Love is...

From Nadine Gordimer's The Pickup

... it's one of the tranquil pastimes of lvoing: he reads (newspapers) as if his life depends on what is there. The book she has been reading lies on her breasts, open face-down at a page where she has come upon a sentence, a statement, that seems to have been written for her long before she came into existence and came to this space in the time of her life. she has read it over again and again, so that is is written, read, on the air around her, around him and her, on the sky looking down upon them. 'I decided to postpone our future as long as possible, leaving everything in its present state.'