In case some folks haven't figured it out by now, this course hasn't been structured whereby the prof is some sort of repository of truths which are imparted upon students who learn them and somehow prove back that they have. Plato held that love is an ideal, and like all ideals, it cannot be grasped with any finality - only engaged toward. Fromm may list some of its attributes or what immature versions of it look like, and Lampert may propose how we ended up with it, but it may in "truth" reside where Campbell refers to as "beyond the fields of opposites," what rational thought ends up knocking its cortex against at its most abstract. Love and hate... Good and bad... true and false... faith and doubt... All are logical concepts for the not necessarily logical. Each needs the other, so to speak, in order to bear meaning; none are purely what they purport to be. A "good" action may yield "bad" results, and vice-versa. Each dwells in the other - because we're the ones coming up with these ideas, we're humans, and we may be simple, but we're complicated too.

Particularly in the case of those abstractions which deal with human desires and dreads, it is often through the visceral of specific situations and deeds that we can come to terms with, well, the terms. Kundera and Huang have represented situations which indicate what love is not. You've got to have an "outside" if you want the "inside" to have meaning. Dangerous Liaisons provides more outside, though it does propose, in the end, that the inside exists, if only to undo those players it visits (because of too much faith, too much vanity, pride - too much human imperfection one way or another.)

Beloved represents a character situationally bereft of the cultural knowledge humans have evolved in order to balance the gut prompts which our bodies have evolved. As sons and daughters of a culture of the individual, we cheer the efforts of Tristan and Iseult as their "transcendent" love vies with established codes of the times as to what love is and is for. Yet they are imperfect humans too. Nietzsche once wrote that romantic love was evil in its own way because it excluded other humans. The individuated, "inside" of amor creates an "outside" and thus diminishes any universality of agape. Iseult is willing to have her maid killed, Tristan denies his new wife's being and cause her great anguish, and so on...

In the Fisher King, we have an attempt at a modern symbolic structure (allegory) which is a story, is entertaining, but all the while celebrates amor - not as just a falling in love, but as part and parcel of agape. Jack, for instance, cannot love Anne without sacrificing his regained career for Perry's need. Jack resides nearly entirely in "reality" and Perry in "myth." Each needs some of the other, and so these two characters each give of themselves - and then the fireworks, and that catchy tune.