Right up to the end, this painter of emotional and poetic abstract love letters did wonderful work.
When he finally does let his voice rise in "Stay," an abstract love song to a battered woman, he sounds tender again.
"It's very easy to live in the abstract love of the people of the world, and the so-called new Middle East," he said.
It is all the more strange for a spokesperson for Leave, a campaign built around the irrational power of patriotism, to assume that abstract love of country would not be motive enough.
The copies are here, and despite the artists' different styles, Mr. Freud's being harder won, the connection becomes obvious across time: the patient gaze, the tactile solidity of figures, objects and air, the sane beauty that is about simple truth and not about abstract love.
They help because they care, not because conscience or some sort of (abstract) love of the Good tells them (how virtuous or dutiful it would be) to do so.
We can see Diotima, then, not only as revealing the other more abstract loves that a true lover of boys must have, but also as exploring the conditions concepts must meet if they are to figure in genuinely coherent love stories.
Perhaps, when we write our vows, we need to think a little bit more about practicalities and less about abstract love.
His winning patterns included a zebra drinking coffee, an abstract "love triangle" featuring three hearts, and a peacock strutting its stuff.
We must take abstract questions about loving God and loving our neighbor and place them against the backdrop of systemic injustice that keeps people in poverty and eliminates opportunities for human flourishing.
