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Yelengaño es, por otra parte, ilusorio, pues aquello que se ha amado, lo que en verdad se amaba, cuando se amaba, es verdad. Es la verdad, aunque no esté enteramente realizada y a salvo.
On the other hand, deception is illusory, for what you loved, what you truly loved was—at the time you loved it—true. It was and it still is true, it is the truth, although it may not be entirely realized and secure.
“I love you”: Hardly any other sentence is such a common, ordinary, communicative sentence, hardly any other is so vulnerable to misunderstanding, to the breakdown of communication and the eruption of the unusual. It is as though the dialectic of commonness consisted in the fact that the common becomes more and more unusual and alien the more it resembles itself. It is precisely the commonness of this sentence that makes it seem so reassuring, as if one needed to be reassured of love by the most common, most intelligible, and most secure of all sentences. Scarcely uttered, “I love you” comes dangerously close to its very opposite, creating the distance of insecurity which exposes the common and the generally intelligible to the particular and the unsecured— to contingency. Is the fact that love requires—verbal—expression not in itself already a sign of lack? Shouldn't language supplement, replace, inventing missing love or weak love, shouldn't it deceive us about weakness and lack? In this