notes about the Shining Barrier to keep in mind

To be the watch upon the walls of the Shining Barrier, we early established what, later, we called the Navigators’ Council. It was in part a ‘truth session’ but, more significantly, it was an inquiry into the ‘state of the union’. Were we fully sharing? Was there any sign of creeping separateness? These Councils would occur fortnightly or monthly. In them we would pour out sherry and begin with a burst of music from some noble symphony, perhaps the singing of the ‘Fifth’, and then we would talk. Often there were decisions to make. Whatever the decision, it would be made upon the single basis of what we called the ‘Appeal to Love’.

The ‘Appeal to Love’ was an essential part of the very structure of the Shining Barrier. What it meant was simply this question: what will be best for our love? Should one of us change a pattern of behaviour that bothered the other, or should the other learn to accept? Well, which would be better for our love? Which way would be better, in any choice or decision, in the light of our single goal: to be in love as long as life might last? No argument could prevail against it. The Appeal to Love was like a trumpet call from the battlements of the Shining Barrier, causing us to lift our eyes from the immediate desires to what was truly important…

The passion, the sexual element, was there: and sexual harmony like sexual playfulness was an important dimension of our love. But it wasn’t itself the whole thing; and we knew that to make it the whole or even the most important element was to court disaster. Those who see love as only sex or mainly sex do not, quite simply, know what love is. They are the blind man assuming that the trunk of the elephant – or perhaps the phallus – is the whole creature. Sex is merely part of a greater thing. To be in love, as to see beauty, is a kind of adoring that turns the lover away from self. Just seeing Davy asleep, defenceless and trusting and innocent, could tear my heart, then in that first spring or a dozen years later. When we first fell in love in dead of winter, we said, ‘If we aren’t more in love in lilactime, we shall be finished.’ But we were more in love: for love must grow or die. Every year on our anniversary we said, ‘If we’re not more deeply in love next year, we shall have failed.’