Dear Editor,

There is more happiness in giving love than in receiving it.

That certainly may explain the enormous lack of love that is present in the world today, and the gulf continues to widen by the day.

To give love is to leave one’s own capacity for receiving it empty and wide, such that you will be able to welcome and appreciate the smallest demonstration of love shown to you from anyone. Like affection, food is never so pleasing as when filling up an empty stomach that restrained its own cravings so that others may be filled first.

Conversely, a disproportionate love of self may account for some of the most vicious crimes and murders currently making the news. For that inordinate “me first” philosophy becomes wasted on the selfish individual, since being saturated by oneself robs the receiver of the true benefit and meaning of love or, as Shakespeare puts it, “Give me excess of it that surfeiting the appetite may sicken and so die.” In other words, to be so filled by ones own interest and desires that one becomes fallen by the very thing that was meant to enhance life.

Most often the reason is connected to the unblanced function of our care. Love is man’s most reliable antidote against social disintegration and not the problem, but like an uneven see-saw, when one side goes up, look, the other side is coming down.

Homer Sylvester

New York

h2sylvester@gmail.com