“A dream you dream alone may be a dream, but a dream two people dream together is a reality,” Yoko Ono wrote in her 1964 compendium of illustrated instructions for life. Two years later, and nearly a decade after she had presaged their fateful romance, she met John Lennon and the two became inseparable as they dreamt together one of the most beautiful and tragic love stories of all time. In 1969, the same year that 14-year-old Jerry Levitan taped his now-legendary conversation with Lennon, Village Voice writer Howard Smith sat down with the couple to extract from them the secret of love in a heart-swelling, soul-expanding conversation found in the altogether fantastic The Smith Tapes: Lost Interviews with Rock Stars & Icons 1969-1972 (public library) — an archive of Smith’s interviews with such icons as Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison, Jane Fonda, James Taylor, Jerry Garcia, and other greats whose names don’t begin with J.

Now, the fine folks of multimedia nonprofit Blank on Blank — who also gave us Janis Joplin on creativity and rejection, David Foster Wallace on ambition, and Maurice Sendak on being a kid — have brought Smith’s conversation with John and Yoko to life in their signature style of audiovisual storytelling. Highlights below.

On the secret of love:

You’ve got to work on it. It is a precious gift, and it’s a plant, and you’ve got to look after it and water it. You can’t just sit on your backside and think, “Oh, well, we’re in love, so that’s alright.”

On being together without stifling one another:

We’re both mind people, you know. So to be apart, we don’t have to physically be apart.

On the myth that there can be too much togetherness:

If you love somebody, you can’t be with them enough — there’s no such thing.

For more insight on the dignity of love and sharing a life, see Adrienne Rich on how relationships refine our truths and these essential reads on the psychology of love. For more Lennon gold, revisit Jerry Levitan’s illustrated interview and Lennon’s own illustrated poetry and prose.