The more fully we enter into the 'challenge of the hour', into the present factual moment, into the conditions that hold from one case to another, in… - Lou Andreas-Salomé

Our first experience is, remarkably, of a disappearance. A moment ago we were everything, undivided; any other being was indivisible from us - then we were urged into being born -- became a residual part of it all, which from then on would have to strive against even further diminution and to assert itself against a contrary world rising ever wider before it, into which it had fallen out of its fullness, as if into an -- at first depriving -- emptiness.

"Do you know what love is? I mean the most profound thing about it? I will tell you: it is the mystery of completely sharing the experience of what is happening to the other person. As if hypnotized, as if replaced or exchanged with that other person, you follow the most subtle stirrings of that other person's soul, enjoying them, experiencing them, in that person. For that reason, they call love a kind of insanity or possession by the other. What is the result? The result is that both persons experience the same thing -- that they become identical, so to speak." ("Maidens' Roundelay") p. 50

In the fusion of single cells . . . the two cells' nuclei totally merge with each other, forming the new creature, and only what is inessential, at the periphery of the old cell, disintegrates, dying off. It may well stem from such influence that . . . the total fusion of single-cell organisms corresponds allegorically to what, in the highest dreams of love, the mind imagines as the full joy of love. That is arguably why love is so easily associated with longing and trepidation about death, which are not even clearly differentiated from each other; with something like a primal dream in which oneself, one's lover, and their child could still be one, and just three names for the same immortality. (p. 191-92)