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Love is being utterly honest, even when it’s ground-glass painful. Tell the truth all the time! All the truth! Not just that part that you can get away with. Go the limit. And the answer to Hemingway’s riddle is that the leopard lost his way. He took the wrong path. And that’s what so many of us do in love.
Keep aware, keep wide open, and remember everything that’s ever happened to you, everything that’s ever been said, every motion and change of tone and subtle hint. We’ll read a long, essentially dull book on how to get through probate with our skin intact, or take a correspondence course in electrical wiring just so we don’t have to pay an electrician to do our house, or go to college for four years to acquire the obscure knowledge that will permit us to make a living in one or another proscribed field of endeavor. But about the most mysterious subject of all, love, we bumble and careen and hope for the best; without proper education, without proper tools, without even a goal that can be named. And more often than not it poisons our lives. The wrong men and the wrong women get together and proceed to kill each other piece by piece.
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