Saturday, May 9, 2009

Ineffable

I don't think mothers ever find their way into our daily conversation. Weather, yes. Prison Break, check. Irritating boss, check. Even all the forgettable faces at the bar have their five minutes of fame at the water cooler. But mothers, no. It's never in our habit to talk about our mums, let alone their affection for us.

Now that I think about it, I guess its because something of this magnitude is well beyond human expression. A mother's love resides in a dimension that language, in its scantiness, cannot hope to comprehend.

But as Melvin Maddocks points out, "Mankind craves definition as he craves lost innocence." So there definitely is no stopping people from muddying the waters trying to pin down the definition. Personally, I don't believe we'll ever come close to wholly capturing the essence of a mother's love (atleast with a medium as brittle as language). I'm not going to try. I'll go with somebody else's words. Erich Fromm has managed to snatch a glowing ember from that ineffable flame that is a mother's love.

Mother's love is peace. It need not be acquired, it need not be deserved.

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