tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-569277242662827759.post8138490799157302639..comments2023-11-02T08:19:29.550-07:00Comments on The moderate contrarian: Realistic about Lovedandiacalhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09769500137964384489noreply@blogger.comBlogger5125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-569277242662827759.post-32143830544954522422012-02-25T01:28:32.386-08:002012-02-25T01:28:32.386-08:00Welcome Mitch! No charge for my proofing services...Welcome Mitch! No charge for my proofing services.<br /><br />Re this from your essay:<br /><br />"I simply want to imagine what Love would look like if we took it to have the kind of reality and stubborn presence in our lives that the most tangible, physical thing has: as real as our own skin, our own sense that we exist and that we matter."<br /><br />This may be apropos, from Tennyson's The Higher Pantheism: <br /><br />"Speak to Him, thou, for He hears, and Spirit with Spirit can meet-<br />Closer is He than breathing, and nearer than hands and feet." <br /><br />God is Love, we are God and we are Love.Jenhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/02742026436206221165noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-569277242662827759.post-74323396965079806522012-02-25T00:39:00.383-08:002012-02-25T00:39:00.383-08:00Oh goodness Jen! Thanks for your grammar correctio...Oh goodness Jen! Thanks for your grammar correction! That stuff is so important to me.dandiacalhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/09769500137964384489noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-569277242662827759.post-5667901025357203372012-02-24T17:44:07.760-08:002012-02-24T17:44:07.760-08:00Love your essay! ;)
Erich Fromm apparently was i...Love your essay! ;) <br /><br />Erich Fromm apparently was in sympathy with K:<br />“Love is not primarily a relationship to a specific person; it is an attitude, an ordination of character which determines the relatedness of the person to the whole world as a whole, not toward one object of love.”<br /><br />That, to me, is both realistic and idealistic love. <br /><br />By the way, like you, Fromm insists that love is not a feeling. He says it's a commitment, a decision.<br /><br />Also by the way Mitch, it's "loath" not "loathe," in the context you use it here. <br />http://www.grammar-monster.com/easily_confused/loath_loathe.htmJenhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/02742026436206221165noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-569277242662827759.post-23530210329540801552012-02-21T21:32:29.613-08:002012-02-21T21:32:29.613-08:00Thanks so much for your response!
About irony I ...Thanks so much for your response! <br /><br />About irony I am of two minds. Well, in one way I think we actually suffer from "irony deficiency" if we take what Harold Bloom says in an interview: "Irony by definition is the saying of one thing while meaning another, sometimes indeed quite the opposite of what overtly you are saying. It's very difficult to have the highest kind of imaginative literature from Homer through Don DeLillo, as it were, and entirely avoid irony. There is the tragic irony, which one confronts everywhere in Shakespeare, that the audience, the auditor, and the reader are aware of--something in the character or predicament or inward affects, emotions of the protagonist or protagonists, that the heroes and heroines are totally unaware of themselves". That is a sort of irony which the greatest works of art are rarely without and doesn't necessarily have to take light, comic, or parodic forms. <br /><br />Having said that, there is a kind of cheap popular or even populist irony that was begat, I believe, by the first SNL crew on television and exhibited by, say, David Letterman on his talk show. There is probably too much of that. <br /><br />I think what you say about History is most interesting: that there was a shift towards a fear of love in culture more generally. I couldn't know that for sure. Are you saying that these things move in cycles? Also, I was talking about Love in the broadest possible sense rather than taking any stance on sex or the Sexual Revolution per se. It is true that, just as we were about to collect on the promissory notes of the Sexual Revolution, a kind of unthinking conservative reaction set in. On the other hand, there were many problems with that Revolution, problems which might have helped that conservative reaction take hold.<br /><br />The context of this post is my response to what I believe to be a general attitude of disbelief and skepticism and suspicion regarding Love (that it isn't real, is a fiction, is only and always, already dangerous and foolish) which I think could be a negative thing if carried too far. It seems too much an important part of our humanity. <br /><br />Of course Krishnamurti is one of the greatest and most original of thinkers and I certainly don't have his wisdom or gifts. Yet I do have sympathy with his project to the extent that he want us to see Love in its broadest sense, rather than tying it to the couple or the family alone.dandiacalhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/09769500137964384489noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-569277242662827759.post-68663858156008038112012-02-20T09:14:52.654-08:002012-02-20T09:14:52.654-08:00This is completely astonishing, especially in the ...This is completely astonishing, especially in the significance you give to Love and Realism. You point out the superiority of Realism in Love, and yet also insist that it retain its independence from our characterizations and its proper mysticism. This is really a deft piece of philosophical writing, and is also quite moving and important for our times. Bravo.<br /><br />Do you think our current problems with Love started during the irony epidemic of the '80s? I see that period in our history as a mass embarrassment at having gotten closer to all sorts of concepts of Love in the '70s, and wanting to control and tame it, especially in its sexual forms, and thus laugh at everything high-minded and take nothing seriously. We threw out sex as a form of liberation and as a way of establishing closeness between people, but we also threw out Love I think because it made us vulnerable, and at the same time we also trashed most of the great work from the past because it was too earnest. <br /><br />In its call for seriousness, your essay seems to be a plea to return to seriousness in general, the seriousness that was destroyed not only in personal relations but in the arts and in thinking in general. And it reminds me of Krishnamurti, who was always trying to bring his followers back to being serious. He was also talking about Love, and also attaching the concept of Love to Being in the world in reality and in the quotidien.Anna Billerhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/09715596939310896657noreply@blogger.com