Pity the selfishness of lovers: it is brief, a forlorn hope it is impossible.

Bowen’s line treats romantic love not as pure generosity but as a form of possessiveness that tries to seal two people off from the world. The “selfishness of lovers” is something to be pitied because it is inherently temporary (“brief”) and ultimately untenable (“impossible”): life, time, and other claims inevitably break the lovers’ attempt at exclusivity. Calling it a “forlorn hope” suggests a doomed but emotionally compelling last stand—lovers persist in the fantasy of permanence even while reality guarantees change, separation, or disillusion. The sentence’s compressed, aphoristic force turns private feeling into a general law about desire’s limits.