For Jill
Not until I was grown up could I use the word love, could I say “I love you”
But I have learned to love and learned that I loved throughout my life
I have loved almost a hundred women. Some for a night, some for a month. Some for a year. One for 55 years and I love her still.
I have loved to see our children grow and become the wonderful human beings that they are, and love them for who they are
I have loved Bach, Beatles, Bob, Beefheart, Blues and they still weave joy in me with their patterns, melodies, harmonies and words
I have loved drugs and the ecstacy and golden visions they granted me, but had to give them up when they drove me, inexorably, towards madness, oblivion and death
I have loved the ocean and all the denizens of the deep from the pink pygmy seahorse to the star-studded ridge-backed whale shark
I have loved gliding through coral swim-throughs and marvelling at the fractal beauty of brightly coloured soft corals shimmying in the current
In almost a thousand dives I have loved to swim with the mysterious creatures of the deep from manta rays to man-eating sharks. Most of all I have loved the oceanic feeling of oneness, swimming inside a school of a thousand fish
I have loved a score of close friends all my life and sadly lived to see some drop off like leaves from a tree in autumn
I have loved teaching children, teens and mostly adults and seeing the spark of understanding and the fire of enthusiasm ignite in the eyes of some, just a few
I have loved talking with friends, colleagues and strangers, sharing memories, chasing down concepts and stretching my understandings
I have loved the diamantine beauty of mathematics, with its great arcs of crystalline stars stretching from here to infinity and beyond
I have loved pursuing the problems of the philosophy of mathematics and penning my own answers to the perennial questions of What is number? What is mathematics? Is it discovered or invented?
I have loved for four-score years and learned that love is more important than anything. It is love that binds all living creatures together in a common cause, together with the Earth, and which offers us the hope of any future at all.
I have loved, I have been loved, and I am blessed.
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Paul Ernest
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