[MA-VM-37]
DECEPTION IN LOVE
We forget and purposely banish from our minds a good deal of our past. In other words, we wish our picture, that beams at us from the past, to belie us, to flatter our vanity—we are constantly engaged in this self-deception. And you who talk and boast so much of “self-oblivion in love,” of the “absorption of the ego in the other person”—you hold that this is something different? So you break the mirror, throw yourselves into another personality that you admire, and enjoy the new portrait of your ego, though calling it by the other person’s name—and this whole proceeding is not to be thought self-deception, self-seeking, you marvellous beings?—It seems to me that those who hide something of themselves from themselves, or hide their whole selves from themselves, are alike committing a theft from the treasury of knowledge. It is clear, then, against what transgression the maxim “Know thyself” is a warning.