Love's Desire

The goal of Love’s Desire, the third and final volume of Benjamin Sell’s trilogy on beauty, love, and soul is to give the ancient souls their due by acknowledging that we each have our special share of soul, and it is this fact that binds us irrevocably with one another and the ensouled cosmos of which we are a part. To make his way toward his goal, Sells turns to beauty, love, and soul, but most of all—love. Beauty, love, and soul all precede meaning, and they do not rely on meaning. Their innate sensibility is given by myth, which also provides the coherence and integrity of images. At the end of his book, Sells makes a passionate plea for the “meaningless life,” taking a clue from a comment made by James Hillman on a line from Jung’s Red Book: “The goal is somehow if one can live the meaningless life.” When we forgo meaning in favor of myth’s inherent sensibility, life retains its vital mystery.