Dear Cory:

A very good friend of mine died recently. Do you think that love is stronger than death?

Tarquin

Dear Tarquin:

Cory is saddened to think that you have suffered this loss and wishes you peace. Your question is a great one: thank you. Cory doesn’t want to seem like the Wayne Dyers of this world whose take on reality is sure, arrogant and doctrinaire; this isn’t PBS, after all. All he can offer you by way of answer is his humble intuition that the awful impermanence of this world is undergirded by a glorious reality composed of thought and, necessarily, creative loving intent — we draw from that to live and befriend, and are subsumed in that when we die. We have, perhaps, insufficient brain cells to perceive that reality in more than a fragmentary way.

The film Farinelli, about the eighteenth century castrato, contains a touching, instructive scene in which Farinelli expresses his gratitude to a boy who becomes his friend: “I thank God for the love you bear me.” The boy replies, “God had nothing to do with it; it’s a personal gift.”

Your love towards your friend, and his toward you, can certainly not be lost, Cory thinks; that love may be far more real than the stuff in front of our eyes.

May Cory commend to your attention the astonishing ode by Wordsworth, Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood?