A Quote and a Dedication [on the nature of love, to the loved ones]

Back in September, after my first reading of Amitav Ghosh's Sea of Poppies, I had posted this quote and this dedication to a few loved ones. This piece was probably the part of the novel that made me gasp the most in aesthetic awe. As I re-read the novel this week, I came across another piece that got me thinking, this time, about love.

It's been an overwhelming week-end for me, to say the least. Over the week-end I found love, pouring out to me like a fountain, I found connections that I had lost over the months and I spent quality time with some "old friends" whose presence in my life, I had never realized I valued so much. This quote got me thinking about all the love I've found in the most awkward and unexpected places around the globe throughout my life: What is the relationship between space and love? What makes people fall in love while being in a particular space and time? What are the particular acts that makes you pour your heart out? How do you give up your own self, almost on a whim, to somebody you just met, just because you know you ought to do it?

Once again, I dedicate this to the many people I've loved and to many who've loved me, for no reasons at all, with the intensity of a craftsman for his handiwork.

"To take care of another human being-- this was something Neel had never before thought of doing, not even with his own son, let alone a man of his own age, a foreigner. All he knew of nurture was the tenderness that has been lavished on him by his own care-givers; that they would come to love him was something he had taken for granted-- yet knowing his own feelings for them to be in no way equivalent, he had often wondered how that attachment was born. It occurred to him now to ask himself if this was how it happened: was it possible that the mere fact of using one's hands and investing one's attention in someone other than oneself, created a pride and tenderness that has nothing whatever to do with the response of the object of one's care-- just as a craftsman's love for his handiwork is in no way diminished by the fact of it being unreciprocated?"