We must be quite the sight. Raffe in his red mask with his demon wings spread out in all their scythe-edged glory. A scrawny teenage Daughter of Man brandishing an archangel sword. And a little girl stitched-up to look and behave like a nightmare who is clutching a pair of angel wings.
It is painful to see that people prefer a bad guy who looks like an angel to a good guy who looks like a demon.
The Reader (2008)
I'm not frightened. I'm not frightened of anything. The more I suffer,the more I love. Danger will only increase my love. It will sharpen it,it will give it spice. I will be the only angel you need. You will leave life even more beautiful than you entered it. Heaven will take you back and look at you and say: Only one thing can make a soul complete,and that thing is love.
"How sad. A leader bereft of followers. An angel with severed wings. A warrior without a sword.” Beliel circles Raffe like a shark as he taunts him. “You have nothing left."
"He has me," I say.
ahh kalbim
In case we are inclined to forget how deified the romantic love object is, the popular songs continually remind us. They tell us that the lover is the “springtime,” the “angel-glow,” with eyes “like stars,” that the experience of love will be “divine,” “like heaven” itself, and so on and on; popular love songs have surely had this content from ancient times and will likely continue to have it as long as man remains a mammal and a cousin of the primates. These songs reflect the hunger for real experience, a serious emotional yearning on the part of the creature. The point is that if the love object is divine perfection, then one’s own self is elevated by joining one’s destiny to it. One has the highest measure for one’s ideal-striving; all of one’s inner conflicts and contradictions, the many aspects of guilt—all these one can try to purge in a perfect consummation with perfection itself. This becomes a true “moral vindication in the other.” Modern man fulfills his urge to self-expansion in the love object just as it was once fulfilled in God: “God as … representation of our own will does not resist us except when we ourselves want it, and just as little does the lover resist us who, in yielding, subjects himself to our will.” In one word, the love object is God. As a Hindu song puts it: “My lover is like God; if he accepts me my existence is utilized.” No wonder Rank could conclude that the love relationship of modern man is a religious problem.
Veritable rivers of words were written and spoken in an effort to decide the question of which divine ear would give the most indulgent/motherly attention to the prayers of the faithful. This question is still undecided. Is it Mary? Jehovah? Jesus? Allah? Krishna? Brahma? Kuan Yin? Oshun? A particular saint or angel? The God of the Baptists, or of the Mormons, or of the Native Americans, or of any of a thousand different fundamentalisms that specifically exclude all others from the divine favor enjoyed by themselves?
