frequentandvigorous: “I shall never believe in the classification of love among the purely physical joys (supposing that any such thing exists) until I see a gourmet sobbing with delight over his favourite dish like a lover gasping on a young shoulder. Of all our games, love’s play is the only one which threatens to unsettle the soul, and is also the only one in which the player has to abandon himself to the body’s ecstasy. To put reason aside is not indispensable for a drinker, but the lover who leaves reason in control does not follow his god to the end. In every act save that of love, abstinence and excess alike involve but one person; any step in the direction of sensuality, however, places us in the presence of the Other, and involves us in the demands and servitudes to which our choice binds us (except in the case of Diogenes, where both the limitations and the merits of reasonable expedient are self-evident). I know no decision which a man makes for simpler or more inevitable reasons, where the object chosen is weighed more exactly for it balance of sheer pleasure, or where the seeker after truth has a better chance to judge the naked human being. Each time, from a stripping down as absolute as that of death, and from a humility which surpasses that of defeat and prayer, I marvel to see again reforming the complex web of experiences shared and refused, of mutual responsibilities, awkward avowals, transparent lies, and passionate compromises between my pleasures and those of the Other, so many bonds impossible to break but nevertheless so quickly loosened. That mysterious play which extends from love of a body to love of an entire person has seemed to me noble enough to consecrate to it one part of my life. Words for it are deceiving, since the word for pleasure covers contradictory realities comprising notions of warmth, sweetness, and intimacy of bodies, but also feelings of violence and agony, and the sound of a cry. The short and obscene sentence of Poseidonius about the rubbing together of two small pieces of flesh, which I have seen you copy in your exercise books with the application of a good schoolboy, does no more to define the phenomenon of love than the taut cord touched by the finger accounts for the infinite miracle of sounds. Such a dictum is less an insult to pleasure than to the flesh itself, that amazing instrument of muscle, blood, and skin, that red-tinged cloud whose lightning is the soul.”

frequentandvigorous:

“I shall never believe in the classification of love among the purely physical joys (supposing that any such thing exists) until I see a gourmet sobbing with delight over his favourite dish like a lover gasping on a young shoulder. Of all our games, love’s play is the only one which threatens to unsettle the soul, and is also the only one in which the player has to abandon himself to the body’s ecstasy. To put reason aside is not indispensable for a drinker, but the lover who leaves reason in control does not follow his god to the end. In every act save that of love, abstinence and excess alike involve but one person; any step in the direction of sensuality, however, places us in the presence of the Other, and involves us in the demands and servitudes to which our choice binds us (except in the case of Diogenes, where both the limitations and the merits of reasonable expedient are self-evident). I know no decision which a man makes for simpler or more inevitable reasons, where the object chosen is weighed more exactly for it balance of sheer pleasure, or where the seeker after truth has a better chance to judge the naked human being. Each time, from a stripping down as absolute as that of death, and from a humility which surpasses that of defeat and prayer, I marvel to see again reforming the complex web of experiences shared and refused, of mutual responsibilities, awkward avowals, transparent lies, and passionate compromises between my pleasures and those of the Other, so many bonds impossible to break but nevertheless so quickly loosened. That mysterious play which extends from love of a body to love of an entire person has seemed to me noble enough to consecrate to it one part of my life. Words for it are deceiving, since the word for pleasure covers contradictory realities comprising notions of warmth, sweetness, and intimacy of bodies, but also feelings of violence and agony, and the sound of a cry. The short and obscene sentence of Poseidonius about the rubbing together of two small pieces of flesh, which I have seen you copy in your exercise books with the application of a good schoolboy, does no more to define the phenomenon of love than the taut cord touched by the finger accounts for the infinite miracle of sounds. Such a dictum is less an insult to pleasure than to the flesh itself, that amazing instrument of muscle, blood, and skin, that red-tinged cloud whose lightning is the soul.”

^^^ Wednesday, February 1, 2012