SOPHIA AND PHILONE ON THE

UNIVERSALITY OF LOVE.

SOPHIA.

GOD SAVE YOU, Philone; do you pass by like this without speaking? PH. The friend of my health The Italian "salute" means both "health" and "salvation." Philone is playing on Sophia being the source of both his well-being and his greeting. greets me! God save you too, Sophia; what do you want from me? SO. I would like you to remember the debt you owe me, and now seems a convenient time to pay it, if it pleases you. PH. I, in debt to you? For what? It certainly is not a debt of benefit or goodwill, for toward me you have been generous only with pain. SO. I grant you it is not a debt of gratitude, but a debt of promise—which, while not as noble, is nonetheless more binding. PH. I do not recall promising you anything except to love you and to endure your disdain until Charon In Greek mythology, the ferryman who carries souls across the river Styx to the underworld. carries me across the river of oblivion The river Lethe, whose waters caused the dead to forget their earthly lives.; and furthermore, if the soul finds itself with any feeling there, it shall never be stripped of affection and martyrdom. Of this promise I need no reminder, for I pay it daily. SO. You are forgetful, Philone, or you pretend to be. Yet the debtor should remember the debt no less than the creditor. Do you not remember that a few days ago, at the end of our discussion on love and desire, you promised to tell me fully about the origin and genealogy of love? How have you forgotten it so quickly? PH. Oh, oh, I remember! Do not wonder, Sophia, that since you have usurped my memory, I cannot remember such things. SO. Even if I have usurped it, I take it away from foreign things, but not from my own. PH. My soul remembers only those things of yours which fill it with love and pain; these other matters, though they are yours, are foreign to my suffering. SO. Let it be as you wish; I forgive your forgetfulness, but I do not release you from your promise. And since we have convenient time, let us sit under this shade, and tell me of the birth of love, and what was its first origin. PH. If you wish us to speak of the birth of love, in this present conversation original: "confabulatione," a formal term for a dialogue or scholarly discussion. I must first tell you of the universality original: "comunita," referring to the idea that love is a force common to all things in the universe, from rocks to angels. of its being, and of its wide-reaching universality; and another time then speak=