Love and Life
By Ms. Castorp on May 17, 2014
Format: Kindle Edition Verified Purchase
In so many of the great love stories--Romeo and Juliet, Tristan and Isolde--the highest of earthly love leads to death, takes those who experience it away from life and existence on this earth. Lovers distance themselves from an earthly existence that seems somehow to have become too weak or faded or pale to support the greatest of passions. Eros is connected to the other-wordly, only able to be fulfilled in death because it is too great for life.
In her story, Dian Parker turns this view of love upside down. Her passion for another human being drives her towards life, not away from it--towards all of the pain and the beauty, towards a daily celebration of what it means to be a living human being on planet earth. To love another person, in her world, is most fully to be alive.
Sustaining Ecstasy is thus a celebration not only of love, but of life itself. The book reads sometimes like a sort of modern Song of Solomon, sometimes like a travelogue, sometimes like a meditation--always backed by wonder at human beings and the crazy things they do.