Falling in Love: A Feeling Explained

I came home from Cuba today to randomly find Nobel Prize winning Columbian author Gabriel Garcia Marquez's book, Memories of My Melancholy Whores to be a new addition to our living room coffee table. I decided that reading it would be the perfect way to pass a lazy Friday drifting in and out of a travel inspired sleep whilst waiting for my washing to dry.
The book recounts the story of a 90 year old man who falls in love with a prostitute. This excerpt (pg 65) was particularly honest in its description of the giddy all-enveloping catalytic nature of new love or as the NY Times review described it, "a profoundly immature and not especially healthy emotion: the painful, idealizing, narcissistic romanticism of adolescence."

Anyway, make up your own mind:

"I became another man. I tried to reread the classics that had guided me in adolescence, and I could not bear them. I buried myself in the romantic writings I had repudiated when my mother tried to impose them on me with a heavy hand, and in them I became aware that the invincible power that has moved the world is unrequited, not happy, love. When my tastes in music reached a crisis, I discovered that I was backward and old, and I opened my heart to the delights of chance.

I ask myself how I could give in to this perpetual vertigo that I in fact provoked and feared. I floated among erratic clouds and talked to myself in front of the mirror in the vain hope of confirming who I was. My delirium was so great that during a student demonstration complete with rocks and bottles, I had to make an enormous effort not to lead it as I held up a sign that would sanctify my truth: I am mad with love."