on love

Thursday, October 27, 2011
*****************************************
REFLECTIONS
**********************************
There is a dupe, a coward, and a bully in all of us.
That’s the only way to explain world history.
*
Q: If you were an animal,
what animal would you be?
A: A vegetarian tiger.
I hate predators.
They are the commissars of the animal kingdom.
*
Good writing consists in deleting.
Silence can be more eloquent than
a torrent of rhetorical verbiage.
A history of silence will have no quotations.
*
If there are homophobes it may be because
they were traumatized by serial pedophiles,
among them such authority figures as priests.
*
After every line I write I ask myself:
Why should anyone be interested in this?
What if he already knows or understands what I am saying?
What if he is ahead of me when it comes to certain ideas
and experiences?
#
Friday, October 28, 2011
*****************************************
SOCRATES
********************************
When asked where he came from,
Socrates is said to have replied:
"Not from Athens but from the world."
And yet, when he was condemned to death by the Athenians
and was given an opportunity to escape,
he said he’d rather die in Athens
than live anywhere else.
*
BEETHOVEN’S SHADOW
********************************
When Vahe Berberian once suggested that
Beethoven’s somewhat overblown shadow
unfairly eclipsed the reputation and worth
of many other equally great composers,
among them Boccherini,
Paul Jungmann, the quintessential German –
blond, blue-eyed, intense, unsmiling – said,
one should not speak such nonsense
in the presence of children.
Forever after music was never discussed in his presence.
*
PROPAGANDA AND LITERATURE
********************************************
All our problems must be ascribed to our enemies,
our propaganda tells us.
The enemy is us, literature reminds us.
And propaganda is more popular than literature
because no one likes to be told
he is a fool or a pervert bent on self-destruction.
#
Saturday, October 29, 2011
*****************************************
ON LOVE AND DEATH
********************************
Love is an arrow, marriage a boomerang.
*
Where there is love
there will be a pierced, broken, shattered, or shish-kebabed heart.
*
There is a Greek myth
whose intent is to emphasize the fact that
the woman you love
and the woman you marry are seldom one and the same.
The critical passage in it reads:
“No lovely naked bride awaited him
on the marriage bed,
but a tangled knot of hissing serpents.”
*
Your children will break your heart
as surely as your parents (when they die).
*
I first fell in love at age eight
with my schoolteacher.
She married another,
had a nervous collapse,
attempted suicide,
and became physically unrecognizable,
by which time I was nine and in love with another –
this time a coeval.
*
My dictionary defines “passion” as “suffering.”
*
The woman you love
and the woman you cease to love –
what a difference!
Not just black and white
but everything and nothing.
*
According to a Frenchman,
“the heaviest body in the world
is the woman you have ceased to love.”
*
After mentioning a dead person
it is customary to say, “may s/he rest in peace,”
when it is not the dead that are in need of peace
but the living.
*
Stendhal, the author of ON LOVE,
one of the best books on the subject:
“All my life I have always seen what I imagined
rather than reality.”
*
And Tolstoy: “In the presence of others,
women – especially when they are young –
pretend so skillfully that no one can see them as they are.”
#