This essay is adapted from Traversal.We feel first and think second, then spend our lives contorting to invert the order, sublimating emotion to reason, only to find ourselves made smaller and less alive by the flight from feeling.The mind has peculiar way of protecting the heedless heart from breaking, a way of damming an impossible love from flooding in through a bramble of reasons and rationalizations, persuading the possessed person that the ebullient joy of the other’s company, the creative and intellectual invigoration, the ecstasy of understanding flowing between the two, must be an undiscovered species of friendship or admiration or some other unhazardous substance of affection. But against a force of joy strong enough, against an invigoration ecstatic enough, the dam eventually gives way, and the uncontrollable rapids of eros rush in. That is how people of high intelligence and sensitivity, people of otherwise exceptional self-awareness, often fail to realize — refuse to let themselves realize — that they are falling in love with someone unavailable or inadvisable until they wake up one day suffused with an all-pervading love, suffocated by the impossibility of its actualization… too late to press the gauze of reason against the exit wound of love.The Human Heart. One of French artist Paul Sougy’s mid-century scientific diagrams of life. (Available as a print.)And still, and still, to have given love in all of its confusions and complexities and possible catastrophes a real chance is the only antidote to the greater wound, the pain that so poisons a life — the melancholy of the chance not taken. In the aftermath of it all, it takes a superhuman sobriety of spirit to look back on any genuine but unrealized love without the revisionist, survivalist impulse to dismiss it as a hallucination of the heart, for there is no greater hallucination than the rationalization we mistake for reason. Art from An Almanac of Birds: 100 Divinations for Uncertain Days.donating = lovingFor seventeen years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the outgrown name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.newsletterThe Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.