fears, or a morality of one’s disappointments. Love taught the analytic mind a certain humility, the lesson that however hard it struggled to reach immobile certainties (numbering its conclusions and embedding them in neat series), analysis could never be anything but flawed –  and therefore never stray far from the ironic.

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It shouldn’t amaze me how closely my spiritual quest parallels my needs for love, but it does.