What are we to do with our passions?  In this regard, the American novelist Edith Wharton (1862 - 1937), who wrote a number of novels, including Age of Innocence and Ethan Frome, which explored the complexity of human passion, makes some telling points.

    In Age of Innocence, Wharton tells the story of a married man who, many years before he wed, was in a relationship with another woman.  There is of course nothing terribly unusual in this.  However, as it turns out, once he marries, this woman reenters his life as a person greatly admired by his wife.  Again, no harm done.  But he realizes he is still in love with this woman whom, we read, continues to encourage his amorous desires.  But their affections are never consummated.

    Eventually, this man's wife dies.  As the novel therefore draws to a close, he realizes that he can legitimately re-engage with this other woman.  But he doesn't, remarking that his affections, "Are more real to me here than if I went up [to her apartment]."

    Are passions more real if they are unfulfilled?  Wharton's point, it seems, is that the nature of human passion is such that oftentimes it is the passion and not necessarily its completion that marks the human being.  We live in a twilight between what we feel and what we can do.  So it is with faith.  Although in this life we believe, passionately, it is only in the next life that these passions find final fulfillment.

    It's the grand challenge of being human.