As the old man of ‘Return to Innocence’ dies instantly after holding a quince fruit, a rebirth and...
You see, if he loves other people with the purpose of making use of them, it is not love; he simply uses love as a pretext, a cover under which he hides his own selfish interests. To really love other people, he must first give evidence that he can love himself, for to love oneself is the most difficult task.
To love someone else is easy, but to love what you are, the thing that is yourself, is just as if you were embracing a glowing red-hot iron: it burns into you and that is very painful.
Therefore, to love somebody else in the first place is always an escape which we all hope for, and we all enjoy it when we are capable of it. But in the long run, it comes back on us.
You cannot stay away from yourself forever, you have to return, have to come to that experiment, to know whether you really can love. That is the question—whether you can love yourself, and that will be the test.
