“…It is not true that the more you love, the better you understand; all that the action of love obtains from me is merely this wisdom: that the other is not to be known; his opacity is not the screen around a secret, but, instead, a kind of evidence in which the game of reality and appearance is done away with. I am then seize with that exaltation of loving someone unknown, someone who will remain so forever: a mystic impulse: I know what I do not know.”

—Roland Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse.