Solace
a textbook of romantic psychology

by Jorn Barger

O Morning Winds that from the garden blow,
Should you meet one like me forlorn and sad,
On him bestow
The peace and solace I have never had.

            Fighan (xx 18th C.) (translated from the Urdu
            by Inayat Khan and J.D. Westbrook)

For this will cure him that is sick, and raise him that is in dumps; one that has loved, it will remember of it; one that has not, it will instruct...

            Longus (Greece 2nd C.) "Daphnis and Chloe"
            (tr. George Thornley)

For Martha
(she doth inspire)

Timeless magic first began
When woman bared her soul to man.

            Robert Graves (England 1895-1985)
            "Loving True, Flying Blind"

Here are several thousand quotes about romantic love, set within an analysis of the normal course it takes:

• Wishing (and loneliness)
• Seeking (includes dating-advice genre)
• Hoping (the symptoms of love)
• Planning (the best intentions)
• Weighing (is this match plausible?)
• Qualms (so many things could go wrong)
• Courting [to be added as available, from here on]
• Courted
• Losing
• Loving
• Testing
• Trying
• Fading
• Bereaved/Ricorso
• Bibliography: my most-used texts, besides poetry, are Stendhal's "Love", Ortega y Gasset's "On Love", and novels by Flaubert, Tolstoy, and Iris Murdoch.
• Theory: this work is intended as a new paradigm for the social sciences, making possible computer simulations of human behavior.

If this be error, and upon me prov'd,
I never writ, nor no man ever lov'd.

            W. Shakespeare (England 1564-1616)