There are many things we mistake for love — infatuation, admiration, need — but there is no error of the heart graver than making another our higher power. This may seem inevitable — because to love is always to see the divine in each other, because all love is a yearning for the sacred, within us and between us. And yet the moment we cast the other as our savior, our redeemer, the arbiter of our significance, we have ceased loving — for we have ceased seeing the living human being.

The tragic part, the touching part, the strangely assuring part is that we have been doing this since consciousness — that synaptic hammock of yearning — first crowned the human animal. We have suffered in the same way across cultures and civilizations, and have transmuted that singular, commonplace suffering into some of our most enduring works of art. (“You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world,” James Baldwin observed in his finest interview, “but then you read.”)

Centuries ago, John Donne (1572–1631) channeled the complex interplay between eros and the divine, the confusion of it and the transcendence of it, in the most eternal of his Holy Sonnets. Composed in his late thirties and published shortly after his death, it is read here by nineteen-year-old artist and poetry-lover Rose Hanzlik to the sound of Bach’s Goldberg Variations:

Batter my heart, three-person’d God, for you
As yet but knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend;
That I may rise and stand, o’erthrow me, and bend
Your force to break, blow, burn, and make me new.
I, like an usurp’d town to another due,
Labor to admit you, but oh, to no end;
Reason, your viceroy in me, me should defend,
But is captiv’d, and proves weak or untrue.
Yet dearly I love you, and would be lov’d fain,
But am betroth’d unto your enemy;
Divorce me, untie or break that knot again,
Take me to you, imprison me, for I,
Except you enthrall me, never shall be free,
Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me.

Complement with Derek Walcott’s lifeline of a poem “Love After Love,” then revisit Aldous Huxley on reclaiming the divine within.