"Erotic love is temporality’s invention, temporality’s most beautiful but nonetheless frail invention. Hence there is a more profound contradiction here. There was no fault in the girl; she was and remained faithful to her erotic love. Yet her love changed somewhat over the years. That is the nature of erotic love. The contradiction, then, is this: one with the most honest will, willing to be sacrificed, still cannot be unconditionally faithful in a more profound sense or abide in what does not itself eternally abide-and erotic love does not do that. The one who loves, who abides, has an eternal expectancy, and this eternal element provides evenness in the restlessness, which in time does indeed oscillate between fulfillment and nonfulfillment but independently of time, inasmuch as the fulfillment is by no means made impossible, because time is over-this one who loves does not wither away. What faithfulness in the love that abides! It is far from our invention to want to disparage the loving girl, as if it were a kind of unfaithfulness on her part (alas, an unfaithfulness-to a faithless one!) that she had weakened over the years and had faded away, so that her erotic love had changed and had faded away, so that her erotic love had changed in the change that is the change in erotic love itself over the years. And yet, yet-yes, it is a curious crisscrossing of self-contradicting thoughts, but it cannot be otherwise with even the highest faithfulness in erotic love than that it almost seems to be unfaithfulness, since erotic love itself is not the eternal."