Merton says some interesting things here:
Secrecy and solitude are values that belong to the very essence of personality. A person is a person insofar as he has a secret and is a solitude of his own that cannot be communicated to anyone else. If I love a person, I will love that which most makes him a person: the secrecy, the hiddenness, the solitude of his own individual being, which God alone can penetrate and understand. A love that breaks into the spiritual privacy of another in order to lay open all his secrets and besiege his solitude with importunity does not love him: it seeks to destroy what is best in him, and what is most intimately his.
-Thomas Merton, No Man is an Island, Ch.15 Sec.3
Several thoughts come to mind. One is that there is a certain amount of personal space that is necessary for even the closest relationships. When you other person tries to invade it, it isn’t love and closeness anymore. I think this is because of the fall. It is impossible in our fallen state to really know and commune with each other personally. I think in glory (in the new heaven and new earth) we will be. That is why there is no marriage. There is no death.
Thinking in terms of the larger limits of humanity, I can’t help think of Neon Genesis Evangelion. No, you shouldn’t take anime too seriously, but one of the themes in the show is that all human beings have an “AT Field” (Absolute Terror) field that protects our inner most heart/soul and allows it to have form. The bad guys (kind of) are trying to take humanity to the next stage in it’s evolution and merge everyone into one essence ala “Childhoods End”, Arthur C. Clark style. Anyway, but when that happens, nobody is distinct anymore. We all lose our identity. In the end, our protagonist refuses to enter in, asserts himself, and causes the collapse of the evolution. He and the female lead in the story are left as the new Adam and Eve to start over. Eh, hard to explain. That and the 14-hour mini-series + movie is still mostly about fighting robots. That’s just a front for this love thing though. OK. Time to go to bed.
