Image or Mire And Murk?

[from Susanna Kaysen's Asa, As I Knew Him p146-147:]

---And the biggest discrepancy of all was between what we were and what we perceived in each other. Who did I love? What man was it who in my dreams and in the long vibrant winter evenings alone on my sofa I had kissed and awakened, feeding my images with conversations about layouts conducted in the fluorescence of the office? Whose eyes superimposed themselves on Fay's during dinner, halting his descriptions of his day at work? Can human beings love each other? Must we always love an image we've labored over secretly, never love the living soul with all its mire and murk?

[I really enjoyed Kaysen's memoir, Girl, Interupted; it lead me to seek out her other writing, and this was my favorite of her fictions. Whom do we really end up loving — our image of a person, or their actual mire and murk? I've asked myself this for a long, long time; and it's illuminated some of my explorations of developing a computational consciousness.]