Peter‘s Musing on the Nature of Platonic Love

Fortunately, I did not have to wait very long. Biene had expected a store-bought book that in content and style would bear a strong resemblance to our turbulent relationship, where the ending would perhaps provide an urgent plea to get our act together and leave our fantasy world behind. To put it mildly, the handwritten book had overwhelmed Biene. Never before had she received a gift like this, where every single page had been written exclusively for and about her. She did not insult me in the least (as a matter of fact I took it as a compliment), when she questioned for a moment the authenticity of the book’s claimed authorship. Then came the sentence I had been waiting for, ‘I believe we love each other.’ What all my letters in the lines and between the lines could not accomplish, it seemed to me the novel had succeeded in pronouncing my unequivocal and unmistakable message ‘I love you’ and that at last I had received the long-awaited, if somewhat faint echo, ‘I believe we love each other’. However, when she qualified the kind of love she had in mind, I realized that I had rejoiced too soon and that at best I had only scored a partial victory.

Biene’s Parents Mr. and Mrs. Walter Panknin

‘But it is a strange love’, she continued, ‘like a dream not bound to reality. I love your words, your soul, which your words express. I love you as a human being, Peter, but I am very much afraid to love you as a man, and I fear that you already love me as a woman. That will bring much pain. How shall I make it clear to you, so you will understand what I mean? I cannot yet belong to a man. It has been my greatest desire for a long time to love a man and to completely belong to him, and yet I know, and I have experienced it myself that I am not yet ready for it .’

‘Therefore, Peter’, she continued, ‘I must ask you, do not love me as a woman, for then we could quickly lose each other again! I would like to write to you the opposite and yet let us this time not go with our dreams any farther than what reality will be able to give us as fulfillment. I find it so hard to tell you this and yet, Peter, grant me this wish, let us be friends just as in the beginning.’

I reread her letter looking for clues in the bewildering plea to turn back the clock to the time, when we had started our friendship. But I found nothing apart from just a vague hint of something horrible that she had experienced in the recent past. It was obvious to me that she had not written the happy ending to the novel in real life, which I had so intensely been hoping for. It was a now-or-never situation for me. I realized that she was in a complete state of confusion and afraid of a man-woman relationship, so afraid that she risked losing the one whom she believed she truly loved. The spirit within me that so often in the past had said ‘one last time, try just one more time’ goaded me to write. I felt completely calm. I wanted to pass on to her that sense of tranquility, which would ultimately provide the pillar upon which she could rest her final decision without regret. It was either a life together with me, or the end of a friendship that could not be maintained. I was one step ahead of Biene in that I had felt the pain of jealousy over Henk and the Moroccan pen pal. She was in my opinion naïve to believe that she could find a broad-minded, speak indifferent husband, who would tolerate another soul mate in their marriage, no matter how platonic such a relationship would be.

So I wrote after some considerable time of reflection, ‘I have the feeling, you want to cut off the roots to a tree, but still want to harvest its fruits. You must not be so fearful, dear Biene. When one talks about love between a man and a woman, one must not think right away of its consummation. What I think about it will perhaps be to you a bit of a consolation. I can belong to only one girl. Then all the others vanish with time. If they don’t, they cause hard to solve conflicts within me. The girl that I mean was and is you, dear Biene. Don’t be shocked if I tell you that the love, which you are renouncing, took control of me from the moment I met you the first time. But in its purest form, as it finds expression through passion, it comes last. Many thousands of steps precede it. But it lives within me not strictly separated from all other human values. It plays its role in everything I am doing and thinking. In every sentence that I write to you it is there. Even if it is never mentioned, it is there. My entire being is woven into it through and through. And I feel happier now than in the times when I tried to suppress it as something evil.

Peter with his Buddies at an Army Training Site

Dear Biene, you have a decision to make. But it is not difficult; I am not getting lost to you, at least not in the way you envision it now with a pure friendship between soul mates. What your attitude will be later does not matter now. The question for you is whether you will accept me with my love as a man. You can keep me just as I am or you set yourself and me free for the ‘love’ for somebody else that fate will bring into our lives. I give you complete freedom with your decision and accept everything. But I must have clarity! Take your time to answer my letter, just as I have taken my time.’

A few days later feeling sorry of having had the audacity to force a decision upon her, I thought it wiser to go back to Biene’s original plea for platonic love between the two of us and describe it vividly with a good measure of irony so that she could see at long last that this kind of love would not be worth pursuing.

‘I think I know now what is troubling you. Recently it stood before my eyes like a vision. It is the relationship between two souls pure, aiming upward, self-sufficient. This kind of love permits no passion; it wishes to be pure. That’s why you were afraid that our friendship would be in jeopardy, if you didn’t warn me. In your eyes we are two souls completely separated from our bodies in quiet distant solitude, eyes open for the wonders of nature and its beauty. Lovingly we exchange experiences we each had suffered from the blows of fate; we mature and rise upward towards ethical perfection. Earth with its horrors is no longer important; nothing bothers us any more. We let ourselves go, when we say farewell to our bodies. The day has arrived; we reach out for each other; the gate to our ideals opens. Who then should stop these innocent souls from entering the land of arts? One admires Spitzweg’s idyllic pictures, listens to romantically imbued poetry and goes into raptures over Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony. One meets great spirits: Goethe, Lessing, and Schiller. We take flight and seek refuge at philosopher Seneca, who teaches us to relish contentment and happiness. But we are not so simple-minded as to ignore that even this is a dubious fabrication of human beings seeking escape from this odious world. Shuddering, we rise even higher, leaving everything behind. It feels so warm and fuzzy around our hearts; like a bridal veil our souls become transparent. Nothing weighs us down any more. Indeed, we are being lifted up; we melt into nothingness. You are I, and I am you. How magnificent and glorious! Our contours begin to blur. Eternally happy and content we have been transported into the heavenly realms. Dear Biene, with all that bliss why don’t we just go ahead and die?’

With this bitter-sweet rhetorical question I ended my letter and wondered about how Biene would respond to the imagery of my emotional diatribe.