Recollection's love and its three types of lovers

Recollection's love is the kind of romantic love which consists in recollection (something which flourishes in the inner sphere of the lover's mind) rather than in a genuine encounter with the beloved other. As we shall see, the three protagonists of this type of love – the aesthetic Poet (or Seducer), the ethical Judge, and the demonic ‘Someone’ – share a fundamental failure to reconcile themselves with the loss that every relationship of love entails. The loss concerned is that involved in the passage of time and manifested in the effects that time has on love. Most conspicuous, naturally, is the loss of the initial stages of love: these stages are strongly characterized by an enchanting excitement that the passage of time seems to weaken. However, the loss that threatens love, to which each of the lovers responds in his own manner, is deeper than that. It is the essential loss of everything that time may – and sometimes must – eventually take away with it.

Essential loss, as specified in the Introduction, is the condition common to all those circumstances in which the object of love is potentially lost, and those in which it is actually lost.