another thousand days

"Right now all I know is that in love there must be some form of desperation and some form of joy. Both these sensations -- along with whatever else the lovers invent or permit -- are constants. Lovers are never long without one or the other or both of them. Is the joy fuller through the desperation, as it is to eat when you've been very hungry, to sleep when you've been awake too long? And if it is, shouldn't we welcome the despair as much as the joy? The giving, the getting, the taking, the nurturing, I have begun to understand that we take turns signing on for one or another of these as though they were daily jobs. We continue to assume jobs until all of them are filled, until all roles established. The dynamic part of love lies within each of these jobs but rarely beyond it. Consider, too, that love transforms the lovers."
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"Did you know it's defiance that keeps a man optimistic? Without his secrets, his rebellions, his little vendettas against another man or against the same wild hare who eludes him three days in a row, against hunger, against time itself -- if he loses these, he loses his voice."
--Marlena de Blasi, A Thousand Days in Tuscany