The Art of Loving

[mylittlepwnie]

"If two people who have been strangers, as all of us are, suddenly let the wall between them break down, and feel close, feel one, this moment of oneness is one of the most exhilarating, most exciting experiences in life. It is all the more wonderful and miraculous for persons who have been shut off, isolated, without love. This miracle of sudden

Comments

[waxchrist]

sometimes erich fromm is a jerk

[waxchrist]

Romantic love in the west received energies from neoplatonism, just as the islamic world; and romance provided an acceptable (still orthodox)means of compromise between Christian morality and the rediscovered erotocosm of Antiquity. Even so the balncing-act was precarious: -- Pico della Mirandola and the pagan Botticelli ended up in the arms of Savonarola. A secretive minority of Renaissance nobles, churchmen and artists opted out altogether in favor of clandestin paganism; the Hypnerotomachia of Poliphilo, or the garden Monsters at Bomarzo, bear witness to the existence of this "tantrik" sect. But for most platonizers, the idea of alove based on longing alone served orthodox and allegorical ends, in which the material beloved can only be a distant shadow of the real (as exemplified by such as St. Theresa and St.John of the Cross) and can only be loved according to a "chivalrous", chaste and penetential code. The whole ppoint of Malory´s Morte dArthur is that Lancelot fails to achieve the chevalric ideal by loving Guenivere in the

[waxchrist]

Nowadays both these solutions to the problem of romance seem still "open" , still "possible". The atmosphere may feel yet more polluted with degraded images of desire than in the days of Mackay or Breton, but there appear to have been no qualitative changes in the relations between love and Too-Late Capitalism since then. I admit to a philosophical preference for Mackay´sposition because I have been unable to sublimate desire in a context of "hopeless obsession" without falling into misery; whereas happiness (Mackay´s goal) seems to arise from "giving-up" of all false chivalry and self-denying dandyism in favor of more "pagan" and convivial modes of loves. Still, it must be admitted that both "separation" and "union" are non-ordinary states of consciousness. Intense obsessive longing constitutes a "mystical state", which only needs trace of religion to crystallize as full-blown neopltonic ecstasy. But we romantics should recall that hapiness also possesses an element completely unrelated to any tepid bourgeois coziness or vapid

[whoisjohngalt]

Well.... I am happy you're reading my book.