I met a fool tonight.

Nothing new to me, gentle listener, nor to you and yet this one, I think, I shall mention.  For in this you are, all of you, fools.  Oh, yes.  He insisted there is no such thing as magic, and more foolish yet, that no one believes in it anymore.

Really.

All things can be explained, or will be explained, if only there is time enough, and tests...?  No.  I think not.  The eternal cry of 'Why?' comes no less from the scholar than from the child -- perhaps most often from the philosopher.  Men cling to the comfort of these 'modern times,' these 'civilized ways.'  You trust the strictures of science for comfort in the deep of night, in light switches and electric blankets, and perhaps even my voice in the dark of your rooms.  Such cold, cold comfort, even under those blankets.  Science is not everything, and it is far away indeed from what men believe in the dark of the night... and the darker shadows veiling their hearts.

Whether magic exists or not, modern men believe in it even more than their ancestors -- and to greater folly.  Every night, on every corner, I see spells traded and rituals performed, all to control a force no man may harness.  Not earthquakes or thunderstorms, not flood or famine or fortune's fickle hand.  All of those you may pray for and rail against and, in the end, survive... or not.

No, I speak of none of those, but of the greatest folly of them all.

Modern man thinks he has rituals to control love.

Fools.

You walk into the world with your arms spread wide, hope in your hearts and invitations upon your lips, begging love to come into your life... because you think you face only a dimpled child with wings and some puny pinprick of a bow.  You believe in the child-sized, castrati cherub and forget the reality of Venus and Eros, those twin terrors of the world.

Your farthest ancestors knew better.  Venus and Eros are descended from Chaos and Night, children.  Your forefathers did not pray for love.  They prayed to survive love intact -- if they could.  But then, they knew that love, not death, is the greatest of changes.

Oh, yes.  Nothing and no one is the same after love.  Love has started wars, split houses, drawn lusty hands and killing blades, stopped kindness and charity, shattered alliances of common cause in favor of entanglements of the heart... or at least of the limbs.

Love has stripped children from their families, spouses from their vows and marriage beds, even your own certainties from your soul.  Tristan and Iseult, dead for love.  Abelard and Heloise, mewed up in their religious houses and their own bodies -- what was left of his, after the knife between his thighs.  The topless towers of Ilium, toppled by far too much lust for a woman named Helen.

Too remote?  What of the children left behind by a mother whose heart tore between them and this new love?  And yet she left.  You've known the man made miserable because the childhood sweetheart in his bed is not the same person who makes his heart and all tasks light, or the poor bewildered soul who thought he understood the rules of this society and found, to his shock, that it was not only women he could -- and did -- desire.  The woman who has found that she longs for softer skin, richer curves, a different scent and taste in her mouth, and must choose between what is safe and what burns her blood.

The businessman toppled by a buxom secretary; the woman shattered by an indiscreet lust for the strong, sweating back in her garden; the politician who did not have sex with that woman:  Now am I close enough?  Do you recognize them, loathe them, pity them... love them?  There but for the grace of... what? you go.

For now.

Love is where modern man believes in magic.  You forge your spells in cards and candy, flowers and phone calls, rituals and rings, and hope to tame love.  You trail your veils over reality, time and again, until the now-layered image is everything you desire... you think.  Oh, yes, you think.  Fools that you are, you think that minds and logic rule hearts -- and other organs.  Until one night you look up from your images and incantations and reality stands there, full-grown, full-curved, fully roused... and you are helpless to resist that force you never knew was there, the rip-tide that not only has you but has already eroded the sand beneath your feet.

Love, foolish children, love rolls over you, through you, possesses you.  Love is the song that flows through your ears to take up residence in your mind and echo for days through your thoughts, swaying your legs and arms, heating your blood, scorching your heart.  Music ignores your mind and takes over your body, and music is only the food of love.  Love knows no reason, no stricture, no logic.  It does not begin in your mind and thus is not controlled by your mind -- try though you may.  You can no more stop or silence love than you may still the tides or hold off time.

'Fool for love.'  'Falling in love.'  Shattered by love' and 'dead of a broken heart.'  Oh, yes, you know the phrases, and still you think that the right gifts at the right time, the right words and the right rings, will protect you, enfold you, surround you with 'love.'

A ring, to bring a woman to defend you like a lioness her cubs?  A new tie, to keep a man between you and danger, to come home with his shield or on it?  Chocolate to bring only the desired skin-pricking, blood-fevering shattered sight of love?

Oh, yes.  Rituals.  Spells.  'Magic.'  To find, and bind, and control that change and range and raging storm we call 'love.'

Modern man believes in magic, children.  What he does not believe in, however, is an uncontrollable force, an overmastering urge, an unstoppable desire.

He'd do better to accept it.  Or at least appease it.

I hear slaking lusts is passé now.

As I said:  Fools.